Page 1538 - Week 05 - Thursday, 11 May 2006
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Australia. Surely, if we are being fair dinkum about this, we want to ensure that the police and the courts are able to have detained someone who should be detained.
We are talking about quite extraordinary situations here. People really need to have a reality check and get out of their comfort zone. It is all very nice here on a lovely, sunny, autumn Canberra day, a very peaceful place, debating this matter in a civilised way, as we tend to do and have done traditionally in Australia for over 100 years. But our freedom comes at a price: 100,000 Australians died in various world wars and other conflicts fighting to preserve our freedom.
Let us not kid ourselves. We face—and even the Chief Minister recognises this—a threat. At COAG he admitted that, in the briefings he had, we are not pussy-footing around here; we are not dealing with people who share the same values as we do; we are dealing with people who want to kill us. What on earth is wrong with detaining for up to 14 days someone who wants to kill us, to help prevent that, especially when there are provisions here to ensure that they are detained in a very humane way?
I find it ludicrous that we are not following the same test as the rest of Australia and that you are making it so difficult—we are not—for our law enforcement agencies to seek to detain people who want to kill us and who hold all these strange views. In some instances, I understand, some of these mad groups think that, if they blow themselves up and kill a lot of people, they will get 72 virgins. That is medieval stuff. It makes a nonsense of what we are all about in terms of being a civilised society.
But civilised societies have regularly been called upon to defend themselves. Australia has always answered that call most effectively, even though we are only a little-ranking power. We have lost many, many people in the past, defending the rights of us here today to remain free. In this parliament, we have a duty—and the government certainly has a duty to the citizens of the ACT if it introduces laws like this, which it is doing—to make sure they work and not have impossible tests that may well prove to be nigh on impossible and that discourage the police from perhaps using them and having to forcibly do something else. As much as anything else, that is a horribly inefficient and problematic way of dealing with things. You have a duty to introduce laws that protect your law-abiding citizens.
The problem here is that you are not doing so. These laws have been framed to be compliant, it seems, with our Human Rights Act. I do not agree with that act. The Liberal opposition does not. We see that act as an act that panders to criminals—in this case, would-be terrorists. I have yet to see it used for the benefit or ordinary, law-abiding citizens.
There were similar concerns raised in places like the UK, who went down the same path a little before we did. They are seeing real problems now with how that act is being interpreted by their judiciary. I read an article in the Spectator referring to activist judges and the problems they have got with over 1,000 people who are citizens of the UK, who have been imprisoned and who are not being deported. As a result, they have got problems in terms of error being interpreted again in favour of those criminals. There are suggestions in the UK that they might have a substantial look at some of the conventions they are party to and maybe look at substantially rewriting some of their legislation as a result.
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