Page 1390 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 June 2020
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Mrs Dunne also spoke about the human rights compatibility, and I emphasise again, as I did in introducing the bill, that the government considers that the bill is compatible with the Human Rights Act. This view was based on the construction of the current section 122 and analysis of the scope of rights protected under the Human Rights Act, including the permissibility of potential limitations of those rights. Advice was taken on this from the Solicitor-General. The explanatory statement to the bill outlines a detailed response to the rights engaged by the bill, and I was pleased to note that the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety, in considering the bill in scrutiny, did not make any adverse comments about its human rights implications; it simply asked the question whether we had considered the Victorian model.
The Victorian provisions that I spoke about earlier may be a reasonable consideration in the context of an ordinary public health situation that does not require extraordinary whole-of-community actions to prevent the spread of a virus that causes serious illness and death. However, we consider that creating new provisions would encourage disputation with the government as a means to receive financial support and would divert critical and scarce government resources away from service delivery and stimulus into defending public health decisions that ultimately were made on the advice of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee. It would be likely to require a significant administrative structure to implement the kinds of guidelines and support for decision-making in this regard.
The approach we are taking preserves the right to compensation if a person is deprived of their property, as Mrs Dunne has indicated, and, as Minister Rattenbury has spoken to, the act-of-grace scheme will continue to operate for those who may be in exceptional circumstances. This approach, we believe, is tailored to the unique needs and resources of the ACT. Mrs Dunne and I have spoken about this and, again, we have engaged through this process, but fundamentally I disagree with Mrs Dunne about the implications of proceeding with this bill or otherwise. I actually think that, contrary to her closing comments about some people bearing a burden if we do this or if we do not implement her amendment, this is critical to ensuring that everyone, including all sectors of the economy that have been affected by COVID-19, can be fairly supported.
Many people and many businesses have been hard hit by COVID-19 but have not necessarily been specifically affected by the actions of the Chief Health Officer or authorised officers under part 7 of the act. There have been such widespread implications of COVID-19 that, essentially, retaining this provision would privilege—and I use that word advisedly because obviously people have been very, very significantly impacted—and would give those who have been directly affected by our Chief Health Officer’s actions and directions an opportunity to apply for compensation that is not available to those who have been affected but by an administrative decision of government, by advice from the Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer or the Prime Minister or the Chief Minister to stay at home, which was not a direction that was made in the ACT.
There have been so many responses that trying to unpick that and creating an administrative structure that enables people to argue through that would have
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