Page 731 - Week 02 - Thursday, 10 March 2011
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MR SESELJA: We do not see it in other jurisdictions, funnily enough. They have discrimination acts, yet we do not see this happening in Queensland and WA. In fact, the Queensland government appears to be encouraging this, and good on them. People would expect some common sense.
You have got the unintended consequences, and they will grow. It takes many years for the unintended consequences—or the intended consequences for some people—to actually occur. But, the other aspect that I touched on was that the government is able to say, “Look, we’ve got a human rights act. We’re human rights compliant. All our prisons are human rights compliant. You can’t criticise us for people’s breach of human rights because we’ve got a human rights act.” Of course, that is not true.
We have seen that human rights compatibility statements are not worth the paper they are written on. Ms Hunter touched on some of the frustrations the committee faces in looking at these things. But we saw the starkest example in relation to legislation introduced by the health minister and which was declared by the Attorney-General—his signature was on it—to be human rights compliant. Of course these laws in their effect were actually more onerous than the anti-terrorism laws that were being debated around the same time. Yet we had the Attorney-General saying that they were human rights compliant. This is the other side of the debate—they will use it as a shield that still allows people’s human rights to be taken away but, “We’ve got a human rights act and it’s human rights compliant.”
Let us look at that. The seemingly minor amendments to existing health laws would have allowed the Health Professions Tribunal to issue warrants for the detention of health workers suspected of misconduct. Police officers enacting the warrants would have been empowered to use force to detain and move those suspected of malpractice to tribunal hearings. The powers were largely unrestrained by safeguards. But these were declared to be human rights compliant, and this goes to the point. If you are going to have a Human Rights Act, you should actually comply with it. If you say that something is human rights compliant, it should be, and we have not seen that.
I did compare it at the time to the controversial anti-terrorism laws, because it actually provided fewer legal safeguards. So health workers were treated worse than suspected terrorists if they were suspected of some kind of improper act. They were denied legal safeguards such as access to lawyers and maximum detention periods.
There are two sides to this coin. We have on the one hand the unintended consequences, where we see common sense thrown out the window in the name of human rights. I do not think there would be many people in the community who would support that approach and say it is unreasonable discrimination not to serve someone who has a legal obligation to be somewhere else at the time—that being school, for example.
We can look at the prison. Is anyone really claiming that it is human rights compliant? It is expensive, but if we look at the outcomes, they are not respecting anyone’s human rights—not the corrective services staff and not the prisoners. We can go through all of what has happened since we have had a Human Rights Act. We could talk about the Attorney-General prejudging a case of two remandees. I suspect that
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