Constitution an “Alice in Wonderland” view of democracy and rights

Yet that sort of question simply masks the fact that smart, reasonable, well-informed and nice people – people you'd be happy to have a beer with (or whatever happens to be the drug of choice of Greens members) – simply disagree about what course of action best upholds and respects rights.

All of us can say we favour freedom of speech, which is all that a bill of rights will do, pitched as these things are up in the Olympian heights of moral abstractions. But as soon as you ask about where to draw specific lines when it comes to rules about hate speech, say, or defamation laws, or campaign finance regimes, all of which are the sorts of things that a freedom of speech right in a bill of rights will trigger and will send to the judges and courts, and you find people simply do not agree.

So the practical effect of any bill of rights is to take some decision-making power on such questions away from the elected legislators and give it to the unelected judges. That is what you are buying when you buy a bill of rights.

And I can see no reason for thinking that the elected legislature's choices on these sorts of issues – or if you think of other rights- related provisions about wearing headscarves in schools, or the availability of euthanasia, or same-sex marriage, and so on and so forth – ought to be moved to the courts. Certainly, people professing an attachment to "democratic structures" ought to find it hard to call for this shift.

One sometimes wonders if some proponents of a bill of rights simply believe that they will get more of their first-order preferences as regards the above rights-related type issues satisfied by the judges than they would by letting-the-numbers- count democracy. (If you doubt this then just look at judges' views on abortion or euthanasia or same-sex marriage in North America and compare them to the views of the public at large).

Much the same point can be made about plenty of aspects of international law, that this sort of law can work in ways that debilitate democratic decision-making. Rights related treaties have to be couched in abstractions that allow the world's Sudans and Zimbabwes and Chinas to sign up.

But then the committees who come along and later tell us that Article 19 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits spanking, do not really expect their view to have any traction at all in those sorts of countries. It will be people such as members of the Greens, in countries like Australia, who then jump up and down and say that international law prohibits spanking, and hence has to be prohibited.

Of course if a political party finds itself on one end of the political spectrum, and also finds that its core support amongst voters rarely extends much beyond one in ten, these sorts of devices such as bills of rights or certain aspects of international law can appear very attractive, and can do so precisely because they allow for an end run around the views of the majority of one's fellow citizens.

In plain, blunt terms, they are not democratic at all, however much those advocating them also claim to be committed to "democratic structures."

Let me finish with two final policy preferences of the Greens. They want proportional representation in the House of Representatives and they want to lower the voting age to 16.

As for the first, it is true that all voting systems have pluses and minuses. Proportional ones, however, have the undeniable effect of enhancing the power of small parties like the Greens, and indeed of giving them disproportionate power (as even a cursory glance at, say, Israel shows, to take a country that the Greens seem obsessed about). So if nothing else this proposal is self-interest in action.

The same calculation has probably been made about lowering the voting age, that the Green's left-of-the-political-spectrum substantive policies are most likely to appeal to those who have no experience of earning a living and paying taxes. That calculation does not in itself rule such proposals out of bounds, but it does give us pause to consider why they are being proposed and to be sceptical of their wisdom.