MARK DREYFUS MP

These amendments send a strong message that the Albanese government values the contributions made by our frontline workers and that violence and aggression towards those workers is unacceptable.

This bill is an important step towards creating safer Commonwealth workplaces.

What Port Arthur taught us in 1996, what the landmark agreement on the National Firearms Register in 2023 has demonstrated, and what the ongoing commitment of gun safety advocates and responsible gun owners show, is that Australians are committed to doing everything we can to keep our communities and police safe from gun violence.

The Australian government is deeply committed to improving criminal justice responses to sexual assault.

This means ensuring the criminal justice system supports vulnerable people at all stages of the criminal justice process.

We must continue to look forward to opportunities to strengthen and protect Australia’s human rights framework. As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and consider our achievements since 1948, we must also look forward to how we can continue to make improvements.

Effective administrative review is critical to Australia's system of government.

A strong, user-focused administrative review body provides an avenue for community members to seek independent review of government decisions that have major and sometimes life-altering impacts on their lives.

It is ninety years since the Law Council of Australia was formed in 1933 in the wake of the Great Depression to speak on behalf of the entire Australian legal profession.

But the Council is now so much more than a peak body and has evolved to play an important role in policy making and advocating for a fair and just legal system.

The bill delivers on the Albanese government's election commitment to establish the first Commonwealth Anti-Slavery Commissioner to tackle modern slavery in Australia and abroad.

There is no place in Australia for symbols that glorify the horrors of the Holocaust. And there is no place in Australia for evil and offensive acts that celebrate Nazi ideology. Today, the Albanese Labor government is strengthening our legislation to ensure that never again will anyone in this country be allowed to celebrate or profit from acts and symbols of the Nazis and terrorist organisations.

Health justice partnerships and integrated service models are playing an increasingly critical role in the delivery of legal assistance. Legal need is often connected to other needs, in particular healthcare, and these models recognise and reflect that. This important work that you do reaffirms my view that legal assistance cannot and should not exist in a vacuum. Health justice partnerships foster unique pathways designed to better facilitate access to justice for vulnerable and disadvantaged people

So much of what I have done – and hope to do as Attorney-General – concerns transparency and accountability.

Not as an end in itself.

A bad government that is transparent is not better than a bad government that is not.

But transparency has a tendency to make governments and institutions be better, if only out of a sense of self-preservation.