Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will not be supporting these amendments. You can see from the process in committee that this is not an eleventh-hour amendment; this is a twelfth-hour amend­ment after a process was put in place that a week's notice be available for private members' time legislation so that parties could get their act into gear. Not only that; it has been known for many months, in fact since last year, that this legislation was coming down the line. Here we have the opposition, through Senator Brandis, bringing in amendments which were not circulated, have not been notified and which are an afterthought. They are so important to the opposition that they are an afterthought in the wake of huge publicity and a committee investigation into this matter!

Let us look at Senator Brandis's amendments, which have now been circu­lated in the wake of his submission, and see what they do. They run totally contrary to the spirit of the legislation that is before the chamber. Senator Humphries may agree with them, but again they cut down the effort—talk of equal rights here!—to give equal rights to the voters of the territories, as against those of the states, in all matters as far as possible. I have explained that euthan­asia is prohibited by legislation through this parliament, but the matter of marriage is not. What Senator Brandis is arguing is that we should, on the very day we are trying to enhance and make more equal the rights of the voters of the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, bring in a provision that cuts down those rights in the matter of marriage—because it will be a prohibition that is not there in state law.

The whole thrust of this legislation is to give the territory assemblies, as far as is practicable, the same rights to pass laws for their citizens as the state assemblies have. It is as simple as that. So this is a last-minute effort to pre-empt that principle of democracy. I am surprised that Senator Humphries—and presumably Mr Sezelja, the Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Capital Territory is in very direct commun­ion with Senator Humphries on this matter—wants to cut down the rights of the people of the ACT to deal with marriage laws in ways that are not any different from those of the states. This cuts across the whole principle of the legislation. The Greens will not be supporting it.