Page 2847 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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Mr Hanson: No. He said he wanted to. He was consulting with the minister.
Mr Coe: You’re the master of criticising the police officers.
MR SPEAKER: Order!
MR STANHOPE: In fact, we need to correct these mistruths, these untruths. The Leader of the Opposition has now claimed, here publicly, that the Chief Police Officer refused to respond to Mr Hanson. I have the correspondence here. He did no such thing. This was last Friday, in the context of a bill to be debated today, that Mr Hanson latterly and blatantly thought, “I’ve been embarrassed now. Perhaps I had better find out what ACT Policing think.”
Then we go to the second issue in relation to the ACT government’s response to this bill today and that is advice received last night from the ACT human rights commissioner. In the context of this debate and the time available, I just need to make these two points. We do now have available to us specific advice in relation to this particular bill which we are debating today—one piece of advice from the ACT Chief Police Officer, one piece of advice from the ACT human rights commissioner. The Chief Police Officer asserted, on the basis of the material provided to him, a number or range of concerns, the most fundamental being—and I will read it:
The Hanson Bill does not incorporate formal laboratory testing of an oral fluid sample as part of the analysis process, which is seen by ACT Policing to be a critical requirement for sound and successful prosecutions. Limiting a prosecution so it is based solely on the results obtained from an oral fluid test conducted at the police station, without the added layer and certainty of a laboratory test, and without the further option of an independent test, creates a precarious situation for both police and prosecutors and has the potential to lead to failed prosecutions.
As a result of this advice, we know now Mr Hanson, protesting how outrageous it was that I had received or released the advice, of course, has now acted on it and sought to actually deal with deficiencies that have been revealed by the Chief Police Officer. Maybe he has. Who knows? I do not know. We certainly have not had an opportunity to have those amendments appropriately tested in the context of the legislative package as a whole. A raft of amendments were circulated yesterday, then withdrawn and then another set circulated by Mr Hanson, trying to deal belatedly and in a panic-stricken and driven way by revelations that he had not consulted and that others had consulted, namely, me on his behalf. He said, “There are some issues with this legislation.”
The second point that I make in the broad is in relation to the human rights commissioner’s advice. Of course, we have had assertions over these last couple of weeks from both Mr Hanson and Ms Bresnan that they are completely and perfectly satisfied that there are no human rights implications. They are on the record, each of them, as saying that: “It is a good bill. Human rights issues have been dealt with.”
The ACT’s statutory human rights commissioner does not think so. Our statutory human rights commissioner, one of Australia’s leading experts in human rights, does
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