The Federal Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, has taken an appropriately restrained view of Tasmania’s unenforced law making it a crime to commit homosexual acts (even in private) punishable by up to life imprisonment.
The law is unacceptable and in breach of international and Australian standards of human rights. However, a heavy-handed Commonwealth approach is likely to be counter-productive.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee, at the behest of the Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Group, is about to adjudicate on whether Tasmania’s law breaches the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which Australia is a party. It seems fairly clear that it is a breach.
There has been a lot of macho, homophobic political posturing on the issue in Tasmania. The Premier, Ray Groom, and others in his ministry have asserted that they went to the people at the last election with a policy of not changing the law, they were elected, and so they will not change the law. This is an acknowledged abdication of political responsibility to lead public opinion rather than be a siphon for it or a slave to it.
However, the issue has to be put into perspective. There have been no prosecutions. There has been no active police intimidation or crack down on homosexuals in Tasmania. We are dealing with posturing and statement-making rather than a practical matter of human rights of the scale presented to the UN by, say, the Bosnian crisis.
In that context, Mr Lavarch is right, not to rush in with heavy-handed statements about the Commonwealth legislating to over-rule the Tasmanian law. The preferred position is that Tasmania see that it is out of step with other Australian jurisdictions and out of step with general Australian public opinion and that Tasmania change its own law.
the Tasmania Government says its law is educative and standard-setting. Mr Groom said, “”The code is educative, meaning it tells us something about a proper code of behaviour.”
How very true. The Tasmanian criminal code is educative of how repression of victimless conduct between consenting people in private is unenforceable, wrong and likely to condone intolerance and perhaps violence. It also tells us about proper codes of behaviour by politicians: that acts of homosexuality between consents people in private is none of the state’s business and that the state’s business in to engender a climate of social tolerance, economic productivity and public propriety.
The statements defending Tasmania’s prohibition of homosexual acts on grounds of public morality coming from the Liberal Party a couple of years out of a public bribery scandal smells a little of holier than thou or outright hypocrisy.
As to the “”educative” lesson, Mr Lavarch is right to let it be a self-educative lesson. Given there is no practical enforcement of this offensive law in Tasmania and that it is all about statement-making, it is wise for the Commonwealth to sit back and let public opinion, ridicule and criticism take its course.