Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House reaffirms that :

(1)

every Australian is entitled to the full protection of Australian law;

(2)

cultural practices in any community do not lessen that protection; and

(3)

human rights override cultural rights.

My seat of Stirling is a fantastic reflection of the Australian way in that it is the most culturally diverse seat in Western Australia. Every major immigrant population is represented, from the early migrants of the post World War II era from northern and southern Europe through to the later arrivals from Vietnam and China and now the newest arrivals from Africa and the Middle East who are benefiting from Australia’s generous humanitarian program—a program that is unrivalled across the globe in its generosity. All of the world’s major religions have places of worship in Stirling, from those of the various Christian faiths to Sunni and Shiah mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples and a Jewish synagogue.

I enjoy attending the frequent citizenship ceremonies that are held by the City of Stirling, where a glance across the crowd gives you a very good indication that Australia’s newest citizens are coming from every corner of the globe. I appreciate this diversity and I believe it is one of our nation’s greatest strengths. It enhances the country economically, socially and culturally. One of the things I make clear when I address the new citizens at those citizenship ceremonies is that, from that night, they will share exactly the same rights and responsibilities as every other Australian citizen. We do not have differing levels of citizenship in this country: the newest Australian citizen, who meets the criteria to take out citizenship and does so, is no more or less a citizen than someone who was born here and whose family goes back generations.

But this practice, where all Australians are equal before the law and are entitled equally to its protection, is being diminished by the practice of taking cultural rights into account within our legal framework. There has been an insidious infiltration of the idea that a person’s cultural background can be used as an excuse to mitigate particular criminal actions. This is nowhere more evident than in the treatment of Aboriginal Australians. It seems that in the minds of some the protection of Australian law does not equally apply to everyone.

There is no more disturbing example of where this can lead than the completely inadequate sentence handed down to an Aboriginal man in the Northern Territory who was convicted of physically and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl who had been promised to him as his bride. The judge, taking into account cultural practice, sentenced the man to a mere four months in jail. This judge later admitted that he was wrong, and I do not wish to personalise this particular motion as being against him, but I read in the media reports of this incident that he had children of a similar age and I doubt that he would consider that to be an appropriate sentence if it were one of them who had been so viciously assaulted.

I understand the difficulties that arise when traditional Aboriginal culture collides with Western society, but we absolutely must not accept that practices that injure or harm young people are any more acceptable in the Aboriginal culture than they would be in our own. For us to do that would be to say that a 14-year-old Aboriginal girl is not entitled to the same protection of Australian law as we would expect for the children of any one of us in this place. We would completely shame ourselves if we were to do that.

One of the reasons behind our system of justice is that it deters people from committing crimes. Lenient sentencing that is prepared to take into account cultural factors therefore sends a signal that the protection available to members of that community is not the same as the protection that is offered to others. If our legal system sends that signal that it is prepared to judge people based on their background, then the message will obviously be received that these crimes are somehow less horrifying.

This practice is not just restricted to Aboriginal communities. In recent trials in New South Wales for vicious gang rapes, counsel for the defence argued that the rapists’ backgrounds lessened their responsibility for committing these crimes. We cannot have a two-speed legal system in Australia without saying that the protection that that system offers is lessened because of somebody’s background. It is a straightforward principle that I have heard affirmed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights that human rights trump cultural rights, and it is a straightforward principle that we in this parliament need to strongly say that we support today. We must say very strongly that all Australians are entitled to the complete protection of Australian law. (Time expired)

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