Playing to the gallery: the invocation of human rights, legal actors, and outside audiences in debates on roadside drug testing in the Australian Capital Territory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Roadside drug testing (‘RDT’) was introduced in the Australian Capital Territory (‘ACT’) through a private member’s Bill that was fiercely debated in the ACT parliament. It was the first RDT scheme in Australia subject to human rights scrutiny, and thus parliamentarians had to weigh road safety arguments against human rights considerations in determining whether the proposed measures were proportionate. This paper focuses on the debate over RDT in the ACT parliament, how human rights and safety concerns figure, and how legal actors and ‘outside audiences’ are invoked. The debate was marked by frequent appeals to family members present in the public gallery and legal actors such as the Chief Police Officer, the Human Rights Commissioner, and socio-legal experts outside the chamber. Drawing from cultural legal studies scholarship on legal insiders and outside audiences in legal proceedings, this paper analyses how these stakeholders figure in human rights debates on RDT, and with what effects. The paper argues that the invocation of outside audiences reflects what Crawley and Tranter term ‘a need to bring the human back’ but cautions that this humanising process only brings some humans in, and therefore connects human rights to only certain human lives in certain ways.