Page 1355 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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to grapple with have already been addressed, and the whole of jurisprudence is based on previous cases. So let us not be insular.
Mr Seselja also said that he has more confidence in ASIO and Commissioner Keelty than the government elected by the ACT people. If 90 per cent of the ACT people opposed the Human Rights Act, why did they elect the Stanhope government, which went to the polls very much committed to that act? They did not hide the fact that they supported human rights legislation, which this whole Assembly has agreed to. So I do not think that argument really works. I do not think the community shares the confidence in ASIO and Commissioner Keelty that the opposition has claimed here today. Does Mr Seselja believe that there is the secret cache of weapons of mass destruction still hidden in Iraq, as we were told by our intelligence agencies? Instead of fearing communists under the bed, as we saw with those who took a Cold War stance in the 1950s, in the post-Soviet era it is now a case of terrorists under the bed. I want to explore some of these issues in my speech.
The bar association and the Law Council of Australia, among others, have given evidence to the legal affairs committee of this parliament and to the federal and state governments that existing laws are sufficient to deal with any of the threat scenarios which have been put forward as reasons why we need to pass these laws. I tend to take the advice of these independent and highly skilled experts ahead of the advice of the federal government’s own advisers.
As I see it, my primary task as a legislator is to be satisfied that the interests of my constituents and the interests of society at large are best served by the passage of any particular legislative proposal. I imagine that similar calculations inform the decisions of all of us in this house. As a political scientist, when looking at a new legislative proposal, one of the first questions I ask is: whose interests are being served with the passage of this legislation? While I acknowledge that the interests of the general public in being protected from violence are of enormous and overwhelming priority, there are also countervailing interests in protecting the public from the unnecessary intrusion of the coercive powers of the state into areas of their lives where freedoms of expression, association, movement and thought ought to remain supreme. The key word is “unnecessary”.
In some extraordinary situations the utilitarian calculation is such that the interests of the general public must trump the interests of the individual to many of their various freedoms. The outbreak of a highly contagious and deadly disease is one such situation where extraordinary coercive measures may be justified in defence of society as a whole. Nuclear or biological blackmail would similarly demand extraordinary responses. But the key word here is “extraordinary”. Such a measure should never become commonplace, and I fear that there is a push from the federal level to entrench such practice as a commonplace response to low-level threats.
Given the alacrity with which federal bureaucrats are being authorised by successive government legislation to put aside basic freedoms and detain innocent people, I fear that there is a push to establish such measures as a tool which can be used in the increasing arsenal against perceived political enemies and to foment fear among the poorly informed, politically disinterested and gullible members of society. Fear has ever been a powerful device and a great distracter. We know that governments and other political
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