Ruth Webber (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to commence my remarks by quoting a well-known politician—a person well known to this chamber. In December 1998, when speaking on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he said:

Since 1948, Australia has given strong bipartisan support to the declaration and the principle that human rights are both universal and indivisible. At home, Australia has built a society which places the utmost importance on the values of decency, fairness and tolerance.

When discussing the need for a Constitutional preamble, in August 1999 he said:

It is also important that the preamble express those great principles of liberal democracy to which all of us subscribe: freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and the rule of law. The great strength of the Australian nation is built upon those inherited values that we have. It is not built upon a formal bill of rights; rather it is built upon the instinctive values of the Australian community and those institutions, including this parliament, the federal system and the democratic character of our nation that provide the underpinning of the free society in which we live.

In both cases, I am of course quoting our current Prime Minister, John Howard.

We have had much discussion in this debate about the values that individuals bring to this place and that different political parties hold. One of the values the Australian Labor Party holds that I am most proud of is our commitment to the fundamental principle that all people should be equal before the law. That formal equality or equal treatment is an intrinsic concept that underpins our international and Anglo-Australian legal culture. An important right that citizenship confers upon citizens is equal treatment before our law. Formal equality guarantees that the law is administered in a fair, just and impartial manner in the interests of the individual. Equality before the law is undermined when the law distinguishes between people because of their sexual orientation.

Like the Stanhope Labor government, before the 2001 state election the Western Australian branch of the Labor Party made a clear commitment to amend Western Australian laws to recognise that lesbians, gay men and bisexuals have the same rights as other citizens in Western Australia and therefore should be equal before the law. The rights of territories and states have been canvassed here most recently by Senator Humphries and by others. Territories and states of various political persuasions have often passed legislation that I have personally disagreed with. I can think of numerous examples passed by the Court government, including extinguishing the rights of workers, and I am sure I could think of examples passed by the previous Northern Territory government and by the government that, indeed, Senator Humphries was a member of. But I will always—although I regard myself as probably more of a centralist—defend the rights of those democracies to pass the legislation that they are elected to proclaim.

In my view it is incumbent upon all of us, when considering issues like this, to balance competing rights and values. It is a measure of our maturity as a democratic society that we are able to debate matters where divergent views are held and to create solutions that balance the right to hold personal views in the private sphere with the right to exist without harm and discrimination in the public sphere. In my view, the acts of the current government fly in the face of this very important principle. I would also like to place on record my appreciation of the tolerance and understanding that has been shown by members of my own party who do not necessarily hold the same personal view that I do on this issue. This debate within the Labor Party, if not within this chamber, has been handled in a very sensitive and democratic way.

I would like to conclude by pointing out that in 1861 John Stuart Mill argued that society should offer equal opportunities for all its members. Mill argued for ‘a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side nor disability on the other side’.