Queensland needs a human rights act to protect its citizens when unchecked lawmakers “go crazy” with politically inspired crackdowns, the state’s civil liberties lobby says.
The president of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties (QCCL), Michael Cope, said the need for legal reform to uphold basic rights “won at great cost and after centuries of struggle” was apparent from Newman government crackdowns on everything from bikies to public housing tenants.
Cope is calling for both major parties to embrace human rights laws of the kind already in place in Victoria and the Northern Territory. But the government has been spruiking its bikie laws in a first major pitch for re-election this year.
The acting police minister, John McVeigh, criticised the Labor opposition for “wanting to take Queensland back to the bad old days” by repealing the laws if it won a coming election due by June this year.
McVeigh said the “tough” laws – which deprive bikies of rights including to associate in public, meet in clubhouses, wear their “colours” and work as builders, electricians or tattooists – were having “a tremendous and unprecedented impact” on crime in Queensland.
He credited the Liberal National party (LNP) government’s crackdown with causing drops in reported property crimes, such as car thefts and break-and-enters, which are not traditionally associated with the gangs but police argue are a byproduct of their trade in illicit drugs.
Cope said the “guilt by association” factor made the bikie laws worse than anything the repressive Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime did because of their ability to “infect” other areas of law.
“Joh tended to like mandatory penalties and I suppose he outlawed strikes but it wasn’t systemic so it didn’t violate fundamental principles in a way this stuff does,” he said.
Such laws would fall over in the United States where “simply, you have to have personal guilt in order to find somebody guilty of a criminal offence. You can’t find them guilty by association.”
Cope called for a human rights act “to stop the single legislature here [in the absence of a state senate] just periodically going crazy … well, regularly going crazy”.
“In the age of the so-called war on terror and now on ‘bikies’, the need has never been greater for our rights to be protected by the most modern mechanisms available like a human rights act,” he said.
“Everywhere and every day, politicians use the pretext of some new or not so new threat to justify depriving citizens of rights and liberties which have been won at great cost and after centuries of struggle.
“Historically, of course, it’s not just the LNP. The Labor party back in the 40s and 50s passed some outrageous legislation,” he said.
Cope said a human rights act could also be invoked, for example, by public housing tenants to safeguard rights to “privacy and adequate housing” in the face of heavy-handed reforms last year.
He said the QCCL recently learnt that public housing tenants needed to advise state government officials if they planned to stay away from their homes for more than a fortnight a year, and needed permission to stay away for more than 28 days.
Cope said measures intended to crack down on rorters who left houses empty for a year or more were raising concerns among pensioners that they would “not be able to spend enough time with their grandchildren”.
He said the government was “taking the same approach [as with bikies] of getting a sledgehammer to crack a nut by putting in these harsh rules in that apply to everybody rather than trying to deal with the real problem”.
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