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Carlo Carli on policy advances and legislation in Victoria

Carlo Carli and Mara Moustafine.

Created:

unknown

Date Added:

20 April 2009

Source:

source not available

Format:

mov (Quicktime);

File size:

8.9 MB

Length:

03min24sec

Transcript

First of all in Victoria, in – we went through the Kennett period– it did demonstrate a certain fragility in our democracy, the ability of a very strong government to basically bypass fairly common democratic norms convinced Labor in the last 10 years that we had to legislate to protect the institutions, so I think we’ve certainly done that. I think there was also recognition that we had to ensure that we protected the weaker communities from racial vilification so we set all that in train.
                        00:40
I mean one of the more recent things which I’m involved with, which is a charter of rights and responsibilities in Victoria, it’s – it was really a recognition that we do need to codify those rights and we do need to ensure that the public sector and the legal system recognise fairly basic rights, universal rights, ones that we’ve signed off as treaties, that we actually do it and hat’s a living experience of the moment, we’ve just now, started that process to see what impact the codified right has on basic service delivery and the basic function of government. But I think it’s a fairly important legislative change. And I think it builds on at least a last decade of trying to strengthen our democratic institutions in this state.
                        01:34
The other things that I think will be really important in Victoria has been just trying to fairly systematically rid ourselves of areas of discrimination often gender based or sexuality – sexuality based, same sex couple type legislative stuff, but just do it systematically through the legislation, I think that was a very useful exercise. We did two pieces of legislation: one was on racial tolerance, the other one was to put into legislation I think it was the term, multiculturalism, I think we actually legislated for that. Both of those came out of looking at the Canadian experience I mean I don’t think they were necessarily all that important in the sense that they’ve done much in terms of the court system, but they were very symbolic and I think that they in a certain sense helped lead us to being the first state to have a charter of rights. And I think they just – they’re just building blocks.
                        02:35
I think that they are the importantwe have had a level of resistance to those, but it’s been fairly much from fairly radical – radical right, fairly non-established areas –well extreme areas of some church communities. We’ve had particularly strong support for those pieces of legislation from the various ethnic communities. And I think the other thing is we shouldn’t underestimate the learning experience from Canada, we are a bit of a –in terms of the multicultural area and indigenous rights, we do tend to learn a bit from the Canadian experience as well.
                        03:25

End transcript