Page 1539 - Week 05 - Thursday, 11 May 2006
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This is the problem when you are giving slavish attention to an act such as the Human Rights Act. You are probably even going too far there with section 28 of that act, which at least gives some opportunity for you to bring it back to reality. If you look at the scrutiny report on my bill, which has these tests which are applied in the rest of Australia, it is not necessarily incompatible with the Human Rights Act either.
You are applying here a very stringent test on the AFP. You are making it very, very difficult for them to satisfy that test. You are making it much easier, I submit—and running the risk of allowing—for terrorists to shop around. You are putting the ACT in a different category to everywhere else in Australia. Be it on your own heads if something goes wrong here. I sincerely hope we never have to use this act or any other similar act in Australia. That would be wonderful. That would be a great outcome for everyone. But there is an obvious threat. The Chief Minister knows it.
We probably do not have the same detail he does or anyone else at COAG does; none of us were there. But there obviously is a very real threat. I take very, very seriously warnings from experts like Mick Keelty and the AFP. I take it very, very seriously when they say they need legislation that at least, as far as the tests that have to apply for police, is the same across Australia. I take it pretty seriously when the federal Attorney-General’s Department gives similar evidence to that on the need, in these crucially important parts, for the test that law enforcement authorities have to operate under to be the same.
We are not dealing with parking matters, we are not dealing with traffic offences, we are not even dealing with minor matters under the Crimes Act; we are dealing with potentially horrendous crimes against humanity—in this case, ordinary, law-abiding Canberra citizens. You are letting them down if you do not have the same tests; you are needlessly causing problems; you have a duty to the community to ensure the security of that community; and you really are doing it the wrong way around. You are putting far too much emphasis on your Human Rights Act and far too much emphasis on the rights of criminals and would-be terrorists—people who want to destroy us and our society—and you are doing nothing to help the ordinary men, women and children of Canberra.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for Planning) (11.43): The government will not be supporting these amendments. Furthermore, the government—and I think I speak for all members on this side of the chamber—takes great offence at the assertion that in some way, through this amendment, the government has ignored the contribution, for example, that Australians have made in war to defend our liberties. What liberties were they defending, Mr Stefaniak? They were defending the rule of law, they were defending the right to be free from arbitrary detention, and they were defending the right to a fair trial. Those were the rights they were defending, and those are the same issues that we are defending here today in our legislation.
We are not prepared to accept an easy threshold on detention without trial, and that is what preventative detention is. It is detention without trial and without charge, and that is something that the government considers is an extreme course of action that must be taken as—and only as—a last resort. That is what the provisions in the bill provide for. It
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