ANNUAL REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT, IAN DEARDEN - ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING THURSDAY 15 JUNE 2000
INTRODUCTION
I recently celebrated a birthday. Neither the date (which, for the historically minded, happens to be “Victory in Europe” (VE) Day), nor for that matter the number of allotted years that I reached on that date are of any particular significance, save for this. My daughter, who has not yet reached double figures, assures me that my current age (which has not just passed 40, but has left it well behind in the dust) means that I now qualify as being “old”. I personally don’t consider myself old and in fact I regard 25 as being but a recent memory. A quick reality check, however, reveals flaws in this analysis. Why is this of any significance?
We are all aware that we exist as an organisation only because of our membership. Our membership continues to support us, as an Executive, because of the work that we do both publicly and privately. That work, over many years, has come principally from a small group of people.
We are no longer in the heady days of the 1970s and early 80s. In those days it was relatively easy to get people involved in the activities of the Council for Civil Liberties. Today we have to work a lot harder and think more carefully about how to involve and service our existing membership as well as throw the net wider and bring in a new generation of people keen to be involved in what the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties stands for.
In that respect, we apologise for our lack of direct contact with our membership over the last couple of years (evidenced by our non-existent newsletter). We promise, however, in the next 12 months to do better. In particular, we now have “on-board” two young people who are keen to push forward both with our website (which currently has a presence but lacks any substantive content), as well as reinstating a regular newsletter to re-open the lines of communication with our loyal membership.
Along the way, of course, if you happen to know someone who is keen, enthusiastic and willing to organise three or four seminars a year, a couple of fundraising concerts, spearhead a membership drive and turn up faithfully to Executive meetings, then I would be very keen to meet that person and persuade them to become involved in the Council. In the meantime, we will all just have to work a little harder!
EXECUTIVE THANKS
For those of us who have kept “plugging away”, it has been (yet again) a year full of challenges. It is traditional at this stage of a President’s Annual Report to extend special thanks and appreciation to our Vice-President, Terry O’Gorman, whose untiring efforts and capacity for work never cease to amaze me. He has continued to produce well-written, exhaustively researched and powerful submissions in a range of areas related to his portfolio responsibilities of crime, police, the Criminal Justice Commission and national civil liberties issues. He will address you more specifically about those matters in his report, but we acknowledge the contribution that he, his secretary, Toni Widdis, and his firm have made to the efforts of QCCL over the past 12 months (as they have over many previous years).
In the same breath, I would also like to acknowledge and thank my secretary, Leona Priest, for her hard work, and of course the members of the Executive who, despite the demands on their time, continue to meet regularly on a monthly basis and to contribute their varied and enormously helpful insights into our discussions on the hot topics of the day.
In particular, I would like to thank our other Vice-President, Michael Cope, whose recent submission on freedom of information legislation was excellent; our Secretary, Bill Ferguson, who faithfully transcribes our Executive debates; and our Treasurer, Derek Fielding, who has zealously and diligently kept track of our funds. I would like to extend a particular mention to Geoff Grantham, who has decided to retire after many years on the Executive. I have always found Geoff’s contributions and insights of enormous benefit and I am sorry to see him go. We wish him all the best.
In accordance with tradition, I will now try and canvas some of the matters that have been of concern to QCCL over the past 12 months. In doing so, I will leave those areas that are within Terry O’Gorman’s portfolio responsibility for him to comment on.
PRISON REFORM
Prison reform continues to be an ongoing source of concern. Following the Peach Report into Queensland Prisons, we now have (yet again) a Department of Corrective Services, headed by the man who conducted the inquiry into prisons, Frank Peach. The process of converting the Corrective Services Commission back into a Department has coincided with a complete rewrite of legislation, regulations and policy in the corrective services area. This has been an enormous undertaking, coming at a time of spiralling expenditure on Corrective Services in Queensland for little apparent benefit.
The enormous pressure placed on Corrective Services resources has lead to a prison sector which seems unable to cope with providing sufficient and appropriate programs for prisoners, nor with processing them through the parole system and returning them to the community in a timely fashion. Prison numbers are booming, the system is not coping and there is grave concern among prison advocacy groups that the proposed “prison reforms” (currently in the form of a draft bill which has just been made available for comment), may well result not in a step forward but three steps back.
We express QCCL’s gratitude (in particular) for the involvement and assistance of Prisoners’ Legal Service, with whom we have worked closely throughout a lengthy and on-going process of consultation in Corrective Services. Without the groundwork provided by them, it would be very difficult to produce meaningful submissions in this area.
DRUG & ALCOHOL TESTING IN THE WORKPLACE
This is an issue that just won’t go away. Increasingly there are employers who are prepared to enforce mandatory drug and alcohol testing on their workers as a condition of this continued employment. It is an area in which we share a keen interest with the Drug and Alcohol Foundation and we hope (subject to funds and enthusiasm) to be involved in a seminar with them in this area in the reasonably near future. Mandatory drug and alcohol testing of workers raises significant civil liberties issues and (based on US trends) is likely to become much more widespread both in the range of industries and the number of workers affected.
PRIVACY
QCCL continues to call (like a cracked record) for adequate privacy legislation both at a State level (where we completely lack any substantive privacy legislation covering either the government or private sectors) and at a Federal level where, after lengthy delays, we currently have draft legislation on privacy covering the private sector, but the general consensus from privacy advocacy groups is that the Federal Government’s privacy legislation is, in reality, a charter to entrench privacy intrusion rather than any genuine attempt to preserve and protect the privacy of individuals against the extraordinary advances of technology and those in the private sector who have a keen interest in privacy intrusion.
In particular, the last 12 months have seen the rise of companies such as RP Data (who intend to link photographs of every house in Australia with the Valuer-General’s data base); Axciom (a partly Kerry Packer owned company which has “data mined” of terabytes of information on all Australians; right through to the Australian Taxation Office, who had (up until recently) the enviable reputation of being the government entity which most zealously protected the privacy of its client base. The Australian Taxation Office has managed to block its copy book “big time” by proposing to use the Australian Electoral Rolls to enable the Prime Minister to send us all a personal letter telling each and every one of us how much better off we are going to be under the new tax system. Thankfully the outcry that this proposal brought resulted in the Commonwealth Solicitor General advising the Federal Government in no uncertain terms that its proposed use of the Commonwealth Electoral Roll to enable the Prime Minister to write personally to all Australians was a breach both of the electoral laws and the existing Privacy Act.
There is no doubt that privacy was one of the major issues of the 1990s and in very many ways continues to be one of the major issues of the year 2000 and beyond.
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
I would like to acknowledge the work of Michael Cope in preparing a detailed submission to the Legal, Constitutional and Administrative Review Committee of the Queensland Parliament, as part of its review of the Freedom of Information Act 1992.
QCCL continues to be deeply concerned at the hypocrisy of both sides of politics in Queensland. The continuation of the “Mack truck” exemption for Cabinet documents has continued to make a broad range of documents even vaguely contemplated by Ministers of the Crown as being something that may be put before Cabinet at some stage, inaccessible to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.
In short, it is clear that both sides of politics, when it comes to freedom of information legislation, have placed politics well and truly above principle – but I guess that shouldn’t come as any great surprise!
SINGLE SEX RELATIONSHIPS
It is pleasing to be able to congratulate this current Government on its moves to recognise single sex relationships in areas as diverse as domestic violence, succession law and the division of jointly owned property. For far too long, laws in Queensland have continued to discriminate against people involved in single sex relationships with respect to critical areas of their lives, despite the provisions of the Anti-Discrimination Act and the repeal of criminal sanctions on male homosexual acts.
In short, we commend the Government for taking what some might see to be politically courageous steps in this area, although others would argue that it reflects no more nor less then legislation for common sense and recognition of the realities of modern relationships.
QUEENSLAND POLICE SERVICE – DATABASE MANAGEMENT
I recently appeared at the public CJC hearing on database management. This was looking at the issue of unauthorised access to confidential Police Service information. QCCL argued that the Queensland Police Service database, which contains an enormous amount of confidential information, had very little practical protection against its misuse by serving police officers. The Queensland Police Union, on the other hand, argued that police officers should be able to access the database freely and without any impediment, because (among other things) it was important to know what information the database contained about police officers’ girlfriends (it appeared implicit from President Gary Wilkinson’s comments that police officers don’t have boyfriends). We certainly hope that the CJC will bring a rather more rigorous degree of analysis to the issue than the Queensland Police Union have been able to provide.
We proposed a clear and sensible regime of legislative, regulatory and technical reforms that would (in our view) reduce the opportunities to misuse the database and simultaneously increase the opportunities to identify and deal with actual misuse by serving police officers and others.
CONCLUSION
There have, of course, been a raft of other matters with civil liberties implications that have arisen over the past 12 months. Despite the on-going and heavy workload that both Terry O’Gorman and myself (as principal spokespersons for the Council) continue to have as a result of our professional lives, it is clear that one of the great strengths of QCCL continues to be our ability to respond quickly, logically and succinctly on a wide range of issues that affect ordinary people throughout Queensland (and through Terry’s role as President of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, on occasions throughout Australia). We would like, of course, to build on this strength, to put more energy into our submission writing, pro-active research, and involving and growing our membership. The furtherance of those aims, of course, depends very much on you as our members. We thank you for your loyalty and support over the past 12 months and look forward to another 12 months of hard work.
IAN DEARDEN, PRESIDENT
Brisbane, 15 June 2000