Page 1351 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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despots found themselves because at some point in time somebody said, “I need to protect my citizenry by taking away some other part of the citizenry’s human rights.”
That is why it is entirely appropriate for people to be uncomfortable, notwithstanding the protestations of the police, with a reduction in human rights. I am certainly uncomfortable about it. I do not like being in a position where we have endorsed a human rights act which sets a course for us. I suppose this is the issue for us: it is quite easy to have a human rights act but it is more difficult to comply with it. It creates some discomfort when there is some threat to compliance with a human rights act which you really believe in.
Having said those few words, I will listen to the debate carefully. It is not as simple as somebody saying, “We need to tamper with your rights to make it easier to get a particular result,” when the evidence is not clear. We will have to wait and see, I suspect, if somebody is detained in accordance with this legislation, whether in fact the courts will find that it is totally compliant with our Human Rights Act. Maybe that is life too. It is, nevertheless, important to be anxious about any move. Notwithstanding all of the publicised claims about it, we ought to be concerned about any diminution of human rights.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo) (11.48): I will be supporting Mr Stefaniak’s Terrorism (Preventative Detention) Bill. Terrorism has been with us for a long time. As well as being a century of war, the last century was also a century in which terrorism was a consistent feature. The terrorist organisation, the Black Hand, acted as a trigger to the First World War with its assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. In 1972 terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, sending shockwaves through the world community. During the 1970s and 1980s a variety of terrorist groups hijacked and downed planes, with the Lockerbie disaster perhaps being the most well known example. The IRA committed numerous terrorist atrocities throughout the latter decades of the last century.
On September 11, 2001 the terrorist threat was taken to a new level. When the two planes hit the World Trade Centre and we watched live on television as thousands of people were killed as the towers collapsed, it is fair to say that we saw the beginning of a new, more destructive and more sophisticated terrorist threat than the world had seen previously. Subsequent to that we have seen the Madrid bombings and the London bombings. Of course, Australia has not escaped from this new threat. In Bali in 2002 we lost 88 of our sons and daughters to an evil, murderous act by Jemaah Islamiyah. This event and the subsequent Bali bombing demonstrated to Australians that this new brand of terrorism was not some remote or distant problem. It was a problem being faced by the whole world and we were not, and are not, immune.
The question for the world, and for Australia, is how we respond to this new and heightened threat. One response was to commit troops to the war in Afghanistan. The Taliban regime supported terrorists as well as oppressing its own people, particularly its women. It was necessary that the Taliban regime was defeated, and that was one response to terrorism.
We are now as a nation turning to our domestic response to the terrorist threat. Canberra is a terrorist target. Jack Thomas was convicted of conspiring to blow up the Israeli
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