Page 3032 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 August 2005
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Arts, Heritage and Indigenous Affairs) (12.19): Amendments Nos 13 and 14 amend clauses 51 (1) and 51 (2), respectively. Those clauses deal with referring complaints to conciliation and consideration of complaints. Amendments Nos 15 and 16, which have not yet been moved, amend clauses 87 (1) and 87 (2), respectively. Those clauses provide for reports to be made to the minister.
I do not understand how these amendments would operate, as they attempt to give commissioners the capacity to exercise statutory functions belonging to the Human Rights Commission. While the Human Rights Commission will carry out its functions through the actions of individual members and its staff, those people do not have the capacity to carry out those functions other than as agents of the Human Rights Commission. The amendments would both take away the capacity of the Human Rights Commission to carry out its statutory responsibilities and seek to give power to commissioners to carry out functions that they do not have, except as agents of the Human Rights Commission.
Because, in the view of the government, these amendments do not have the capacity to operate effectively with other provisions of this bill, the government will oppose them. Without repeating myself or going back to points made earlier in this debate, essentially the government’s position, as explained now, is a reflection of the model that the government ultimately choose in the establishment of the commission and the collocation of a number of oversight complaints bodies within a single statutory Human Rights Commission.
Many of Dr Foskey’s amendments that the government has found itself unable to support today are simply a reflection of a difference of opinion around the more appropriate model for the creation of an effective and efficient statutory oversight regime for the ACT. It really is very much just a difference of opinion between the government and Dr Foskey, or the Greens, in relation to the most efficient and effective model. We choose a particular model. Many of Dr Foskey’s amendments, which I think are very well intentioned, with respect, simply are not possible in the context of the model that was created by the government. To accept them or to interpose them now would simply undo and make, I think, particularly ineffective the commission in the pursuit of its duties.
I understand very much what it is that Dr Foskey is seeking to achieve. I would simply say that it is not consistent with the administrative or statutory structure that we have created. It is for those reasons that we find ourselves unable to support that group of amendments that we have today opposed.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (12.22): I just want to respond very briefly to Mr Stanhope’s comments. It is obviously true that the trend of the government not to agree to the amendments that I am putting forward on behalf of the Greens that would allow commissioners to do what we see as their job indicates a very different idea of the way that the Human Rights Commission will work. Obviously I am not going to win on the numbers here, but I would like to think that the government is not dismissing our approach out of hand.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .