Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I take community safety very seriously, but I also take it seriously when, as a parliament, we're creating new offences on the fly, including mandatory sentencing, and creating additional punishments for a particular group of people. We let people out of jail who have served their sentence every day, and here we're creating some additional draconian conditions on a particular group of people. This legislation requires a delicate balance between community safety and human rights.

I understand that the government needed to respond to the High Court's decision in finding an appropriate balance. We've been locking people up indefinitely for so long here in Australia that it has become normalised, but it shouldn't have come as a complete surprise that the High Court might find that we can't lock people up indefinitely. I don't accept that the government should somehow defy the High Court and put people in immigration detention in direct contravention of the High Court's finding. We have a separation of our powers for a reason.

The government passed urgent legislation a few weeks ago in a process that didn't allow much time at all for consideration about the proportionality of the offences created and with some fairly draconian amendments that were agreed in the Senate. And now, today, we have an amendment. I understand that one of the things that this amendment does is to fix an omission in last week's bill, creating three new offences to correspond to these newly created and fairly draconian conditions, but I have concerns about some of the amendments that purportedly add clarity about electronic monitoring arrangements.

Some of it seems to be addressing rushed drafting, shifting powers from regulation into the legislation, but one amendment changes section 76F(2) so that personal information can be given to any person for a range of reasons. This seems very broad. Purposes listed include 'protecting the community' and 'facilitating the location of a person'. Maybe this is appropriate, but, given we first heard about it eight hours ago and my one advisor and I have been busy all day on the other work of parliament, I've not had time to make a sensible decision about whether it is reasonable. I haven't had time to consult my community, I haven't had time to consult experts and I don't think we can make decisions about laws that seriously impact people's rights in such a hurry.

The government has indicated that the legislation is likely to need to be amended after the High Court's reasons are handed down, but it refuses to include a sunset clause on these hurriedly drafted new laws. And we hear the High Court may hand down its findings as early as tomorrow, which makes it slightly ridiculous to be passing legislation today. We need to pause on this. We need to listen to the High Court's reasons for decision. We need to be very careful about removing individual rights without proper, sober consideration and debate. So, I will not be supporting this bill. It may well be proportionate. It may well be required. Once we see the High Court's reasons, it may well be consistent with those reasons.

But, without adequate time to consult, I'm not comfortable supporting any further reduction of rights or creation of new offences.

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