Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

That will give me the incentive to go there. That is good, and that does not have the permit system, apparently. I am sure there are other communities that are on the not-so-positive side of things that also do not have permits in the Territory and certainly in Western Australia and Queensland. I would also hazard a guess that there are some pretty good communities in the Territory that also operate under the permit system. To try to single it out as some key delineating factor in the absence of some pretty decent evidence is pretty sloppy reasoning, and that is why I think people make the reasonable conclusion that there must be some other ideological agenda—and, people are allowed to put forward ideological agendas. We probably all do it in different ways with different degrees of consciousness or self-awareness that that is what we are doing. But, if you want to have things passed in a rush because it is an emergency, you need, firstly, to make it clear that all the measures relate to that emergency; and, secondly, as has been said a number of times, if you want that emergency intervention to be effective, you need to build trust. To me, this is one of the areas, along with the five-year lease area—probably the area of permit removal, even more so, on the basis of what people have said to me, anyway; I do not want to be too conclusive about that—where people have said, ‘I just cannot see any logical reason for this; there has to be some other agenda and, if there’s some other agenda, it makes it really hard to trust what’s going on.’ A key issue for long-term success with this stuff is building trust. I am not saying that this is the be-all and end-all and it will never happen if this goes through, but I am saying you are making it a lot harder for yourselves for no particularly good reason.

Certainly, amongst the people I have heard from and talked to, a number of whom, as I have freely acknowledged, have been broadly quite supportive—a few very strongly—of what the federal government is doing, none of them has said that the permit system needs to go as part of this. There have been some who have said that that is the price we have to pay, that doing something about child abuse is more important and that, if it means getting rid of the permit system in the way that is proposed, that is the price we will pay. But it does not have to be the price they will pay, and that is what these amendments are about—and, more so, the Democrat amendments.

To me, the key issue is: where is the evidence? There have been lots of good assertions. On the face of them, you can even see how they might make some logical sense until you dig a bit deeper. But, without some decent evidence, I cannot support this sort of change. We got some pretty good evidence from John Altman, and whilst he, I am sure, says things the government does not like, I do not think they accuse him of not knowing what he is talking about or of not having a clue or those sorts of things. They might say he is outdated and living in the past and all that sort of stuff, but he knows a fair bit about this sort of area. He provided research to the committee—it was done on behalf of Oxfam, from memory—which pretty much demonstrated the opposite of what the government is asserting. That is why I believe this whole section should not be supported.

As to the specifics of the Labor amendment, they, as I understand it, basically seek to allow automatic access for a designated group of people. I think that is about right. That is a group of people listed in the legislation, which includes MPs, I note, and candidates. That leads me to one question, which I will float out there for the minister to answer whenever he does so. Groups of people listed under section 2A on page 39 as basically having automatic access included members of parliament, the Governor-General and government officials et cetera. But it also says ‘candidates for election’. I was wondering whether the definition of someone being a candidate for election means in the period after they have put in a nomination or whether it is—