Page 1341 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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If I can depart from this demonstration: there is a yawning gap between the two standards. I do not know why Mr Stanhope does not feel he can bridge that gap. The article then goes on to say:
Mr Keelty said the AFP also had concerns about the ambiguity in the ACT’s legislation over the detention of children … He said the ACT should look to adopt NSW’s anti-terror legislation or amend its own so that the two laws were compatible. “It would be simpler if the ACT adopted NSW legislation,” Mr Keelty said. On this particular, important piece of legislation we do need to have consistency.
That is where the Canberra Times got to on that particular issue. That demonstrates very clearly the yawning gap and the inconsistencies in the standards that we need to see in this law. This is very, very new law for Australia and has not been introduced by the federal government on the advice of its agents and authorities for the sake of some demonstration or some political joke. This is a very, very serious issue, and there are very smart people, much more experienced and smarter than the people in this place, who have deemed the risk to, and seen the need for these laws to be brought to, this country, in particular to Canberra, the seat of government power.
But we do not see this government taking this risk seriously. We see instead an attorney-general too frightened of his default lefty human rights position to take any sensible notice of expert advice from the hardened men and women in Australian society who are only too frighteningly aware of the terrorist dangers facing this country and, here today, this community of ours.
Jon Stanhope would risk betraying—I do not think he wants to betray; I think he is a better man than that—his community in general, he would risk betraying his police and his emergency services, he would risk betraying his hospital and other ACT professionals in the face of the lefty lawyers and civil rights activists; rather than stare down his cosy, but minority, and, I must say, too-often arrogant and social inept leftist power base. He risks, instead, degrading law and making it much more difficult for his professionals to do the job that they have to do.
But that is okay, I suppose, because at least Mr Stanhope came part of the way and most reluctantly—and, I reckon, perhaps a little too, too bitterly—grasped part of the Howard laws. After all, he is Chief Minister of one of Her Majesty’s Australian territories; so there is only so far even lefty Stanhope can go in defying Australian norms. He is a chief minister; he is an officer, if you like, of the crown.
It is absolutely pathetic that the Stanhope government is so concerned to bend to human rights concerns regarding the application of the national benchmark, counter-terrorist laws that he would turn his back on the broader community and, specifically, his police who have to implement these laws. It is the height of arrogance that a chief minister would bustle off to chatter in some comfortable, warm and friendly alternative cafe to primarily, tearfully perhaps, discuss the challenges facing him: what to do with these wretched Howard laws, especially when all those other nasty, hard Labor men and women around the country seem to be moving with undue haste, in consultation with all those brutish, insensitive police and special branch types, to implement their laws, my God, in the best interests of their citizenry?
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