Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, we have just heard three outstanding contributions condemning this legislation from the members for Murchison, Launceston and Nelson. Honestly, I could not possibly put it any better myself. We need to understand that we are looking at terribly poor legislation that is classist and creates, as other members have observed, two different sets of workers and two different sets of applications to protections to those workers under the law.
I used to work in the former federal justice minister, Duncan Kerr’s electorate office in Hobart, on the corner of Collins and Harrington Streets. Justice Kerr’s electorate office was a two-minute walk from Centrelink. We would see on a regular basis in that office people who were in a hightened state of psychological distress: people experiencing poverty, disadvantage, in some cases homelessness, feeling completely shut out and shafted by society. At times we, the staff in Duncan’s office, felt unsafe because we were dealing with people who were acutely distressed. We at times needed to call the police because there was a potential threat of physical violence. However, everyone in that office knew we were dealing with people in states of acute stress and who felt marginalised.
We cannot make legislation that will have a disproportionate impact, potentially, on people who are experiencing acute psychological distress. We can all agree, and we do all agree, that everyone has a right to be safe at work, but we cannot as a Council, pass legislation that treats one group of workers differently from one another. For example, in a massive insult to our teachers, this legislation does not treat teachers as frontline workers.
A question that has been asked is, how did the government come up with this list? It is arbitrary and it is classist. What we now know is, is that this legislation is a political performance.
Ms Webb – Self-interest actually.
Ms O’CONNOR – Self-interest, clarified and confirmed so eloquently by Ms Webb. It is the collision of self-interested politics and law.
Ms Webb – Using workers as props.
Ms O’CONNOR – Using workers as props. Thank you, Ms Webb.
Dr Woodruff took this bill through the lower house for us and articulated the numerous arguments for not supporting this legislation. The Greens have never supported mandatory minimum sentencing and, while we recognise that this legislation softens the principle of mandatory minimums a bit by making them presumptive minimum sentences and giving the courts some capacity to respond to the individual circumstances of the person who has been accused of the assault, it is still the same attempted political interference in the independence of the judiciary.
Full stop, end of story. It is also a sign of the failure of government policy where we are not investing in tackling the causes of crime. We are not really serious about dealing with poverty. We still put children in the hellhole that is Ashley Youth Detention Centre and invest too little in preventing them from graduating to Risdon Prison.
We still do not. This government still does not take seriously enough its responsibility to invest in social housing. We hear a lot of words but see little action. Dealing with the causes of disadvantage, by attending to the health of children and young people, or making sure kids go to school with good food in their stomachs so they can learn, for example, are all things that we as a society could do, and it is a political choice not to do them. It is not that dissimilar from the debate we just had about marginalising people who are so poor they have to ask other people for money.
I had an interesting briefing probably six weeks ago with a senior member of the legal profession in Tasmania who spends a lot of time in the Supreme Court. This is an issue that we are going to have to deal with, as a parliament, and the Greens are putting the government on notice that the way our court system is operating is already harming the interests of justice because of the delays.
We are talking here about creating a structure that is likely to encourage people accused of assault on a frontline worker to plead not guilty, as the member for Launceston made clear, which will mean that there is a court process, which means it impacts on everyone else who is going through the court process or waiting for justice. There are people who are waiting two or even three years for a judgement. There are victim/survivors of sexual abuse who are now in year five of a journey through the court system where there are endless delays and deferrals. There is no justice for that victim/survivor, as there is really restricted justice for too many people who come before the courts and are entitled to expect efficient and fair application of justice.
The other groups of people, the other classes of worker who are left out of these definitions, are, for example, tenancy support workers who may work for Homes Tasmania or Housing Tasmania as it was when we had tenancy support workers – or for Colony 47, a community housing provider. There are often circumstances where tenancy support workers need to go to a tenant’s home and sometimes maybe have a difficult conversation with them. There are no protections for tenancy support workers, Mr President. And why not?
There are no protections for community nurses who are sent around to people’s houses, often in remote rural and regional areas on their own, which makes them vulnerable. The workforce in community nursing will predominantly be female. That is a potentially vulnerable frontline worker. No protection for them at all.
We have a government that decides. A lot of these issues are as a result of funding cuts, are they not – where you have essential services understaffed to the point where, for example, sending a single paramedic out to a job is acceptable. They may have to deal with someone who is experiencing psychosis or under the influence of alcohol or drugs and there they are, that individual person. That is about that individual paramedic, but that is about the fact that the ambulance service is underfunded, the health service is underfunded.
Right across the spectrum of essential services here, we have seen no real increases in funding and in this term of the parliament and across the forward estimates given the state of the Tasmanian budget, we are likely to see more cuts to public services. We are likely to hear more rubbish from government about protecting the frontline. No cuts to the frontline, we are told. Define the frontline, because within an organisation there might be some people who are very much on the frontline in dealing with people they are providing a service to, but there is a whole range of workers within that area who are essential to the delivery, equitably, of public services in Tasmania.
We know that people who work in the professions within the lists in this legislation can be very vulnerable in their work. We know that there have been assaults on frontline workers and I have not seen any data as the member for Nelson said, but we do not have any data or solid information to inform us about how prevalent assaults on the workers who are defined as frontline workers in this bill are.
We are being asked to make law in a vacuum of solid information and we know – I understand we cannot reflect on previous debates, Mr President – the government has been here many times before with mandatory minimum sentencing legislation and very often been knocked back, because well, certainly in this place I know members take their responsibility to support good law very seriously.
There is no foundation in evidence for this bill. It is just politics. It is actually about the 2030 Strong Plan. It is about the politics of an election campaign where this promise was made to deliver this legislation out of just sheer populism. That is all it is. It is not because it is necessary or good law. We have this sort of cognitive dissonance happening in government where on the one hand we have a youth justice strategy that talks about a trauma-informed approach. We have the minister for Children and Youth often talking about all children’s different circumstances and acknowledging the trauma that is at the foundation of so many people in the youth justice system. Then on the other hand we have, for example, the police minister who talks about being tough on crime.
We have not yet heard from government that it is going to tackle the causes of crime and until you do that, this sort of legislation is just puerile window dressing. We have to get serious about investing in the mental health and well-being of children and young people. Supporting families when they are experiencing disadvantage, poverty, stress. You have to get very serious about creating the foundations for a more kind and just society.
We are a long way from that. As a society, we seem to accept a certain amount of poverty and homelessness. We seem to – and I am talking about a collective here – write off some people and not commit or understand that we need to help people, not punish them in all circumstances.
When people break the law and commit serious assaults and crimes, they need to be dealt with fairly by the court system. I cannot see that this bill is going to make any person who is working in one of the defined frontline roles any safer. I do not even think the government’s claiming that, as the member for Nelson said, it was all about – what were those words again? The words about creating a community understanding that –
Ms Webb – Rather than education, it is inflammation.
Ms O’CONNOR – Yes, but the government’s reason for this legislation was that they wanted to send a signal to the community.
Ms Webb – It will make good social media posts though.
Ms O’CONNOR – It certainly will.
Ms Forrest – Golly gosh, it will make good social media posts.
Ms O’CONNOR – Yes, and who can forget when my colleagues in the lower House, before they sort of crumbled on mandatory minimum sentencing, held really firm. It was when the former premier and attorney-general, Lara Giddings, was still a member of the Labor caucus, Labor held really firm in rejecting mandatory minimum sentencing, but what do we see all over the state? Really vile billboards targeting the Labor leader at the time who had the courage to stand against bad law and mandatory minimum sentencing that undermined the independence of the judiciary. The bad law that potentially encouraged more harm to victim/survivors by creating a circumstance where those accused of grooming or sexual abuse were more likely to plead not guilty because they faced mandatory minimum sentencing.
It was about politics then and it is about politics now, and that is why we should not support this bill.
