Page 1383 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 June 2020
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Really, my concern here, and the opposition’s concern, is that the government has lost the plot with this bill. The government has tried to convince me and the opposition that this approach is okay because some Liberal-led jurisdictions are also doing this and taking away people’s right to apply for compensation. I did say to the minister, and I will say it here, that I am not minded to remove the rights of Canberrans for fellowship sake with my colleagues in South Australia and Tasmania.
The Canberra Liberals do not lightly extinguish the rights of our fellow citizens. In saying this, I note that we have an enforceable obligation, as I said before, to resume property only on just terms. I am doubtful whether this legislation extinguishes that right and whether it does what the government thinks it does. Also, the ACT is a human rights compliant jurisdiction. I note, from the scrutiny report and from briefings that I receive from the government, that the ACT Human Rights Commission has expressed reservations about the government’s approach in this case and has suggested to the government an approach similar to that which I am proposing in the detail stage.
The government has flip-flopped over this for some time. As recently as Sunday the minister made it clear that she would draft an amendment to accommodate the opposition’s desire and possibly the scrutiny committee’s desire to have a system which is closer to the Victorian model. But then by Monday evening I was told that that was off the table. Presumably, the minister got rolled in cabinet. It shows that there is not a really clear commitment from this cabinet, from this Labor-Greens cabinet, to allow rights to be complied with. It is very easy for the Attorney-General to say, “I have looked at it and, yes, we do take away people’s rights but it is reasonable.”
The justification that this government is using is that it has an impact on the territory’s fiscal position. One of the things that we need to be very mindful of, and I do not think that any of us have really thought about this, is that the decisions that were made to keep the community safe, to minimise the prospect of our fellow Canberrans dying—let us not overstate it, that is what we set out to do, and I applaud the officials and the government who have made the decisions to keep our community safe, prevent our friends and relatives and our grandparents from death from this disease—are very expensive decisions to make. The collective decisions we have made to protect our community are very expensive. And no-one has yet totted up the cost.
But what this government is doing by taking away people’s right to apply for compensation is to say that, for the good of the whole community, a part of the community will pay a higher cost. That is not what the Canberra Liberals are about. The Canberra Liberals understand completely that the decisions associated with protecting the ACT community and the Australian community from what other countries have experienced are very expensive indeed, probably less expensive than letting the pandemic run and really cripple your economy. Probably that is the case. But, irrespective of the outcome, we have imposed enormous costs on the community, and it should be that the whole community bears that cost, not individuals.
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