George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I am very perplexed, Senator. You were criticising me a few moments ago for not responding properly enough to your questions and now, Senator Wright, you are criticising me for being too eager to respond to your questions. All I was trying to tell you, Senator Wright, is that I have asked for the explanatory memorandum to be available as early and as quickly as possible. I expect that it will be able to be circulated in the chamber when the debate resumes tomorrow morning. That was the answer to the question that you asked me and then did not pause for the answer when I offered it.

Senator Wright, in relation to the substantive issue you raise, I think I have already addressed this by pointing out that there are accretions of judicial interpretation to the existing use of those terms in the Criminal Code. It is very bad practice, in fact, and productive of confusion, frankly, to define too narrowly generic common speech language in an act of parliament and to rule in and to rule out whether language is caught by generic common speech words on a series of hypothetical examples. That is not what parliaments do; that is what courts do. The word 'support' and the word 'facilitate' each have an ordinary natural meaning in the English language. As those words are used in the existing provisions of the Criminal Code, they have on occasions been applied to the facts of particular cases, and courts applying those general words to the facts of particular cases have developed their meaning, in the way that the law always does when it applies general language to particular instances. That is the way this should work. That is why the PJCIS and the government both decided that it would be bad drafting practice to include a definition within the statute of these words which have an ordinary natural meaning in the English language. I am not going to speculate about what a court might do on a hypothetical case in applying general words to particular hypothetical facts. I am just not going to do it. You said yourself, Senator Wright—and you were quite right in saying so—that on occasions courts, in construing an act, will have regard to what ministers say in the course of parliamentary debates. How wrong would it be of me, as the responsible minister here, to, as it were, dictate to the guidance of a court how it ought to apply these general words in particular hypothetical cases?