Page 3007 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 August 2005
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certainly aware of one instance where there was a lot of angst among the victim’s family and the prosecution, and indeed some people who were there to see how the act effectively got someone bail, against what most people involved in the matter felt should have occurred.
One of the big criticisms of human rights legislation by people such as Bob Carr and Peter Beattie is that it has a propensity to place an overemphasis on the rights of criminals, rather than on the rights of ordinary people, victims and the rest of society. One only has to look at the various provisions in our own act. It is not a big act but a lot of the provisions there relate to court procedures and place emphasis on the rights of accused people and people who are before the courts for various crimes. That is a real concern.
We have not yet seen a plethora of cases going to court because of this legislation. It is early days yet but that is another concern. One of the big concerns expressed by the New South Wales committee of parliament that looked at whether they should have a human rights act was that it transfers from an elected parliament the things that a parliament should do and puts the decision on an unelected judiciary. As former Premier Carr has said on numerous occasions, when you give one group rights, invariably you are affecting the rights of other groups. That is a very real problem.
I think an act such as the Human Rights Act may well be fine—I can see why the Americans did it in the 18th century—in some other countries. But in a country and a territory where we have a very sophisticated system of justice—and I use “justice” in the broad general term; justice to the whole community through our conventions, our ever-changing ordinary acts of parliament, which have many rights in them; and indeed our civil law, and the evolution of law through the courts—it is something we tinker with at our peril. I certainly have seen no great discernible benefit for the people of the ACT as a result of this Human Rights Act, and nor has the Liberal Party.
There are a couple of worrying issues developing as to just how the act is operating in practice. I do not think these particular suites of legislation are going to help one jot. However, they will be going through; we acknowledge that. We have been approached by a number of groups with suggestions to improve these acts. I am concerned in relation to several of these acts truncating, affecting or taking away from the role of the ombudsman. That is also something that has concerned a number of groups. The Leader of the Opposition and I saw the AMA. They had big concerns about that because they wanted the ombudsman to be available. The ombudsman is a traditional, cheap means for people to seek investigation and resolution of a problem caused by government and government agencies, rather than facing the expense of having to go through a court process. In perhaps limiting the role of the ombudsman, as this suite of bills does to an extent, I think there are some very real problems. Basically, those are my comments on the Human Rights Commission Bill.
The Human Rights Commission Legislation Amendment Bill, which is here for cognate debate, contains the necessary consequential amendments to allow the human rights commission, established by the Human Rights Commission Bill, to operate. It makes changes to the Discrimination Act, the Health Professionals Act, the Human Rights Act, the Heath Records (Privacy and Access) Act and the Community and Health Services Complaints Act accordingly. Minor changes are made to other legislation to include
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