Rights

This evening my Smaller Half and I went to a public lecture given by Julian Burnside QC on the topic of why Australia needs a bill of rights. I was very impressed by him. He is a terrific public speaker. He managed to teach us all an awful lot about history, legal theory and politics, and did it all by telling us stories.

Telling stories is a great way to keep people listening, but it's not that easy. One of my lecturers at my Fine University at the moment is fond of telling stories too, but his are meandering diversions away from the topic at hand rather than illustrative vignettes, so I usually leave his lectures wondering what they were about.

Mr Burnside's lecture was basically about what the main objections are to having a bill of rights, and why he feels they aren't valid.

Anyway, afterwards I approached him and asked him to sign a copy of one his books for a friend, which he did very cheerily. I then complimented him on his talk, saying that beforehand I was a skeptic regarding the need for a bill of rights, but he had converted me. He responded (to my surprise) that he had also previously been skeptical, but had had to rethink things over the last 10 years and had changed his mind.

The thing that changed his mind (and the thing he discussed in detail in his talk that convinced me too) was that the idea that the existing law is sufficient protection was clearly shown to be false by the actions of the Howard government against refugees. He described how 2004 was a bad year for human rights in Australia.

In that year there were three separate cases that went to the High Court regarding the operation and conduct of the detention centres that refugees were kept in while their status was assessed. The first case affirmed the right of the Australian Government to keep people in detention indefinitely even though they had done nothing wrong. The second case affirmed that the Government had no obligation to provide any standard of accommodation or care to refugees. The third case affirmed that the above cases applied equally well to children as to adults. In all three cases those points of view were the positions actively argued by the Government.

If Australia had had a bill of rights, like the rest of the western world, the outcome might have been a little different.

I've come to the point of view that those who oppose a bill of rights are either insufficiently well informed or too concerned with the "power" that this would give to underprivileged groups, which is really a way of saying that they think that only "sensible" people like themselves should be in charge.

A transcript of the talk will be available tomorrow (Friday). When it goes online I'll post a link here. Have a read of it. I'd like to know what you think. Here it is!

PS Here is a link to the transcript of Fiona Stanley's speech from last week on Indigenous Health that I discussed previously.