Page 4580 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011

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The debate we ought to be having is how our rights can be secured and our democracy can be protected from the threat of terrorism, not the extent to which we are prepared to do the terrorists’ job for them by inciting fear and giving up our democratic freedoms and human rights without a whimper.

What the Chief Justice and the Chief Minister were saying was that we should not give up our freedoms lightly. Later in the debate I will be moving, on behalf of the Greens, amendments that act on those urgings from five years ago. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the laws are an unjustified intrusion into our civil liberties and that conventional criminal law provides all the power necessary to take a preventative approach to terrorism but from a more robust and respected legal footing.

MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (5.13), in reply: I would like to thank members for their comments in relation to this bill. The bill is the culmination of the review conducted by my directorate into the operation and effectiveness of the terrorism act that began with the first statutory review which I tabled in this place in November last year.

The recommendations arising from the first statutory review are the foundation of this amending bill. As the specific amendments proposed by this bill have been aptly described previously, I will simply try to address a couple of points. Firstly, there are the issues and considerations arising under the Human Rights Act and the questions raised by the scrutiny committee in its report No 40 regarding the necessity for the continuation of the act.

As I stated when I introduced this bill in June, in arriving at the decision to propose the continuation of the terrorism act, the government has undertaken a robust human rights analysis in the context of the current threat of terrorist activity posed to Australians and to the ACT community. The government has concluded that terrorist activity is a real, significant and continuing threat. The evidence underlying this conclusion has been discussed in the first statutory review of the act and in the explanatory statement that accompanies this bill.

Following the conclusion that the continuation of the act is necessary, the government has then considered whether the continuation of the powers created by the act is a proportionate response. The question is whether the specific counter-terrorism measures contained in the act are proportionate from a human rights perspective, and this was extensively canvassed during the development of and debate on the initial bill in 2005.

The independent legal advice of Ms Kate Eastman considered the interaction between the initial 2005 bill with the right to a fair trial, privacy, arbitrary detention, freedom of movement and assembly under the Human Rights Act. This advice concluded that the bill was compatible with the Human Rights Act and that it satisfied the reasonable limitation requirements of section 28 of the act. It is important to note that nothing has changed since that assessment. Therefore, the question for the government is whether


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