Page 2863 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (11.02): I want to speak to a number of the things that the Chief Minister has said regarding the issues around human rights and the human rights commissioner. I have already outlined this morning, when I spoke earlier on this bill, a number of the issues that have been put forward by the human rights commissioner and some of the points raised. As I said, the critical point that we are looking at is whether the limitation on human rights can be justified by reference to evidence.
As I noted, you can bring up evidence to support any position you want to support, but we believe that the evidence we have looked at shows that taking drugs does impair driving. As I said, this is a road safety initiative, and I note that the human rights commissioner refers to a number of the amendments that the Greens have put forward and which address some of the significant concerns she has raised.
So we have addressed a number of those issues. The amendments we have put forward, as I outlined, have gone to issues and concerns raised by Civil Liberties and Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform. They do not address all of the concerns, obviously, but we have put forward these amendments because we believe they improve human rights aspects of the bill and also civil liberties aspects around the restrictions on the use of evidence for searching cars, having the presence and non-presence test and also removing the drug impairment test, which is an extremely subjective measure. We believe putting all of those forward has addressed those significant human rights issues and concerns with the bill.
The other thing I would note is an implementation issue that will come about as part of the bill. One of the things that the human rights commissioner has stated is:
In my view the limitation on human rights would be more proportionate if this testing was conducted only as an adjunct to random alcohol breath testing which (whilst also limiting rights)—
which she notes—
is an established and well-accepted regime in Australia.
She notes that this is not specifically considered under the bill. But, again, this is an implementation issue and it would be inappropriate to some extent to put this in the bill because it will be very much up to the police about how they conduct these searches and how it is implemented.
I do take issue with some of the things that the Chief Minister said. Of course, we are concerned about human rights aspects and the views which have been put by the commissioner. I reiterate that it would have been helpful if we had had this discussion with the Chief Minister some months ago when the bill was first agreed to in principle. I thought we were engaging in good faith with all parties on this, that we were going to move forward on it and put in place a piece of legislation that we had all engaged on, and that concerns we had would have been raised.
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