Page 418 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 2019
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solid foundation for evaluating proposed laws against those values. We are a territory that is established under a national constitution with its own core legal framework, including rights, responsibilities and rules for governance that apply across the country.
Our foundational act sets out a framework for self-government here in Canberra. It recognises the importance of participation in the democratic process and it sets out the powers of this government and this Assembly to govern and make laws for Canberrans. It is unfortunate that Mr Hanson has again today demonstrated a surprising misunderstanding of the way that Australia’s legal framework operates, especially as it comes to the interrelationship between the constitution and territory laws and, as he has referred to, section 109. But we will leave that for another time.
As an Assembly, we have adopted a Human Rights Act. That act sets out our most fundamental civil and political rights. It guides our consideration of competing rights. Each sitting period we draw on those legal frameworks to consider bills and other important legal issues. And of course it is critical that in making these judgements we do so from a thorough evidence base.
Again Mr Hanson today has spoken of the way that he seems to look for someone to express his own opinion back to him, and by the time he has got two opinions he calls it data or evidence. But that is not the case. It is critical that we do so with a true evidence base and not just look around to try to find people who agree with us. Constitutional and human rights judgements cannot be made in a vacuum. The tangible impact on the lives of Canberrans is how we measure the success of our legislation.
The government takes its commitment to evidence-based human rights and constitutionally sound legislation very seriously. We will not accept that the statute book should be a place for generating headlines or, as was suggested by the Canberra Liberals last year, that we should just try to pass new laws and see what happens next. Over this term we have demonstrated our commitment again and again. We have enacted evidence-based laws to make Canberra a better place to live, and we will keep listening to the evidence about how those laws work even more.
One of the most important examples of our work to turn evidence into action this term follows from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The Gillard government set Australia down the path of examining clear, ongoing and unacceptable failures to protect children from harm. And that commission also gave us the latest psychological, criminological and legal evidence about how to best support survivors of sexual abuse. The royal commission’s final report, delivered in December 2017, represents a comprehensive evidence base for reforming our laws to protect children.
The ACT is uniquely based, as Australia’s first human rights jurisdiction, to take action to prevent abuse and to provide redress and justice for survivors. The Human Rights Act gives us a framework for evaluating the competing rights and interests that were so evident in the royal commission’s report.
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