When consultation is not consultation

The Commonwealth Attorney-General thinks the country should have a Bill or Charter of Rights. He has appointed a committee to “consult” with the public and then recommend what action the government should take. By making the Terms of Reference loaded one way, by ensuring that few submissions are published, by a total failure to advertise the “consultation” and by making the country-wide meetings open only to those that “sign on”, he has striven to ensure that he gets the outcome that he wants - a Charter of Rights.

Supporters of issues such as Reconciliation, the Republic, scrapping of the “Pacific solution” and so on have variously been called “elite”, “self appointed elite”, “doctor’s wives”, “café latte set,” “the three R’s”, and recently, by Costa, “the cultural left”. Some of those are seen to be offensive. I prefer the term “the New Class” which Milovan Djilas used decades ago to describe a communist elite who were the new power bloc. Of course our New Class are not communist, but the phrase does catch the sense of an undemocratic and very powerful group.

In the context of this “consultation” the Australian Human Rights Group and Get up! are the most prominent sub sets of the New Class.

The rorting of the “consultation” is compounded by New Class-organised mass pro Charter submissions. Information indicates that there have been more than 10,000 submissions, the vast majority by obedient New Class members.

My thinking about the issue of a Bill or Charter is based on two assumptions:

• Democracy is the best/least bad system of government possible and nothing must be introduced that might reduce the supremacy of Parliament. I have no starry eyed ideas that democracy is perfect; merely that, as the old saw has it, “democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time”. Having lived in Northern Nigeria in the 1960s as its democracy (flawed but better than nothing) collapsed and sank after two coups into military government and the dreadful Nigerian/Biafran civil war I know that democracy is far better than any alternative.
   
• It is illogical, almost puerile, to imagine that it is possible to achieve two desirable objectives simultaneously if they may occasionally be mutually exclusive. Obvious examples are (i) the “right” to religious freedom re Islam and the “right” for equality for women and girls and (ii) the Canadian Mormon, charged with polygamy bleating about his religious “Rights” under their Charter of Rights.

The Minister states that Parliament must be supreme. Why does he say that?

Possibility (a) is that he genuinely thinks that it is possible to have a Bill or Charter and leave the supremacy of Parliament undamaged. Well, either a Charter will have an effect or it won’t. If it does have an effect (influence/power) then that must come at the expense of Parliamentary supremacy. If it will have no effect, what are we going on about?

Possibility (b) is that he thinks that a Charter would be easier to whip through Parliament if it gave lip service to Parliament. He may think that since “Hull got away with that spin in Victoria, why shouldn’t I?” Much safer than a referendum that might fail. Can’t let the Plebs decide important things like this now can we? Oh dear me, no.

The “consultation” material recommends the reader “find out more” about Human Rights at some sites, including that of the UN Rights group. What we find is sad. When the original UN Rights organisation was created it had such high hopes and ambitions. Sadly it has become a perversion of what was intended, a travesty.

Members of the UN Human Rights Council must show “the highest standards in promoting … human Rights”. Currently membership includes Russia, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Cuba!

An article in Oracle, an Education Foundation, states (regarding Saudi Arabia) “In the legal system, just like in Pakistan, women are not considered to be legitimate witnesses”. Currently the Pakistani government, either because it cannot or does not want to control the northwest of the country, is unable to prevent the Taliban from stopping girls from attending school in Swat province. Forty thousand girls are now prevented from getting an education because of the manic and brutal religious ideas of the Taliban. It is probable that Sharia Law will be imposed.

Sixty per cent of UN condemnatory motions are against one country - Israel - but there is no criticism of Darfur, China, North Korea or Zimbabwe. That is a consequence of block voting by some Middle Eastern and African nations plus China, Russia and Cuba. Ban Ki-moon has criticised the council for its ineffectiveness and urged countries to “drop rhetoric” and “rise above partisan posturing and regional divides”. No chance.

The same block has succeeded in gagging criticism of, for example, aspects of Sharia Law. When a group criticised the stoning of women for adultery and the marriage of pre teen girls, Muslims got very upset and the President of the Council ruled that talk about religion would not be allowed.

You can have free speech or freedom of religion or neither, but you cannot have both unless you are a Hogwarts’ alumnus.

The Attorney-General, his obedient minions and the New Class support the UN lot. I do not, and can not. They are at best useless and at worst bad because they connive with and provide an imprimatur of respectability to those who commit terrible breaches of Human Rights in the name of religion and culture.

Shamefully the Australian media self-censored itself at the time of the publication of some cartoons depicting Mohammed in Denmark. We heard, saw and read about Islamist violence, so clearly it was news. But no Australian paper actually published the cartoons; they put abject terror above their responsibility fearlessly to tell the public what is happening. (Like me, a lot of people would have disliked a piece of “art” called Piss Christ. I saw pictures of that in the press - but then I do not relapse into primitive violence when somebody offends me). Real or pretended hypersensitivity to perceived slights is, when combined with a propensity for violence on the one hand and spineless fear on the other, another major threat to freedom of speech. We must stand up for freedom of speech or we are lost.

The drive to democracy via elected representatives meeting together has been a slow struggle over the centuries. People have suffered and died so as to achieve the supremacy of Parliament. From the 1688 Bill of Rights in England that made it crystal clear that the monarch was to operate with the consent of, and to an extent under, Parliament; through the struggles of Chartists and Suffragettes and on to the efforts of Fisher and others; to the demise of the White Australia policy and constitutional change re Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, it has been a long road to the supremacy of democracy via Parliament.

A Bill of Rights would empower a group of (presumably) lawyers to “examine” legislation that is before, or has been passed by the democratic process in Parliament, and then to decide whether Parliament’s decision should be allowed or struck down.

The Attorney-General opposes a Bill on the grounds that it would demean Parliament (and lose votes). Consequently we are force fed Mr Hull’s Victorian “Charter of Rights”. That empowers a group to examine Parliament’s decisions but, to “ensure the supremacy of parliament” will be unable to strike them down but will be able to declare them contrary to the Charter. They will be stating that the Parliament is acting immorally. No Parliament will allow that to happen so they will back off. A Charter is a Tricky Dicky Nixon way of getting the effects of a Bill while pretending that Parliament is not weakened.

Any Bill/Charter will list “Rights” as generalisations. Generalisations must be interpreted so there will be an eternity of (highly paid) pontificating by those who will judge our Parliament (and hence us the proles who elected them).

A phrase frequently used in the East End of London is “a nice little earner”. The group that will pontificate on the rights or wrongs of Parliamentary actions, will be unelected, unsackable, have total power but no responsibility at all. Power without responsibility is proverbially the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. Lawyers will salivate! It will be a nice little earner (NLE) or, probably, a nice big earner.

Because of the never ending stream of issues, this NLE will make the Jarndyce case look speedy. That case stopped when the money ran out. This NLE’s costs will be borne by the proletariat and they can be taxed ad nauseam.

The Chairman of the Consultation team, speaking on SBS about the consultation, gave examples of issues that might be affected by a Bill or Charter. They were virtually all individual examples of dubious treatment of people such as Ms Rau by government departmental officials in the last few years.

Former Senator Susan Ryan, Chair and lead spokesperson for the New Class organisation Australian Human Rights Group, gives examples of “system failures”. All pertain to refugee detention centres and associated issues plus matters to do with Indigenous Australians. In explaining why a Bill or Charter is needed, Ryan asserts that claims that the system (without a Bill/Charter) was successful are wrong. Why? Because of all the problems referred to above that happened over “over the last decade”.

So both the Chairman and, far more crudely, Ryan, are saying that the problems arose because of the Howard government. Since Howard has gone, complete with horns and tail, things will presumably improve. But against the possibility that the proles get it wrong again and an equally evil government is elected in future we need a Bill/Charter to preclude a re- occurrence of the problems that occurred “in the last decade”.

Historically the thrust for representative, Parliamentary democracy has generally come from the Left of the political spectrum. For me it is the greatest achievement of that side of political thinking and action. So it is disappointing that the push for a Bill or Charter - which must weaken the authority of Parliament - is coming mainly from the New Class which generally identifies with the Left.

In 1988 one of the amendments put to the people “sought to enshrine in the constitution various civil rights, including freedom of religion, rights in relation to trials, and rights regarding the acquisition of property”.

A grand total of 30.8 per cent of the voters said “yes”. The lowest yes vote ever.

Professor Judith Brett, a prominent Rights person, sneers at Howard because he took notice of opinion polling, saying that under that approach “the opinions of the ignorant or uninvolved are given equal weight to those of the passionate and knowledgeable”. (Quoted from the “Rear View” section of The Weekend Australian, January 10, 2009.)

At best that is egotistic elitism, at worst it is crude authoritarianism. The New Class exposed in all its arrogance. It is axiomatically anti democratic. I hoped that the quotation was wrong, but sadly I have seen no denial.

The attitudes that Brett apparently holds are probably common within the New Class. Their lust for a Bill/Charter of Rights is equalled only by their contempt for the people at large. Hence their opposition to a referendum - the ignorant and uninformed proletariat got it wrong in 1988, so let’s not go for a referendum, forget all that democracy stuff, let’s ooze in through the back door.

We are the fortunate heirs of many who have striven and suffered for our democratic system and a substantial amount of free speech. We have done nothing to deserve it, we are just lucky.

We should make a stand and defend democracy and freedom of speech.

The Consultative Committee should either:

1. recommend to the government that they do nothing vis a vis a Bill/Charter; or
2. recommend to the government that a Bill of Rights be constructed and put to the people of this nation as a whole in the form of a Constitutional amendment.