Page 3417 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 14 November 2006
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I would want to dispute the implied recommendation of the commonwealth review that the states surrender their right to take independent action such as moratoriums on genetically modified crops for marketing reasons. That is what the ACT government is accepting by not doing its own review.
The ACT Assembly’s health committee conducted an inquiry into the Gene Technology Bill and recommended a more cautious approach. The ACT government did not accept those recommendations. It has essentially accepted the commonwealth regime with the addition of a moratorium on the commercial release of genetically manipulated food crops, echoing the moratorium in New South Wales. That is appropriate, given that we are plonked right in New South Wales. In that context, then, the decision not to consider an ACT review, as legislated for, is unfortunate.
Furthermore, there was the apparent incapacity of the department to provide my office with a list of ACT input to the commonwealth review. At the last minute we got that list, but I am still wondering how comprehensive that ACT input was. I will still be following that up.
Perhaps more importantly there is the Human Rights Act. The scrutiny of bills committee report makes a number of comments questioning the basis of the changes to health legislation that are described as flowing from the human rights audit of ACT health legislation conducted by Monash University’s Castan Centre for Human Rights Law. Once again, however, as this audit was apparently commissioned by the government for cabinet consideration rather than Assembly or public enlightenment, we have been advised that this must remain confidential.
Of course, it is a self-serving idiocy to claim that because a document can be kept confidential it must be kept confidential. That is the same facile argument that was used to support keeping secret the functional review. It has now been trotted out again, both to my office and to the scrutiny committee, with regard to this audit of health legislation.
There could be reasons why that audit should not be made public, but the fact that it is prepared for cabinet of itself is not that reason. The Queensland government’s use of a trolley full of hospital records, which was wheeled into cabinet meetings in order to grant information such as waiting lists immunity from freedom of information, makes that obvious. The fact that this review was prepared for cabinet does not mean that it, some of it or relevant parts of it, cannot be released to the scrutiny committee and MLAs, if not more publicly, in order to explain the rationale for some of these amendments.
The ACT’s model of a human rights act is one of dialogue. I had understood that dialogue was intended to be one that is public. That includes the parliament as well as the executive. Dialogue requires at least one other participant. In fact, it seems to me that a secret human rights dialogue inside the cabinet room, or between one part of a government department and another, might be no real dialogue at all.
I wonder what the position of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law is on section 59 of this bill. This section would give enormous powers of detention, far in
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