Member

Overall, the statutory test for imposing respect orders, in my opinion, is too broad and vague in its language to be a safe new legislative change. I am mindful that respect orders can also have significant impacts on our citizens’ rights and freedoms, and I do think that rights and freedoms are important. These measures are a form of behavioural control order that imposes limitations upon a person’s liberty and daily activities in an attempt to prevent unwanted behaviour that is actually quite subjectively defined. To do this, they provide the state with unfettered discretion to do anything described in the order, and that might include imposing curfews, electronic monitoring, and restrictions on who a person can communicate with and where they can travel to, and even can exclude people from their own home—things we have already heard about.