Sixty years of Human Rights

Australia is the only first world country without significant constitutional protections of civil liberties and without a statutory bill of rights. Currently our Parliament is able to legislate for apartheid style laws and the High Court could uphold them as being in agreement with our Constitution.

We do not have an Australian Bill of Rights because, in comparison with other countries, Australia never has experienced massive human rights abuses by government (save for the situation of Indigenous Australians), or revolution, or civil war, or an invasion and occupation by a foreign oppressor. So historically speaking our experience is significantly different to that of Americans, French, the Poles or Indians.

My argument is that as we learn about technology, trade practices and legal and financial systems from the other countries, we also need to learn about and import human rights protections from countries which, because of their experience, have developed more sophisticated systems and jurisprudence to protect their civil liberties.

I look forward to the start of consultations on the proposed bill of rights for Australia that was promised by Labor. The consultations possibly would result in the weakest possible form of an Australian bill of rights without any implementation value. But if such a bill is agreed upon, even for its educational value it would be better that nothing.

There are many other human rights issues which we could improve upon in Australia. For example, economic and social rights of Indigenous Australians require massive attention. Violence against women stays at significant levels - according to ABS statistics, 29 per cent of Australian women experience physical assault in their lifetime and 17 per cent experience sexual assault. Anti-terrorist laws needs to provide a proportional response to a threat and take into consideration a need to protect our civil liberties.

There is something else I would like to focus on: our migration laws.

I start with acknowledging the reforming spirit of our current Federal Government which has abolished the Pacific Solution and closed Nauru detention centre; and significantly softened our handling of asylum seekers through changes to the Immigration detention policy while abolishing Temporary Protection Visas.

Despite these positive developments, further changes are needed to make our immigration laws and practices compliant with the international human rights standards.

To start with, we need to repeal the excision legislation that involves some 4,000 Australian islands. If we fail do so, we will create “The Indian Ocean Solution” with Christmas Island as its headquarters, and there would continue to be two sets of laws applying, depending on whether an asylum seeker lands in mainland Australia or in excised territory.

Then we need to remove the other vestiges of indefinite, non-reviewable mandatory detention so the system is in line with international Human Rights law. The current policies should be put into the legislation and judicial review available to asylum seekers should be extended. These changes are particularly important as the common law protections of civil liberties were eroded by the previous government.

All these changes are easily achievable, needing a bit more government leadership to change public attitudes. We need leadership of the quality and vision provided by Eleanor Roosevelt during her work on the Universal Declaration.

Conclusion

I would like to finish on an optimistic note.