Queensland’s Alice in Wonderland bill of rights is a sense less power transfer

I could point out that this Queensland Bill goes beyond listing just the usual civil and political rights to include also a couple of economic and social rights. But why bother. This is just more of the same from the pro-bill of rights crowd.

These days that crowd comprises the vast preponderance of university law academics and a solid majority of lawyers. Why might that be?

My own take is that rights-related disputes involve highly contentious issues over which nice, reasonable people disagree. One way to resolve them is to count us all equally and vote. That's called democracy.

But if your favoured outcomes are not being satisfied frequently enough, and if you think the legal caste tends to agree with you more often than what politics produces, another option is to frame these disputes in terms of timeless human rights, hand them over to a lawyerly caste of judges, and give them a souped-up interpretative power (clause 48) along with a God-like declarations power (clause 53).

That is the route Queensland is choosing. An astute observer would note that in all the Anglosphere jurisdictions in which these instruments have been brought in, it is always done by the political left - that's true of NZ in 1990, the UK in 1998, the state of Victoria in 2006, and now true of Labor in Queensland.

You would also note that the right-of-centre parties all opposed the introduction of these instruments but later caved in under pressure from the guild of lawyers and special interest groups (witness Ted Baillieu in Victoria). So it is hard to be optimistic about Queensland's LNP doing anything about the latest Alice in Wonderland bill of rights.