Page 362 - Week 02 - Thursday, 8 March 2007
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MR SESELJA (Molonglo) (11.50): My colleague Jacqui Burke has said what the Liberal opposition’s position will be on the Children and Young People Amendment Bill 2006 (No 2): we will be supporting the bill. I want to speak a little on some of the areas around search powers and the areas that apply to ACT Corrective Services in relation to young people generally.
This bill tries very hard to find a balance between the rights of detainees, the rights of young people who are in detention, the right of employees to work in a safe environment and the right of the community to be protected from people escaping and the like. It seeks to get that balance and it goes a fair way to doing that. We have looked at these provisions fairly closely and in terms of setting out broad parameters.
In particular, we have looked closely at some of the search powers. In terms of broad parameters, I think the bill goes a reasonable way to getting it right. It is very important that, in this debate and in legislation like this, we protect the dignity of young people. Things such as strip searches are something that we want to avoid wherever possible, but of course there are circumstances where they are necessary.
Much of how this plays out in practice will depend on the training of the particular officers involved, the procedures that are set up and the culture of the organisation. Legislation can go only so far in protecting people’s rights. It can set out the broad parameters. It can set out penalties—although I note that there are not penalties here, and I might come back to that in a second. What will be important are the standing orders. They are coming and we will be looking at them very closely.
It needs to be recognised that simply putting in legislation that we protect the rights of these young people will not get it done. That is where it is going to be incumbent upon the minister and senior officers in the department to ensure that the guidelines and the culture that goes with this are put in place in such a way that young people are not subjected to unnecessary or humiliating searches wherever that can be avoided.
I want to touch on a couple of provisions of the bill. In her tabling speech, the minister said:
The search provisions in the Act require simultaneous amendment in order to ensure that searches of children and young people detained at the youth detention centre are done in a way that is compatible with the Human Rights Act.
I question whether we need the Human Rights Act to tell us to treat young people with dignity or to treat young people in a way that is not overly intrusive. I do not think that the Human Rights Act is a necessary precondition for us to have provisions like this. We could come up with these provisions without the Human Rights Act—though, to the extent that the Human Rights Act acts as a guide, it may be of some use. We in the Liberal opposition have put our concerns about the Human Rights Act on the record in the past, but I do not see that any of these provisions would not have been made or should not have been made even if we did not have the Human Rights Act.
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