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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 504 ..

What has this Chief Minister done about the servitude of women, the women being sold into slavery for sex in this country and in this town? Nothing. And what will protect their rights in this piece of legislation? What in here will protect their rights one jot more? Not a thing. It goes on and on. It is grandiose and high flying. He is trying to create a fixed moral code but what he is in fact doing is creating a recipe for strife and dissension, as the meaning of each piece of legislation will be fought out in the courts and in the Assembly and in the community.

What will happen, as has happened in other places and has been brought to our attention by Mr Stefaniak and Mrs Cross to some extent, will be that these rights will be fought out and extended to people who have given up some of their rights to be treated equally because they are criminals, offenders, who have been sent to jail by juries of their peers. They will use these provisions to try and get out of jail, to try and winkle out of the law, to try and winkle out of facing justice. This is not a path that this country should be going down. This is not a path that the capital city of this country should be going down.

The Chief Minister, in trying to build up his great edifice, his great memorial, fails to recognise that this is not a constitution he is introducing here; this is just another bill for an act and it cannot bind future legislatures. This is statute law of a subordinate legislature and there is nothing to stop our successors from amending it, deleting it or ignoring it. It does not ensure fundamental human rights because the subjects who take interest in this will be really indulging in ongoing partisan squabbles. There will be temporary changes in the composition of the Assembly and governments over time and this piece of legislation will just wander into insignificance like much that is done in this place. If you tell yourself you have safeguarded human rights for the future when all you have done is rewarded yourself the right to be smug, you should think again. We will not be safeguarding the rights of people in the future. We will do that, as I said, by being constantly vigilant, by ensuring that there is a consensus across society about what is just and what is not. This does not do that. We have to move further from focusing on actual rights as a sort of broad thing to focusing on the actual rights of actual humans—of actual people—rather than broad grandiose statements. I will conclude by asking: what will become of this grand memorial? I refer back to the last lines of Ozymandias:

Round the decay

Of the colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

MR CORNWELL (4.57): It is interesting that the proponent of this piece of legislation is not present, and indeed the Chief Minister’s colleagues have been conspicuously silent in this debate.

Ms Gallagher: I am just waiting, Mr Cornwell—just waiting. It has been such a stimulating debate.

MR CORNWELL: Well, I wish you luck because you will have difficulties defending some of these points. We have of course had over the years in this Assembly an erosion of people’s responsibilities as the majority, I regret to say, in this place have consistently chipped away at the idea of people being responsible for themselves in favour of having Big Brother take over and look after them. There have, of course, been some spectacular

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