BY KAREN FLETCHER
ALICE SPRINGS — On August 2, the third day of the National Conference of Community Legal Centres, delegates learned that Prime Minister John Howard had announced he would amend the Sex Discrimination Act to make it legal to deny single women and lesbians access to fertility treatment.
Murmurs of outrage rippled through conference, but few delegates were surprised; it was yet another step in the federal Coalition government's offensive against human rights.
The 300 community legal workers gathered here for the conference had good reasons to dismiss Howard's claim of concern for the rights of children. Throughout the conference, delegates had described how indigenous children are being torn from their communities and/or incarcerated for minor offences under mandatory sentencing legislation in the Northern Territory and Western Australia; how refugee children are abused by private prison officers in remote immigration detention centres; how children are suffering malnutrition because their parent's welfare payments are being stopped by Centrelink for alleged "breaches"; and how children subjected to domestic violence are unable to have their situations resolved due to the lack of legal aid.
The conference learned that the "deal" between the federal and NT governments on mandatory sentencing will exclude only a minuscule number of offences by juveniles from the mandatory sentencing regime: those involving property worth less than $100 and not involving unlawful entry to premises.
Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service lawyer Teresa O'Sullivan told a workshop that she could not think of a single instance in which the "diversion" option would have prevented one of her juvenile clients from serving a prison sentence. "This deal has changed nothing", she said. "For my clients in Alice Springs, all roads will still lead to jail."
Delegates saw the new "state of the art" Alice Springs Correctional Centre in the desert outside town, a testament to the ability of the NT government to find funds for prisons but not for high schools for numerous remote Aboriginal communities.
A feature of the conference was a stream on "indigenous issues". A large number of indigenous legal workers participated in the conference.
Winsome Matthews, project development officer with the Women's Legal Resources Centre in NSW, urged legal workers to get busy on projects that can make a difference to Aboriginal people, such as around land rights, a treaty and cases under the Racial Discrimination Act.
The National Association of Community Legal Centres (NACLC) had lengthy debates over the theme and location of this year's conference. The decision to travel to the "red centre" (the other option was Canberra) was a conscious one, aimed at focussing the community legal centre movement's attention away from "negotiations" with politicians and bureaucrats and towards supporting and organising the communities it had come from.
The conference theme, Human Rights and Democracy: Not in Our Backyard, was discussed by the keynote speakers: federal human rights commissioner Chris Sidoti, the Sydney Morning Herald's Canberra bureau chief Margot Kingston and radical Catholic nun Sister Veronica Brady.
Sidoti poured scorn on Howard's claim that Australia's human rights record is "second to none" and referred to the massive budget cuts and reduction of powers suffered by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) under the Howard government. He expressed particular concern about the treatment of asylum seekers given the massive changes made to immigration laws since 1997.
Brady referred to the federal government's assault on human rights, particularly on those of indigenous people, as "psychotic". Kingston spoke about the success of Pauline Hanson's One Nation in reaching out to marginalised communities in regional Australia and urged the CLCs movement to get back out into the community to build support for a human rights agenda.
In her opening address, Merran Lawler, convenor of the NACLC and coordinator of Brisbane's Caxton Legal Centre, said that in conjunction with its assault on human rights and democracy, the Howard government has also launched an offensive against the community sector. She referred to the "reviews" of CLCs which had resulted in the obliteration of most centres in South Australia and to the inclusion of "gag" clauses in the contracts governing grants to a variety of non-government organisations (NGOs).
"We must name what this government is doing with its purchaser/provider contracts, service standards, performance indicators and mandatory data collection", she said. "This is a campaign of NGOcide."
The conference resolved to urge all community organisations to defy any ban on providing assistance to asylum seekers.
A motion was forwarded to the national ALP conference in Hobart calling on the delegates to oppose mandatory sentencing for both adults and juveniles and for all categories of offence. However, there were few illusions that a change of government would result in significant legal or policy change.
Delegates from Labor-governed states such as Queensland, Victoria and NSW were quick to disabuse the conference of any notion that the ALP will save us from the populist wedge politics and conservative ideology that is depriving so many people of basic human rights in Australia.
[Karen Fletcher is a legal worker in Brisbane, a member of the Democratic Socialist Party and the outgoing Queensland representative on the executive of the NACLC.]