Australia in a 'race to the bottom' on human rights

Exciting sounding stuff. But there’d be a lot less disappointment if the plans were tempered by a bit of reality and the lessons of the past.

There’s many methods used by different nations to protect universal human rights standards. Charters, Bills of Rights, constitutionally entrenched principles, or laws bring international human rights treaties into domestic law. The Law Council of Australia produced a solid piece of draft legislation (pdf file 174KB) and an Explanatory Memorandum (pdf file 428KB) back in 1996, which has been a good working model for the legislative approach in Australia.

In Australia we’ve had a series of flawed and compromised human rights laws. Fraser’s 1981 Human Rights Commission - was an educative, advisory and publishing authority. Under the leadership of the great Roma Mitchell, its biggest achievement was to convince government that it needed to be strengthened. This was Australia’s weak model at the time Canada got its Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In 1986 the Hawke Government, with Lionel Bowen as attorney general and his then staffer, Brian Burdekin, brought in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act. This Act attached the international standards as an appendix, but gave the commission power only to inquire into abuses, with the ultimate sanction being a report tabled in parliament.

The immigration department quickly established its activities weren’t going to be effected by this Act, and the process of ignoring the tabled reports of human rights abuses began. Even Susan Ryan’s Sex Discrimination Act, one of our strongest and most effective pieces of human rights legislation, contained a list of compromised exemptions from the universal standards. Are you employed by a Commonwealth-funded non-government school? Forget it.

And then there was the legislation for the Bill of Rights referendum - an incredibly compromised package of uninspiring reforms that were put to the people by the Labor government, and rejected, with the conservative opposition arguing that this would damage our common law protections.

Each of these initiatives promised much, delivered less, but each took the heat out of the campaigns for reform. We’ve had a lot of pretend human rights protections, but the hundreds of children who were locked in desert detention camps, among others, would probably argue their effectiveness.

So while it’s good to see all sorts of activity on the human rights front, let’s be clear: there’ll be no quick fixes. And with such a long way to go in a campaign for effective human rights protection in Australia, why should we stop calling for something less than the best?

There’s a lot of organisation building to be done, particularly to apply the energy that sorted out some of the worst of the refugee abuses, to longer term system changes. Yes, I agree with the many emails I’ve had that it can be frustrating and confusing to people that just want to support change, when there are so many different groups and different approaches. This will sort out in time. At this stage, none of us has the magic formula to address the “race to the bottom” that Australia is now in. Some of us don’t even pretend we do. But we do know that one of the ingredients in that formula is perseverance - and I’m glad that so many of you have it.