Page 1402 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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As I said earlier, and I will conclude on this point, you might be doing a 16 or 17-year-old a favour if you actually accepted my amendments Nos 1 to 6, which include 16 and 17-year-olds. You might not only stop a terrorist attack but also turn that young person away from killing not just himself or herself but as well taking out a lot of other innocent people. It might help to save innocent lives and it might also help to prevent that young person from doing something particularly dreadful. But your blinkered opposition to what every other state and territory has done will prevent that from happening. I commend the amendments to the Assembly.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs, and Minister for the Arts) (5.00): I want to take this opportunity to participate in the debate and to respond to issues that the shadow attorney raised. There are a number of other issues as well that should be pursued.
There needs to be a genuine attempt to understand the implications of preventative detention legislation. At the heart of this entire debate about terrorism is the need to respect human rights. This anti-terrorism legislation is based on an acceptance by COAG—that is, the Prime Minister, the premiers and the chief ministers—that we would respond appropriately to the threats presented by this new form of criminality described broadly as terrorism, but that the response of the governments of Australia would be, consistent with our international human rights obligations, proportionate to and respectful of the rule of law, civil liberties and human rights. That was the basis on which the agreement was struck.
It is necessary that this legislation be consistent with our international human rights obligations and with our commitment to the rule of law because it has such serious consequences for individuals who may be caught up in its processes. The need to develop a preventative detention regime is an acknowledgment of the fact that there may be circumstances where evidence does not exist on which a person might be charged with an offence.
Despite the breadth of the criminal law, despite its essentially all-encompassing nature, a situation can be imagined in which our security services and our police forces cannot, in a particular situation in a particular timeframe, develop a case against a person of some interest to them. In other words, they do not have enough information on which to arrest them and charge them. They may have a suspicion, but they have no evidence.
For the last thousand years—since Magna Carta—our entire law has proceeded on the basis that no person in our society will be deprived of his or her liberty without just cause and according to the law. That is the fundamental principle upon which our law is based. It is a fundamental principle that arose out of Magna Carta and is now incorporated, as it has always been, in our criminal laws and criminal justice system. That fundamental commitment to liberty and the right of every one of us to liberty unless, according to law, we can be charged and dealt with for an offence against the law, is now enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Here in the territory it is enshrined in the Human Rights Act—our bill of rights.
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