Role of Judiciary upheld

Press, 30 April 1984, Page 4

Role of Judiciary upheld

PA Rotorua The law and the courts were indispensable components of the working machinery of democracy, the Australian Attorney-General, Senator Gareth Evans, told Law Society conference delegates in Rotorua. Speaking about' the broader view of democracy, that it was more than crude majority rule, Senator Evans said that a genuinely democratic system required more than just accountability through the ballot box. He said it had to be a fair decision method in which the rights and interests of minorities were protected against unfair or unreasonable majority attack. Senator Evans was responding to a paper to the conference by an Indian senior advocate, Mr F. S.

Nariman, entitled “Why protect minorities?” He said Mr Nariman’s paper acknowledged the apparent tension between minority rights and the principle of majority rule. The tension was more imaginary than real, Senator Evans said. The real test of an effectively working democracy was not just how it protected minorities, but how it protected unpopular minorities. Though minority problems in New Zealand and Australia were not as acute as elsewhere in the world, there were very real kinds of discrimination being practised against racial, sexual, linguistic and other minorities in both countries. Sometimes they were officially sanctioned, he said, but more often it was as the (result of private prejudice.

“It is important for the sake of not only the minorities involved, but also for the preservation of our democracies in good working order, that we respond sensitively and effectively,” Senator Evans said.

Higher education had always been the best solvent of prejudice and discrimination based on ignorance, he said. Much could be done by community education and human rights promotion campaigns, to get across the basic message about the common humanity of all. However, there was still a place for legislation to establish the rights of minorities to share equally in various community goods, and creating duties on the rest of us to behave fairly and even-handedly, he said.

Similarly, in dealing with particular problems that

arose in the workplace, or with landlords or hotel keepers, “soft-glove” conciliation procedures had been, in the experience of anti-discrimination workers in the field, a much better way than “iron-fist” legislation of achieving solutions to practical problems in all but the most intractable cases.

Senator Evans said the approach adopted in Australia, a similar one to that in comparable countries, was a multi-faceted one, creating legal rights and duties, and giving an ultimate enforcement role to the courts.