Page 1357 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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I agree with retired US Supreme Court judge Sandra Day O’Connor when she said:
Autocracies—
and to them I would add military, single-party and fascist governments—
in the developing world and former Communist countries provide lessons for where interference with the judiciary might lead … It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.
The links between state actions which alienate and demonise particular sections of society and the formation of violent responses among those who, rightly or wrongly, feel disaffected by such actions are well documented. The committee of which I am a member received expert advice warning us of these possibilities.
We trample on well-established principles of international human rights law at our peril. The Chief Minister was right to insist on a proportionate human rights compliance undertaking from the Prime Minister. What he got in return was an undertaking that was as valuable and reliable as the word of the Prime Minister. Its value can be measured by the extent to which human rights considerations are lacking in the federal government’s laws. The federal government ignored the bipartisan federal parliamentary committee’s recommendations and blatantly breached its side of the COAG agreement. In contract law terms, there has been a clear breach that goes to the heart of the COAG agreement, and the Chief Minister would be within his rights to repudiate the contract.
As the Standing Committee on Legal Affairs report points out, the explanatory statement makes no attempt to justify the assertion that the bill achieves consistency with human rights. This task is left to the statement of independent counsel Kate Eastman. Unfortunately, her advice appears rushed in places, with a large number of typos as well as some apparent inconsistencies between her reasoning and her conclusions. I would be interested to know how comfortable she is with her advice that was distributed in the Assembly. The advice goes on to say that on balance, having regard to all the safeguards et cetera, the incommunicado nature of the detention may be a justified limitation on the rights afforded by section 18 (1) of the Human Rights Act. Well, I would have thought that to get a compatibility statement it would either be justified or not. There should not be any “mays” about it. But Ms Eastman gives no such unqualified approval.
The watered-down, or perhaps more accurately, beefed-up laws, in terms of human rights compliance that are before us today, play a part in a vast panoply of new forms of state control measures introduced by the Howard government. They fit in with the new ASIO laws, the new phone tap laws and the new sedition and control order laws. They fit in with the new WorkChoices legislation designed to attack the power of organised labour and minimise the rights of individual workers. They fit in with attacks on the independence of the judiciary and the High Court, the independence and funding of the ABC, and the independence and objectivity of the CSIRO. They fit in with the imposition of voluntary student unionism and the intimidation and destruction of non-government organisations which dare to criticise government policy. These laws fit in with the imminent commonwealth laws that will threaten the funding of any NGO that dares to engage in political activity or commentary which the government does not like,
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