Page 1359 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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to our country, which subsequently resulted in the deaths by drowning of close to a hundred people. These are failures of intelligence and police organisations, and they are a timely reminder that we must be at all times proportionate and considered in looking at all of the issues that as elected governments and elected parliaments we should look at.
The primary objective of this bill is to allow for the temporary detention of a person in response to a credible threat of terrorism. The powers are to be used where there is insufficient evidence to arrest or charge a suspected terrorist but where reasonable suspicion exists that a terrorist act is imminent. The government acknowledge that we live in a climate where there are security threats to our nation. We recognise that such threats must be taken seriously, particularly in a jurisdiction that houses the seat of the federal government and the offices of some 90 diplomatic missions. We must take reasonable steps to protect our community against such threats.
Much has been said about the threat of terrorism to the ACT, and at the end of the day the ACT government, the Assembly and the community can rely in an informed and considered way on the assessment by commonwealth agencies of this threat to the country. We have no option but to accept that opinion, in an informed and considered way, of the heads of security agencies and of the police. We acknowledge that community awareness of the threat of terrorism is also incomplete.
It is important to stress that the laws we are debating today make up only a tiny fraction of the legislative response to terrorism, which spans the suppression of terrorist financing of proscribed organisations, ASIO questioning and control orders. These are one part of a broad range of measures.
The government has been called upon through the Council of Australian Governments to address gaps in existing counter-terrorism laws that arise because of constitutional constraints on the commonwealth. The government has implemented the COAG agreement of September 2005, but with the approach necessary to also maintain freedoms, rights and liberties which are appropriate for ACT conditions. This is a mature response to the threat of terrorism.
Justice Michael Kirby, in relation to the legislative response to terrorism, said:
Every erosion of liberty must be thoroughly justified.
He also said:
Sometimes it is wise to pause … to keep our sense of proportion and to remember our civic traditions as the High Court Justices did in the Communist Party Case of 1951.
Those civic traditions and their historical legacy are shared by our common law neighbours and echoed in their own experiences of threats to national security. During the Second World War the US Supreme Court set limits on the detention of aliens, consistent with these basic principles. But that court said:
The judicial test of whether the Government … can validly deprive an individual of any of his constitutional rights is whether the deprivation is reasonably related to a public danger that is so “immediate, imminent, and impending” as not to admit of
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