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

Unlike the previous speaker, the member for Gellibrand, I rise to strongly support the Crimes Amendment (Bail and Sentencing) Bill 2006 and I want to address some of the criticisms that she has made of it. Firstly, she spent a lot of her speech going through comments that had been made by members on this side of the House when the changes were initially introduced in the dying days of the Keating government in 1994. I think it is fair to say that the thinking in this area of government in Indigenous affairs has evolved significantly since that time—on both sides of the House—and I think these changes reflect some of that new thinking. She spent a lot of time criticising Minister Brough, the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, for his handling of this policy area, but I think what he has done in highlighting these issues has been tremendously courageous. When he highlighted these issues you knew that all the usual suspects would come out and call him a racist and say it was just the oppressive Howard government dealing with these issues, but I think these problems have been swept under the carpet for far too long. I commend him on taking the stance he has in trying to actively deal with these issues.

I think it is vital that this parliament take a very strong position that categorically says to all Australians that we are all equal before the law and, as such, we are all fully entitled to the protection of that law. To say that cultural background or coming from a particular community represents mitigation for committing a crime is an appalling message for this parliament to send. This is an issue that requires Commonwealth leadership, even though a lot of the criminal law where the changes will need to be made comes under state and territory jurisdiction. This bill provides the leadership to the states and territories on this issue, and I note that the sentiments expressed in it were endorsed by COAG.

This bill represents only one part of an overall process to deal with extraordinarily difficult issues of family violence and child abuse within Indigenous communities. I cannot say too strongly that every Australian, including every member of an Indigenous community, is entitled to the protection of the law. The acts of criminals should never be justified and they should not be rendered less serious because of customary law or cultural practice. I reject the idea that a person who is found guilty of a crime should have their cultural background automatically considered, when a court is sentencing that offender, so as to mitigate the sentence that is being imposed. This bill will stop any customary law or cultural practice from being taken into account in the process of granting bail so that the criminal behaviour concerned is not seen to be less culpable.

I represent in this place a seat, Stirling, that is extraordinarily culturally diverse. In that way it is a very good reflection of the country as a whole. We have immigrant populations that represent every wave of migration to Australia, from the post-World War II era when the arrivals were southern Europeans, through to the large Vietnamese migrations of the mid-seventies and now to the latest arrivals, under Australia’s very generous humanitarian program, who are coming in particular from North Africa. Within the seat of Stirling all the world’s religions are represented. It is a microcosm of Australia in the sense that you can find representatives there of any particular cultural group. I often attend citizenship ceremonies—the City of Stirling, my local council, holds them every three weeks—and literally hundreds of people are inducted at every ceremony. So the seat has a growing and very diverse population. I think that is a good reflection of one of this nation’s strengths, and this diversity actually enhances us. But nobody has ever come to me and said that they think we should have a two-speed law based on culture in this country. We do not have a situation where people have differing levels of citizenship or differing protection through the law. As soon as you become a citizen of Australia you are 100 per cent equal to anybody who was born here or whose family goes back generations here.

This practice of all of us being equal is a vitally important part of our legal framework. But it has been infiltrated by the idea that a person’s cultural background is a valid excuse for committing criminal actions. I think if we follow this line of thinking—and I am not speaking on the basis of hard evidence, but I think it is reasonable to assume that the victims of crime would often be victims at the hands of somebody from a similar background to theirs—then we need to ask what it effectively means for the cultural groups that we are talking about. What it means, Mr Deputy Speaker, is that they are not going to be as equally protected as you or I are in this place. I think it would be an absolute disaster for the parliament to propagate a view like that. The term ‘cultural background’ was inserted into the Crimes Act in 1994 in the Keating government’s response to an Australian Law Reform Commission report entitled Multiculturalism and the law. I think this provides us with an excellent example of the excesses that politically correct multiculturalism can generate.

I love the diversity of my seat but, as I have said, nobody has ever expressed the desire to me that we have separate laws for different cultural groups. I think the excesses of a policy like that are no more evident than in the treatment of Aboriginal Australians. It seems that in the minds of some in this place the protection of Australia law does not apply equally to everybody. The most disturbing example was one that received quite a lot of publicity at the time, and that was when a totally inadequate sentence was handed down to an Aboriginal man in the Northern Territory who had been convicted of physically and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl who had been his so-called promised bride. The judge handed down a sentence of a mere four months in jail because he took into account the cultural practice of having a promised bride. I think some of the difficulties that can arise when traditional Aboriginal culture collide with Western society are obvious. But if we are going to accept that cultural practices that injure or harm young people are more acceptable in the Aboriginal culture than they would be in our own then we are going down a very slippery slope. If we were to say that then we would say that this particular 14-year-old Aboriginal girl is not entitled to the same protection of Australian law as any other Australian 14-year-old. I think that is an outrageous proposition.

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 sends the exact 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 of taking into account cultural relativities is not restricted to Aboriginal communities. In recent very widely publicised 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. Fortunately, the court did not accept that.

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