Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am not prepared to comment on a matter that is apparently before the courts. The member for Warringah has referred to the case of someone who has been charged.

It is worth reflecting on the wealth of material that was available to the former government, and is still available to the opposition to consider, if it wishes, in the form of not one but two reports. There is a report by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs from 1999 and another report, much more recent, from September 2007, by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs—both of which make it clear that Aboriginal communities are very, very directly opposed to the removal of the permit system. Not only are they opposed; almost all other groups who have any involvement in this matter have expressed trenchant opposition to the removal of the permit system, which, I repeat, will do nothing to address the scourge of child sex abuse which was one of the reasons behind the intervention.

It is worth making the point that many communities, not in the Northern Territory regrettably, have a high incidence of child abuse—just as high as those in the Northern Territory—and they do not have a permit system. This opposition is intent on ignoring the views of Aboriginal people; ignoring the views of Aboriginal communities; ignoring the views of the Northern Territory police, who have expressed a very clear opposition to the scrapping of the permit system; and ignoring the recommendations of the House of Representatives committee when it looked at this in 1999 and the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee when it looked at the matter as recently as last year. I could go on to point to the way in which the former government— (Time expired)

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