Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Multicultural Engagement) Share this | Hansard source

Well, I certainly won't be supporting the Greens' second reading amendment on the Crimes and Other Legislation Amendment (Omnibus No. 1) Bill 2024. It astounds me, with all due respect to Senator Shoebridge, who I served with on the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, that he made that blithe argument—and I'll call it a 'blithe' argument—around calibrating fees based on someone's income without once referring to a fundamental principle of our justice system, which is that everyone should be treated equally before the law—not once! Not once did Senator Shoebridge actually make the point that everyone should be treated equally before the law.

He just went into a blithe recitation saying, 'Well, the fine system can have uneven impacts in terms of this and that. We should just abandon it,' and said—for the first time under any Commonwealth law that I'm aware of—we should start to treat people differently under our justice system based upon their individual circumstances in terms of the application of penalties in our justice system. For the first time, Senator Shoebridge is proposing a change to our system of laws, our rule of law, whereby people would be treated differently based on their individual characteristics.

We have a system based on rule of law, which means that everyone who attends before our court system is treated equally. That is a fundamental principle. If you go to many of the courts around our country, you will see the statue of Justitia, typically portrayed as a woman with a sword, a scale of justice and a blindfold. Why does she have a blindfold? Because it doesn't matter who appears in our court system—it doesn't matter their religion, their ethnicity or their background or whether they came to this country a year ago or they've been here as part of our oldest living community, our First Nations people—everyone should be treated equally in our justice system. The law should be treated equally and applied to everyone equally.

We have a system of rule of law, not rule of men, which says everyone should be treated equally, yet, in that blithe—and I'll call it 'blithe'—contribution to the debate, Senator Shoebridge would tear that principle down. It's just symptomatic of the radical, extreme policies we hear in this place from the Greens again and again and again. Rule of law says everyone should be treated equally before the law—a fundamental principle of our system of justice—and yet, in that 10-minute contribution, Senator Shoebridge would tear away that constitutional and legal principle going all the way back to John Locke's Second Treatise of Government and even beyond that.

It's a fundamental principle of our system. It doesn't matter if you're a king or a serf. We're all treated the same before the law. That's a fundamental principle that Senator Shoebridge would tear down with that blithe contribution. It's very, very disappointing, and another radical, extreme proposition put by the Australian Greens.

This is what I believe. It doesn't matter who you are—a millionaire, someone who's on the age pension—it doesn't matter what your ethnicity is, how long you've been in this country, or whether or not you're a new Australian or you can trace your heritage back thousands of years. It doesn't matter. When you attend a court, the judge applies the law equally to everyone. That's a fundamental principle of our justice system, and it's certainly a hill I'd be prepared to die on. I think the way that Senator Shoebridge presents that amendment would lead to all sorts of injustices and open the door up to people being treated differently, based on their individual circumstances, in our laws. It is fundamentally flawed, Senator Shoebridge.

I will take the interjection, Senator Shoebridge. What particularly disappoints me in that contribution is that not once did you weigh up the principle of equality before the law. You didn't actually once weigh that principle up. You didn't give it any consideration at all in terms of what a fundamental change to our justice system that would constitute—not once. It's very atypical of you, Senator Shoebridge.