Page 3419 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 14 November 2006
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committee. The first and most significant in respect of the time devoted by the committee was in relation to proposed new section 59A of the Health Professionals Act.
I want to spend a little bit of time going through that. I understand there is going to be an amendment, but I think it is important that we go through some of the reasons why this was perhaps not a good idea. My concerns, I guess, are over the process that got us here.
As Dr Foskey has touched on, new section 59A would have given quite extraordinary powers to the president of the tribunal in this case. It would give the president the ability to essentially detain someone—and not just detain someone. It seems that the only reason for detaining them would be that they had failed to appear or, I believe, perhaps also failed to produce documents. It seems extraordinary that we would vest that power in a presidential member of a tribunal without any of the safeguards that we would expect.
We have gone through a long process debating terrorism laws in this country. The Chief Minister has obviously expressed a lot of concern over the federal government’s moves to be able to detain suspected terrorists. If we compare the safeguards that are in that legislation, this does not compare very favourably. In that legislation I believe 14 days is the maximum that a person can be detained. Under this legislation there is no maximum.
There is no discussion about the issues around access to lawyers. The powers are cast in the form of open-ended discretions. As I said, there is no time limit whatsoever. We see in other pieces of legislation such as the Australian crime commission act 2003 that it needs to be a judge who makes these kinds of orders. Here we are allowing a member of a tribunal who has requested the information to make the order of detention. There is no provision as to the evidentiary status in later court proceedings of any statements. There is no provision for an independent review of the exercise of the power to detain. No provision is made as to the manner of detention.
All these things are of significant concern. It reflects on maybe the rushed nature of this. It also perhaps reflects on the ineffectual nature of the Human Rights Act. We are now seeing that it is probably in breach of section 18 of the Human Rights Act, because it would appear to be an arbitrary detention, yet we had a statement from the government that it was human rights compatible.
The question is, what do those statements actually mean. What does the Human Rights Act mean when we have the government coming forward—the government which has trumpeted the Human Rights Act and its human rights credentials—with compatibility statements which are clearly wrong. They have been shown to be wrong here in this case.
This is perhaps one of the dangers of a majority government. It ticks off on compatibility statements with its own legislation which clearly have no value. It is essentially saying, “This complies with the Human Rights Act because we say it does.” That does not give me a lot of comfort, and I do not think it would give members of the community a lot of comfort.
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