National Human Rights Consultation Submission 

AGWW-7PB6NF 

Name: Jean McSkimming 

Submission Text: 

Australia has a constitution that embodied a very suscinct
 
charter of rights, and this has served us well for over 100 years. It is
 
only as individual states have attempted to pass laws outlining "freedom"
 
that problems have occurred.
 

 
Since Victoria passed laws pertaining to "tolerance" they have proved to
 
restrict freedom of speech. It has proved to be a bonanza to the legal
 
profession, providing them with legal cases that have cost mega dollars.
 

 
Beliefs about sex and sexual behaviour are essential to many religions.
 
These are matters for religious bodies and their adherents to address --
 
not for governments to impose, and then lawyers to flesh out with judges
 
who do not fully understand the tenents of the particular faith.
 

 
Doctors and nurses (in Victoria)can no longer make decisions based on their
 
personal view of the scantity of human life. This is now legislated
 
against them.
 

 
In NSW faith based agencies must pass foster children on to homosexual men.
 

 
These new laws were supposed to flesh out the "freedoms" we previously
 
enjoyed!!!
 

 
The courts currently are famous for making absurd decisions -i.e. in WA
 
in the past month
 

1. Hotels cannot discriminate against children, therefore it is impossible
 
to have a hotel catering for adults wanting a quiet weekend away.
 

 
2. It is permissable for a child to use the word "fuck" all the time in
 
conversation. I thought the precedent set in the Rodney Rude case showed
 
the "bad language was not acceptable in a public place - but acceptable if
 
restricted to an area where people had paid to attend and the advertising
 
showed the type of language that could be expected to be heard."
 

 
Why should baby boomers - who currently make up the largest age bulge of
 
the population, put up with such decisions by our legal profession - as
 
they interpret the laws previously passed by parliament -when parliament
 
certainly did not have these scenarios in mind.
 

 
The Tax Act in an example - it was in 1964 one volume - now it has several
 
thousand more pages!!!
 
We are drowning in legislation - providing a banquet for the lawyers and a
 
minefield and loss of funds for the ordinary citizen, who now has to fight
 
for his/her "rights" 
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