Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not want to spend a lot of time talking about the technical parts of the Foreign States Immunities Amendment Bill 2009, because that has been well covered by speakers on both sides, but I would like to make some comments, having had some experience working in international affairs in areas where such agreements had to be negotiated. There can always be a response about giving immunity—should or shouldn’t we? From a purist’s point of view, people often say, ‘Well, there are immunities now given for all sorts of things.’ The fact is that it is the world we deal in, the world we live in and if we want to get help from other countries and we want to give it then it is necessary to give this immunity in several areas. Not in criminal areas, we never do that. It is civil immunity.

We certainly do not want a situation where firefighters or other emergency personnel are deployed to Australia, as acts of goodwill and frequently as volunteers, and are inadvertently tied up in civil proceedings in the courts. This does not include where somebody has a legitimate cause of action in an Australian jurisdiction; that will prevail and be taken to the appropriate authority. So it does not have an impact on that. But because we are interdependent in the globalised framework that we operate in, this is an effective mechanism. It will allow personnel—emergency personnel in this case—to be deployed as needed, and because this will work in a reciprocal way it can give comfort to both sides. But the fact that we have an emergency or a disaster is not a precondition to the use of this regulation-making power. The way I understand the bill, and I know the Attorney would be able to answer this definitively, it will operate on a case-by-case basis. It is overarching legislation with regulation-making power as each situation warrants it. That is my reading of it.

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