Mr NAIRN(5.35 p.m.) —I support the amendment of the right honourable member for New England (Mr Sinclair). I support it because the Andrews bill does not address euthanasia on a national level, as he quite rightly says. I thank the member for Charlton (Mr Robert Brown) for the kind comments that he made about my speech in the main chamber. I felt that I did debate the legislation before us and not the issue of euthanasia nationally. As I said at that time, the passage of this bill would mean nothing if one of the states were to introduce and pass similar legislation.

The other reason that I support the amendment of the right honourable member for New England is that I am not convinced that the members of this House really do understand the implications of the Andrews bill. Listening to the debate on the amendment here this afternoon, I am further not convinced that that is the case. It is all very well for a number of people who proudly call themselves lawyers to stand up and talk about the strict letter of the law and the constitution, but I think we have to look a little bit further than that. When we get down to making every decision based on that, we are forgetting a lot about democracy and other people's rights.

Section 122 of the constitution is continually thrown up as the reason why this parliament can do what it is going to do. But it ignores the fact that a self-government act was introduced by this parliament a long time after section 122 of the constitution. I do not argue that this parliament has the right to make a law that affects the Northern Territory, but when the self-government act was passed by this parliament, this parliament quite specifically said, `You can have self-government over all matters except four areas.' Those four areas were uranium mining, Aboriginal land rights, industrial relations and national parks—Kakadu and Uluru. At that time this parliament said to the Northern Territory, `We think you are competent now to have the right over all other matters.'

I would say that the majority of members of this House did not understand that when they started this debate, because I talked to a lot of them and asked them the question and they really did not understand that aspect at all. That concerns me and that is why I think the right honourable member's amendment should be passed.

What the Andrews bill actually does is retrospectively amend the 1978 self-government act. That part has not come out. People really have not concentrated on that. We are retrospectively saying, `Back in 1978 we made a mistake. We thought we were only going to say that you couldn't have power over four things, but we actually meant five.' I think that is an incredibly dangerous and very arrogant precedent for this parliament to now make. What will it be next week? If the Northern Territory passes something else, will you run in and say,`We shouldn't have given you that power in 1978, either'? I think it is the key point of this whole debate.

The member for Adelaide (Ms Worth), the member for Dickson (Mr Tony Smith) and the member for Bradfield (Dr Nelson) all referred to a number of matters—if the Northern Territory introduced the death penalty or allowed the purchase of military style weapons, we would be jumping up and down and saying that we will have to override that legislation. Of course we can do that under the self-government act because when the self-government act was introduced in 1978 there was a clause that said the federal parliament could override any law that the Northern Territory makes within a six-month period. Of course, you would use that aspect and that would be appropriate for this parliament, because it is in the self-government act, which came after the constitution.

But what we are doing here is saying that we forgot to use that last year, or maybe this parliament decided it did not want to use it, and now we have decided that we should, so we have to revert to section 122 of the constitution. I do not think it is good enough to do it in that form. I have not heard anybody in the whole debate who was in this parliament when the original Northern Territory law was passed explain why they were not on their feet moving motions and calling on the government to utilise that six-month clause in the self-government act.

The member for Warringah (Mr Abbott) belatedly said this afternoon, `That's because we thought they'd override it themselves.' What a load of rubbish! What was the member for Watson (Mr Leo McLeay), a powerbroker in the former government, doing in regard to that? Everybody knows that the government at the time was very severely lobbied about using that six-month clause within the Northern Territory legislation, the self-government act. The government at the time decided not to proceed. But by the same token, many members who were not part of the government could have quite easily moved a motion calling on the government to utilise that six-month clause, and they did not. I think it is very poor. It is treating people as second-class citizens to now revert to section 122.   I wanted to make that point—that, in passing the Andrews bill, we must understand that we are retrospectively saying that in 1978 we made a blue and we should not have given that power to the Northern Territory. I think this issue of euthanasia is a national issue. I did not get into that debate in the Main Committee because this bill does nothing to address it in a national sense. I support the amendment moved by the right honourable member for New England so that it can be addressed in a national way.