Page 3012 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 August 2005
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The new human rights commission will accommodate the functions of the existing Human Rights and Discrimination Commissioner and the Health Services Complaints Commissioner to enable the sharing of resources and expertise as well as increasing consistency and improving coordination of oversight functions. In addition, a new disability and community services commissioner will be appointed to give specialist assistance on disability issues, meeting a long-term commitment by the government.
Other specialist commissioners, such as the children and young people commissioner, created under another bill debated today in the Assembly, can be easily included in the human rights commission as necessary. This will avoid the additional costs connected with the establishment of new, standalone, statutory oversight functions, providing the community with specialist statutory oversight facilities in a cost-effective way.
I am aware that the opposition does not support the establishment of the human rights commission. Mr Stefaniak has publicly criticised the government for allocating money to the new commission in this year’s budget and went to this issue again in his speech today. We have allocated the money because we have listened to the reports of the people we appointed to inquire into our statutory oversight system, and then we made a commitment to take the necessary action to give Canberrans a better service. In fact, the money is better spent in setting up a new commission than on the duplication of resources that would be involved in establishing separate offices for individual, specialist, statutory oversight agencies, as Mr Stefaniak says he would prefer.
I will continue to differ with the opposition on this, because I believe that we, as a community, do need to provide means by which people who are vulnerable or disadvantaged can bring their concerns to the attention of service providers and policy makers. We do need to make sure that service providers and service users are aware that respect and equality of treatment are vital and that support is there to develop those values in our community.
The money spent on the human rights commission will be well spent because it will provide an integrated service improvement and complaints-handling service that will deal with a broad range of issues that can arise for people wanting to be treated fairly and given a fair go. The human rights commission will provide a single access point for people who need help and will give them access to a range of complaints resolution, service improvement and community education facilities.
Some doubt has also been expressed about the ability of a single body like the human rights commission to effectively deal with the different types of issues arising out of its combination of functions. In response, I would point to existing ACT agencies that have shown that it is possible to cover diverse areas of responsibility within one office.
A good example is the Office of Fair Trading, which administers a wide range of legislation covering subjects as varied as brothels, credit services, X-rated films, travel agents, trade measurement and security services. It provides single, shop-front access to members of the community who need advice or assistance, as well as complaints handling and public education across this diverse range of subjects.
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