Page 1348 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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in here. This is to ensure that we can preserve our lifestyle and protect ourselves against threats that are being made to this country and to other Western institutions.
Mr Stanhope’s bill fails to go the distance. Mr Stefaniak’s measures make sense and are worthy of support by the Assembly. I hope, in the final stages of this debate, the Chief Minister might reconsider further, having already conceded in some areas, the approach he has taken on this matter where his priorities are wrong and coloured by a lack of understanding of how serious these issues are.
MR BERRY (Ginninderra) (11.33): I express some concern and discomfort about the limitation on human rights, which can occur with this sort of legislation. When the Human Rights Act was introduced into this Assembly in 2004, it set out an agenda of the Stanhope government to ensure that civil liberties would be protected. No doubt this agenda is an honourable one and one that was set to improve the rights and liberties of people here in the ACT.
Of course, this is the only jurisdiction that has taken this step. I look forward to the day when other jurisdictions, and indeed the commonwealth, find a way to have human rights legislation of their own. If it were the case that other states and the commonwealth had human rights legislation of their own, the debate on these issues would have been more interesting because all jurisdictions might be considering their approach to the terrorism issue from the same standpoint, that is, some sort of human rights statute.
Proposed sections 18 and 28 are the ones of most concern to me in my contribution today. Proposed section 18 refers to the right to liberty and security of person, the contents of which are most affected by limitations on human rights set out in this bill which is being discussed here today. Section 28 sets out that human rights may be limited. Human rights may be subject only to reasonable limits set by territory laws that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
I note that the committee that considered the draft laws recommended that the “reasonable and necessary” element set out in clauses 17, 19, 21, 25 and 29 of the proposed bill be replaced with “reasonably necessary”, so that the test is not as onerous and is consistent with other jurisdictions’ legislation. I mention that because it goes to my initial comments where I said that it would be a good thing if all of the jurisdictions had human rights legislation because they might be considering their response to terrorism against the same background. In the ACT, we have a different task to perform because we have got to set our response against the background of human rights legislation. The government has, in due course, accepted the recommendation of the committee and it is set to become part of the law, part of the legislation, which is before this place.
I took the opportunity to talk to the Human Rights Office about this particular change. I quote from an advice I received from the Human Rights Office on this change from “reasonable and necessary” to “reasonably necessary”:
We note that page 4 of the Attorney-General’s Presentation Speech to the Assembly states that Bill adopted a higher test as “recommended by the Solicitors-General”—it is unclear which test this relates to in clause 19 (4). We do not support the Bill’s acceptance of the Committee’s recommended change to lower the threshold criteria for detention in order to make the ACT provisions more consistent with other
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