Page 732 - Week 02 - Thursday, 10 March 2011
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that is not batting for their human rights to a fair trial. The right to a fair trial was entrenched well before we had the Human Rights Act, yet the Attorney-General was coming out and saying people were guilty before they had actually been found guilty.
The human rights commissioner found that the BRC was overcrowded because of delays to the AMC and that this exacerbated human rights issues at the BRC. Because the government ran out of money, we have seen the lack of certain basic facilities, including insufficient funding for the human rights commissioner to conduct a human rights audit.
It is worth concluding by saying that, firstly, the philosophical principle behind bills of rights and human rights acts is questionable, and I have laid out some of the concerns that we expressed at the time. A human rights act should not be used as an excuse not to get the job done. These human rights exist quite separate from the Human Rights Act. There are some fundamental human rights. Some of them are in our constitution; some of them are expressed through common law; many others are protected through legislation. They should be protected regardless of a human rights act.
If you are going to pursue this and pretend that you are a human rights compliant jurisdiction committed to human rights, you should get the job done. You should be honest when you sign a compatibility statement. We should be able to trust that some basic checks have actually been done to reflect that. We should not see a human rights act impinging on common sense, as we have seen in a number of cases.
This is an ongoing debate. We will continue to be part of that. There are ongoing concerns, and if the government are going to continue with this kind of legislation, they should make it work and they should actually protect people’s human rights.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella) (12.09): It is a pleasure to participate in this debate. A five-year review of any significant piece of legislation is something of a watermark, particularly when the legislation in question is as controversial as our Human Rights Act. In some ways this is an extraordinarily timely debate, perhaps even serendipitous, coming at a time when we are embroiled yet again in a conversation about the right of the ACT parliament to legislate on its own behalf for its own community.
Indeed, let us not forget that the ACT Human Rights Act was itself a target of disallowance by the then Howard government during the war on terrorism, when this government dared to hold the Howard government’s proposed terrorism laws up for scrutiny against what was, at that time, the nation’s only bill of rights. For the Howard government, of course, the ACT Human Rights Act was an inconvenience, an inconvenient prod to its conscience, an inconvenient reminder of Australia’s international obligations regarding human rights, coming right at a time when the commonwealth was trying to convince Australians that they ought to surrender those very rights and cultivate instead a culture of fear.
Just think, if that threat of disallowance had been carried through we would not be able today to celebrate the improvements in the quality of law making that the ACT Human Rights Act has brought about in this city. How fitting that we reflect on that
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