Mr KERR (9:22 PM) —Tonight my colleague the shadow minister has set out in detail the substance of the Proceeds of Crime Bill 2002 and its legislative history. I do not intend to replicate that task; rather, I want to reflect on where social democratic parties—labour parties—ought stand in this area of law which affects so many Australians. It is commonplace to hear those trained in the law say that it is better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man found guilty. That is a view I share, but I think that has to be counterbalanced with the realisation that, if guilty men go free for unwarranted reasons or they are allowed to profit from the proceeds of crime in such a way that they are seen to be exploiting the society in which they live, it will give rise to resentment and passions in our community that will lead to draconian overreach and to actions that can be appealed to by populists. Our legal system has been built on a framework that ensures that all citizens have equal rights and strong protections of the law. If those rights are removed, frightened citizens and citizens who are resentful of those who are profiting at their expense demand of governments ever stronger action.

The tradition to which I belong—the political movement to which I adhere—is that of social democracy. Of the values principles that those of us articulate, the left-of-centre parties tend to emphasise equality, fairness and the social sphere. We do have a tradition, however, that also reflects the fact that the labour movement was born out of struggle against very often repressive state action. More than most in the community, we are aware that a repressive government can misuse its powers; indeed, many people who formed the basis of the Australian society came out here as transportees in the first instance. They are descendants of persons who had experienced legal regimes that contained few of the protections that we now take for granted.

Beveridge talked about eliminating the evil giants of poverty, ignorance and ill health as part of the social welfare reforms that the British Labour government put in place after World War II. The bedrock, I suppose, that has underpinned the thought processes of most social democrats ever since has been to draw on the broad capacity of society to redistribute aims and to build an architecture of the public sphere that will ensure that all citizens have access to a wide range of services, choices and opportunities not on the basis of inherited wealth or privilege but on the basis of opportunity provided to all. But that is undermined if we have within our society the free opportunity for those who take no adherence to those social values and who seek to exploit them. The bitter reality that we must face is that crime frequently is directed not against the wealthy, not against those who are at the top of the social pyramid, but rather against ordinary citizens and—most frequently, regrettably—against those least well off in our society.

If you look at any social atlas for where crime has been recorded, it is not the wealthiest suburbs that are hit by crime; it is those suburbs of the working class or the poor. If you look at those who most exploit the opportunities for the generation of wealth, they often live in the rich suburbs, protected by their own capacity to exploit the legal system and to hide their ill-gotten gains. That situation ultimately is indefensible. It gives rise to those wishing to exploit populism to do so easily, and it leads to a situation where our own people—those whom we speak for and most represent—are not being adequately represented.

The trick for a social democratic party is to make certain that it preserves those fundamental protections that we all need, because all of us at one stage or another might be falsely accused of a crime. There are no guarantees that we do not deal with institutions that fail. Our police fail from time to time, normally because they are human but sometimes because they are infiltrated by corruption. There is no guarantee that at some time we will not have institutions of government that act maliciously. For example, we know of the close relationship between a corrupt police force and a corrupt political administration in Queensland during the Bjelke-Petersen time.

We have to build in systems that rely on strong independent judicial supervision and principles of law that guarantee that we can fairly hold our heads up and say that the innocent will not be subjected to unfair and improper police processes or to unfair trials. On the other hand, if we ever allow tax evasion, housebreaking, violence and car theft to reach epidemic proportions, then we too will have failed our society. We do not do our social objectives any good by turning a blind eye and saying, `Look, we are making certain that the innocent are protected,' if we do not also put in place proper, fair and effective laws that guarantee that those who are wrongdoers—law-breakers—in our society are brought to account.

That is why we have committed ourselves to a strategy in opposition which not only is responsive to what the government proposes from time to time but also forces upon us often the mantle of improving legislation which contains overreach. Quite frequently we are placed in a position where the government puts forward legislation which trammels on some of the bottom line issues of principle that need to be protected for civil liberties. The previous package of legislation that has just been discussed is a good example of where Labor held that line and caused the government to reflect and accept a series of amendments. That means that the new anti-terrorism laws have been made compliant with broad principles that the Australian public as a whole would support.

Beyond our responsive role, we also have a role, as a social democratic party, of articulating where we stand and where we would wish the Australian community, were it to be governed by a Labor administration, to evolve. That is the framework that I was delighted to hear about from the former Leader of the Opposition when he spoke about the strategy that would have been implemented had a Labor administration been elected. We built a series of groundbreaking proposals that this government only slowly is bringing itself to adopt. We were the first political party to identify serious and organised crime as an issue of national importance and security, to be dealt with with the same degree of rigour and seriousness as we treat defence. We proposed that there be a white paper so that we could have the same kind of public examination and scrutiny of these issues of how we configure our law enforcement arrangements to deal with the growing threats of organised crime and the potentiality of international terrorism—not as a response to the planes flying into the World Trade Centre but years before that. We were articulating those premises as the starting principles that ought to inform a social democratic party in government.

Flowing from that, we were also articulating a series of measures that were necessary to sustain and hold public confidence in a community that does have a substantial degree of fear that can be too readily played on by the kinds of Hansonite forces that emerged about five or six years ago. We began to put forward not only broad principles that would govern our conduct but detailed prescriptions. I introduced, for example, in the year 2000—and the shadow minister was kind enough to mention it—the precursor to this legislation. It was a proposal that I introduced as a private member, based on the New South Wales confiscation scheme for the civil confiscation of the assets of crime. The government did not then proceed with it, and now, two years later, it comes into the parliament with a piece of legislation which perhaps is an improvement on the scheme that I put forward, but I think it has no substantial difference in terms of its outcome. Nonetheless, this comes two years after that was first put forward in the parliament by the Australian Labor Party.

We also have been putting forward proposals to make certain that we do not see community crime as an issue where the national government has no responsibility. We put forward the community safety zones initiative as a strategy where we could get teams of law enforcement working together. Now I am delighted to see the current Leader of the Opposition reinforcing that commitment to work cooperatively—were a future Labor government to be elected—with the state governments to progress that idea. I am also delighted that the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs is examining precisely the kind of action that the Commonwealth can take in association with the states to deal with issues of crime. I would hope that that process develops consultatively and constructively. We did have a bad start to the process. The first meeting of the committee got off to a pretty shaky start, if I might speak a little out of turn in relation to a meeting held in confidence, but I think we are likely to find our track.

The important point that I want to make about this in broad terms is that there is nothing indefensible or against the principles of social democracy. Labor should be proud of being able to commit itself to a strong, effective, balanced and fair system of law enforcement that is not only designed to make certain that when a person is innocent of crime the system makes certain that their defence is fair—giving them every opportunity so that the burden of proving their wrongdoing is on the state—and that nobody is convicted for wrong reasons, absent of the inevitable fact that human error does occur in any system and always will, but is built so that, to the best degree possible, that does not occur. At the same time, it makes certain that law enforcement has the tools and we as a government have the mind-set to make certain that we give to our law enforcement agencies the range of tools, techniques and approaches that we would be confident that the community as a whole would support.

This kind of legislation that we bring in today is exactly that kind of legislation. I think there is a broad community consensus that says that for those who exploit our fellow citizens by serious and organised crime—and that is what is targeted by this: serious crimes for which forfeiture will occur—when it can be established on the balance of probabilities that they hold money as a result of that criminal conduct, there is a proper basis to confiscate those assets from them, notwithstanding that we cannot identify clearly that any particular source of funds was associated with any specific criminal act. That has been the deficiency to date. We have had some confiscation of assets schemes before but they have operated only when you could prove that a particular asset was associated with a particular crime for which a person had been convicted. The result was that frequently there were many people against whom a more than reasonable suspicion could be held. It could be believed on the balance of probabilities that they held substantial assets and they were known to be engaged in the drug trade, organised car stealing or one of the many rackets that exist in our community, and we had no means of addressing that. We had no means to take the wealth that they had illicitly acquired and put it to community benefit. One of the interesting facts that I was made aware of today is that one in four cars that are stolen are now believed to be stolen as part of organised crime.

When we talk about these issues, we are not just talking about the drug trade; we are talking about serious fraud; we are talking about a whole range of other conduct which has resulted in communities feeling less secure than they ought. When societies feel less secure than they ought, then they often give licence to governments and police to do things that undermine that first principle: that we should protect always the civil liberties of the subject. So I believe that it is important, following the social democratic tradition, for us always to be aware and willing to stand up and make the case when the government does overreach and act in a way which is inconsistent with those fundamental principles of civil liberties that I grew up to defend and still believe in. But we also have to finger this government for its inaction and for its unwillingness to put in place a proper overarching framework. For the government, that is fine, because it has been willing to play very crude politics in a whole range of areas.

Samuel Johnson said that `patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel'. By that, he was not saying that patriotism is bad—patriotism is a noble thing. But patriotism, in the sense that it is appealed to for wrongful reasons, is the last resort of the scoundrel. In contemporary politics, law and order—and an appeal to more draconian powers and penalties without justification, without rational construction—is the first refuge of the political scoundrel. If we are going to stop political scoundrels destroying those fundamental elements that we hold common, then we have to make certain that we can, in a sense, form a square that we defend and say: `We have put in place laws that do guarantee that within a framework that protects the rights of the individual, wrongdoers will be dealt with severely—that they will be identified by the police, that there will be appropriate mechanisms to pursue them and, to the extent that is consistent with those fundamental overarching principles, ill-gotten gains will be taken and they will be punished appropriately.' Societies that do not do those kinds of things will fail.

I use this opportunity now to reflect upon that Labor tradition because quite frequently, for all the right noble reasons, I—along with the shadow minister and many of our spokespeople—have found ourselves from time to time having to take the government on over the legislation that is put before the parliament and drawing the line to say, `That is thus far and no further.' That is taking the civil liberties approach. But it is very important for our present leadership to make certain also that the community understands that even in opposition we made the agenda—Labor made the agenda. We made the agenda in government when we put forward the national criminal code, which has not been pursued actively by the present government. We made it in government when we put forward a national evidence act, which is still only implemented in a number of jurisdictions. We made it in opposition when we articulated the need to see organised crime and terrorism within an overarching framework and to have a white paper process as transparent as that which we apply to defence.

There is nothing more important to the ordinary citizen than their personal security and wellbeing. The threats that are imposed now upon our society are not simply threats of armed aggression by another nation state but the kind of acts we saw on September 11 and the kind of undermining of society that occurs through the available money that is resourced through serious organised crime. The way to address that is not by fear tactics on the behalf of the government but by open and transparent processes. We did it by proposing a coastguard, we did it by proposing community safety zones, and we did it by proposing the precursor of this legislation that would allow the confiscation of criminal assets.

I believe that this is an important feature of how Labor should position themselves for the future. I believe that we have a different interest than the government: they do not have to reduce the public's fear; they do not mind if the public's fear escalates. But we, as Labor, must have a comprehensive strategy to reduce fear if we do not want to see the privatisation of law and order where people live behind gated communities, where the public provision of policing becomes lacking in confidence, where we do not have mechanisms and where only the rich find protection from government and where the systems that would engender confidence in the overall safety and security of the Australian citizen are undermined. (Time expired)