Prosperity with purpose - a fresh approach to some unfinished business

Public surveys clearly reflect an increasing desire for greater vision among our political class, and a re-energising of debate on more fundamental concerns. While there may be a grudging acceptance of the supposed “practical” solutions being offered by government, the community senses that there is a missing ingredient to these solutions: solutions which may provide short-term comfort but miss the critical sense of our overriding obligations to future generations.

The issue now is to ensure that, in the current debates, critical and long-lasting principles which give support to our essential freedoms are not compromised by a public policy process driven by short-term political opportunism. For policies to be effective in both the short and longer term, to be genuinely sustainable, they need to respect and reflect our national values.

In many democratic societies a nation’s values are reflected in its constitution, which seeks to embody fundamental norms and principles. Many other nations have developed comprehensive architecture in this area, but here Australia has shown a singular lack of intent or purpose.

The most obvious and glaring gap in Australia’s civic architecture has been its lack of a bill of rights or an equivalent, which gives clear testimony and legal foundation to the professed Aussie values summed up in the concept of a fair go. There was a half-hearted attempt at incorporating selected basic rights in a referendum in 1988, which failed, but frankly for many Australians, even as recent as it is, 1988 isn’t so much ancient history - its pre-website, and hence non-history.

Even in liberal democracies like Australia, being different - being other - is to be vulnerable. It is a characteristic common to those most in need of protection. Governments live to win elections and to be seen to be doing what is popular. The challenge for governments is to take up the cause of, to fight for and to protect the rights of those who are perceived, for whatever reason, as different and whose claim to rights protections attracts little or no popular support.

At certain times in the political cycle, generally after a grave crisis, a high-mindedness can enter public policy, requiring the enactment and legislative protection of higher standards of civic behaviour. Australia has missed a number opportunities for the sort of high-mindedness that has led most western democracies to implement human rights charters.

For example, while Canada adopted a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Australia settled for an advisory, report-writing Human Rights Commission with few if any powers to effectively protect human rights in this country.

Australia is not alone in having blurred the distinction between its executive and the legislature. The party system has blurred this distinction elsewhere, too. But this country is alone in its relegation of the third arm of government, the judiciary, to such a minor role in human rights protection. By not incorporating human rights standards into overarching law, and indeed by prohibiting courts from reviewing the merits of many government decisions, there remain few remedies against executive excesses.

So it’s certainly a welcome initiative to see campaigns still seeking to keep alive a public debate over why a bill or charter of rights and responsibilities is such a necessary and vital component for our democratic system.

One such campaign has recently been commenced by New Matilda magazine, and it comes at a time when the absence of effective human rights protections in Australia is critical. The differences between our human rights record and that of other developed nations are becoming starker.

We have continued to deprive Indigenous children of adequate health care and effective education. Our courts have upheld the long-term indefinite detention of asylum seekers, including that of children. We have kept two Iraqis in indefinite detention. One has languished in a remote island detention centre for five years while one remains in hospital as a result of injuries arising from his indefinite island detention.

We have adopted the “anti-terror” legal frameworks of Britain and America without adopting their human rights protections. And the “war on terror” is still just warming up, there’s plenty more dividends there yet for the entrepreneurs of division.