Speech by Matt Foley on being awarded Life Membership of QCCL
1. I respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather, the Turrbal and Jagera peoples.
2. I thank you for the honour of conferring upon me life membership of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties. I am truly touched and grateful.
3. I pay tribute to Derek Fielding. His presidency gave intellectual depth to the Council and drew people together. I pay tribute to Stephen Keim, always original in thought and fearless in action. I pay tribute to the indomitable Terry O’Gorman whose fighting spirit has put this Council at the centre of Queensland public debate for four decades. I acknowledge also the fine contribution of others who served on the Council Executive during my presidency, particularly the Treasurer, the ever helpful Tony Macklin, Secretary Fleur Kingham, the irrepressible newsletter editor Paul O’Shea, and that scholarly powerhouse Peter Applegarth. I make special mention of a much earlier Council secretary Trevor Hartigan who had bravely championed the rights of residents of Goodna Mental Hospital in the early days of the Council.
4. Let me explain how I came to be involved with the Council. Between 1974 and 1978 I worked as a social worker at the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders Legal Service. Aboriginal people on reserves such as Cherbourg, Woorabinda and Palm Island had no right to come and go from their own communities. They required a permit from the white manager. Aboriginal workers on reserves were not paid award wages. Aboriginal land rights were simply not recognised. The corrupt, racist, oppressive Bjelke-Petersen regime brooked no dissent and banned all street marches. Like hundreds of other Queenslanders I marched as an act of civil disobedience and was duly arrested. In one demonstration I was knocked unconscious by a policeman’s baton.
5. In 1978 I chaired a sub-committee of this Council on Aboriginal rights. Then President Derek Fielding was the University Librarian. He was supportive, friendly, clear thinking. Terry O’Gorman courageously challenged abuses of police power, frequently appearing on the TV news with flaming red hair and a fetching green safari suit. Terry taught us to put our case directly to the people rather than merely to rely on written submissions to review bodies or Ministers.
6. Let me speak a little of the Council during the three years I had the honour to serve as President. In 1985, a bitter industrial dispute erupted involving the South East Queensland Electricity Board (SEQEB). Brisbane residents witnessed strikes, lockouts, and the wholesale sacking of employees with removal of their superannuation. Electricity supply to homes and industry was shut down repeatedly, often for protracted periods disrupting family life and jobs. Cold showers and candles were the order of the day. The government rushed in odious legislation, the Electricity (Continuity of Supply) Act 1985. It ousted the jurisdiction of the Industrial Commission. It banned peaceful protest. It gave the Electricity Commissioner (effectively the government) the extraordinary power to direct employees or indeed any person under pain of imprisonment to carry out work to maintain a supply of electricity.
7. Early one morning at the Taringa substation not far from here, I saw police use these emergency powers to arrest a troupe of peaceful protesters from the artistic community. Freedom of speech was not to be tolerated. To this day I recall in my mind’s eye the sublime actor and playwright Errol O’Neill brilliantly declaiming a passage from King Lear aided by his fool as police put them both in the paddy wagon.
8. The Council carefully took no side in the industrial dispute but spoke out fiercely against this repugnant legislation. It breached Australia’s international human rights obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including the prohibition on civil conscription. That view was vindicated in a report by former Justice Dame Roma Mitchell for the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Seven years later I chaired the Parliamentary Committee which enshrined a statutory right to peaceful assembly in the Peaceful Assembly Act.
9. In 1986 the Council challenged publicly the Bjelke-Petersen Government’s giving police drastic powers under the Drugs Misuse Act with none of the safeguards necessary to secure the liberty of citizens..
10. In 1987 the Council mounted a passionate media and community campaign against the infamous “black hole” at Boggo Road Jail where prisoners, particularly Aboriginal prisoners, were subject to inhumane sensory deprivation techniques. We won that fight against the odds. The “black hole” was closed. There is nothing wrong with the judgment of the Queensland people when they are properly informed of the true facts. Indeed their wisdom is regularly underestimated, to the detriment of the puffed up and mighty who act on the banal pseudo-evidence of political party focus groups. Truth will out.
11. Between 1985 and 1987 the Council engaged with conservation groups in support of the right to challenge environmental and property development decisions through the courts. We rolled the powerful and corrupt Minister Russ Hinze on that issue, to the weeping and gnashed teeth of shysters throughout the state.
12. In 1989 this poacher turned game-keeper when I entered Parliament. I had the good fortune to be part of a golden first term –chairing the Parliamentary Committee to implement the Fitzgerald Report recommendations for fair electoral laws, freedom of information and judicial review– issues for which this Council had campaigned for years.
13. The Council unsurprisingly continued to be a strong critic of government. This did not make my life in government comfortable but I always maintained my membership of the Council. Queensland is a better place because of the Council’s apolitical advocacy for civil liberties, whichever party may hold the Treasury benches.
14. As Attorney-General in the Goss and Beattie governments I welcomed the chance to introduce laws long sought by civil libertarians, such as the 1995 legislation setting out fundamental principles of justice for victims of crime and the 1999 legislation to provide for the property rights of opposite and same sex de facto spouses.
15. Perhaps the most important reform was the Guardianship and Administration Act 2000 to enshrine the civil rights of people with a decision-making incapacity and to improve their quality of life and access to justice on complex property and personal issues though a ground-breaking tribunal. The Guardianship and Administration Tribunal was statutorily charged not only with retaining rigorous excellence in law and equity but also with a duty to proceed with informality appropriate to our most disadvantaged citizens. This formidable jurisprudential task was achieved with deceptive ease under the initial, inspired Chairpersonship of Ann Lyons, later to become a Justice of the Supreme Court. This remarkable achievement remains one of the great untold stories of Queensland legal history.
16. I profoundly regret my failure in government to achieve a statutory Bill of Rights for Queensland. I am sorry for that. We sorely need one.
17. I thank the Council for its support for my approach as Attorney-General in making on merit a number of senior female judicial appointments despite the outraged public opposition from the old boys’ club in certain quarters of the legal profession.
18. I respectfully commend Terry O’Gorman and the Council for the strong criticism of the recent bikie legislation which expressly threatens freedom of association. Today the bikies, tomorrow trade unionists on a picket line, the day after, peaceful protesters caught up in an affray (such as happened at Palm Island a few years ago), and so it goes. By all means, punish severely and deter criminal conduct. Punish also those who are parties to criminal conduct under the Criminal Code. That is, after all, the proper function of criminal law.
19. “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.” Those are not my words. They are the words of Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on which all the nations of the world agreed after World War II, the worst conflagration ever seen. My dad was a Rat of Tobruk, seriously wounded by an enemy bomb. I am proud of his fight against the Nazis. He and his comrades fought for freedom against tyranny. Their cause was just. We should honour their legacy.
20. The current state government shows blithe disregard for the separation of powers and contempt for its critics such as this resilient and wily Council. As a republican former Attorney-General, I am reluctant to offer advice to the present, monarchist Attorney-General Jarrod Bleije; but, out of respect for the current Queen who is after all a constitutional monarch, the Attorney really should approach Buckingham Palace to seek a renaming of the Queen Elizabeth II Supreme and District Courts Building to the Stuart Kings Courts building. This would reflect more accurately his recently legislated power to use executive power to override the Judiciary. Courts can be such a nuisance to cocky governments.
21. I conclude with the words of the Sonnet to Liberty written by Oscar Wilde in 1890.
Sonnet to Liberty
NOT that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,—
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies, 5
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea,—
And give my rage a brother——! Liberty!
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades 10
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved—and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things.
27 October 2013 at McIlwraith Croquet Club, Auchenflower