This is a public service announcement about one of the bits of legislation that Governments pass in the wake of their Budgets.
It's here because you're unlikely to read much about it in the Herald or the Dom Post.
It concerns those who stay home to care for the elderly or the disabled. After a long battle, the courts ruled that family members must be paid for this work (previously, only carers who were not family members were paid). This new Government legislation flips two fingers at that ruling, and, oh, by the way, the law can't ever be challenged in court, or before the Human Rights Commission: "no proceedings based in whole or in part on a specified allegation [that the policy unlawfully discriminates] may be commenced or continued in any court or tribunal."
It's called an "ouster" clause, and in the words of our own Legal Advisory Committee, such things "are objectionable because they interfere with the courts' constitutional role as interpreters and expounders of the law". Frank Bainimarama over in Fiji is a big fan of them, to immunise his government's fiats from judicial review.
Do we really want to be aping the methods of a military dictatorship? It's one thing to make a law that discriminates on the basis of family status. It's quite another to decide that the courts can no longer determine the application of the law - which I'm fairly sure is what they're there for. And if a Government is willing to gatecrash our constitution over such a comparatively little thing, what's to stop it doing it elsewhere?
