Page 2610 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 June 2005
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advertising. The cost of a human rights edifice is mounting by the year, for no discernable benefit.
The papers refer vaguely to 6,500 occasions of service in the year. The government has not been able to say what exactly an occasion of service constitutes. The cost of each occasion of service is $131. One can assume that it may well be a phone call. There could be wrong numbers or calls directed to other departments or community services, for all we know.
What the estimates inquiry also revealed was that the government does not collect information on how much the cost of compliance with the Human Rights Act is for government departments. Dr Foskey, today in question time, rightly raised the matter of lack of transparency about how it is determined that a piece of legislation complies with the Human Rights Act.
One thing I would agree with the Chief Minister to date on is that we have not yet seen a flood of matters before the court. He has mentioned there were four matters before the court in the 12 months where the Human Rights Act has been invoked. In one matter there is a worrying trend. That was a bail matter before a justice of the Supreme Court where normally that person would have been remanded in custody. But the Human Rights Act was invoked and that person was allowed bail. One criticism of Bob Carr and other critics of the Human Rights Act, indeed of our act, is that there is an overemphasis on the rights of criminals as against a lack of emphasis on the rights of victims and society.
One thing that concerns me—and I note that there have been 6,500 contacts with the office—is that I have yet to see an instance in the half dozen or so matters I have referred to that office where ordinary citizens’ concerns are being addressed. I had a couple of instances. I got a letter back recently from the office saying they could not assist a fellow who had, wrongfully, some speeding convictions on his record which he didn’t incur. I think it was Mr Hargreaves’s department that expunged those convictions when the error was brought to their attention. But the human rights office was not able to do that.
Another person had a problem in relation to an ACTPLA matter and seemed to get the run-around from the office. Another person had their rights restricted in terms of what they could do within a club because of their employment—an issue that seemed right up the alley of the human rights office. Again, that did not seem to come within the category of what human rights are about.
We are forgetting that it is early days yet. We do seem to be getting a fairly selective interpretation of what things that office is going to do to assist rights and what rights are not really going to be assisted. If we get into economic rights—we are getting into the review period now—God knows how much that is going to cost.
I mentioned earlier the lack of knowledge, lack of detail, on just how much the cost of government departments complying with act is going to be. That, in itself, might add another layer of bureaucracy. I think we will see significant additional costs associated with that act and the compliance required under that act, for no discernable good for the average citizen of the ACT.
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