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Speech by Susan Ryan on Palm Sunday 2006A Human Rights Act for Australia: the people’s campaign
I want to talk to you today about a big question. What sort of a society are we living in, in Australia today, on Palm Sunday 2006? Until recently, Australians and everyone living in Australia, citizens, refugees, and temporary visitors believed something very important:
Was this belief correct? Sadly, no. or most of us, mainstream, reasonably well off members of white Australia, it was true that we had no cause to worry about our basic rights. But, for more and more members of our society outside of the mainstream, for Aboriginal Australians, increasingly for migrants and refugees from the Middle East, this was not true. They did have something to worry about, and this situation, has got worse and worse. We now realise that the human rights of all Australians could be undermined, and we now realise that we need a national law to protect those rights. That is the object of the newmatilda Human rights Act campaign. We want our national parliament to pass a law that will protect our traditional political rights. What are these rights? You will recognise them. They are rights we all used to take for granted:
We also want to see a guarantee of our economic, social and cultural rights such as, freedom from poverty and homelessness, the right to work, to education and to health services. Can we take these rights for granted? No we cannot. We need a law to protect them. That is why we have started a community campaign, a people's campaign for a Human Rights act for Australia. Why at this time? In the past, for most of us in Australia, those rights I reminded you of have been implemented in practice, sometimes by specific laws but in general through the common law. Things have changed and the common law is no longer enough. Vulnerable adults and children, those who have been kept in detention, the mentally ill, those from different cultures who are struggling economically, are no longer adequately protected by common law. And I am pleased to see such a diversity of community members here today. Because the recent threats to human right within Australia do not threaten only the vulnerable, they threaten all of us. How did things change, so much for the worse? The changes have been caused by government reactions to a number of terrible global events. First, mandatory detention of asylum seekers introduced in 1992, was a government response to a wave of desperate human beings, arriving in Australia, fleeing wars and other horrors in parts of the Middle East, seeking our help, but arriving without official documentation. Mandatory detention was the wrong policy to begin with, when it was brought in by a Labor government. The way in which that wrong policy of mandatory detention has been conducted over the last decade by the Coalition government has led to many violations of international human rights treaties. Even though Australian governments over the years had signed those international human rights treaties, without national legislation embodying the protections, there were no protections. Hence we had terrible episodes of cruel treatment, of adults and children in detention, and tragic collapses of detainees' mental and physical health. More recently, in response to horrendous acts of terrorism around the world, the Federal and state government have passed rafts of anti terror legislation. To the extent that governments need to use laws to protect us against violent terrorism, we accept new laws. However when those laws undermine basic freedoms, such as the right to liberty, the right to a fair trial and so on, with no checks and balances to ensure that our freedoms are restricted only as far as necessary, and without discrimination against any group, we see huge problems, for all of us. Our answer is to get the parliament to put in place a national law embodying our obligations under international human rights treaties, a Human Rights Act for Australia. Such a law would provide checks and balances against anti terror laws, and provisions of the Migration Act, where they undermine our traditional human rights. Such a law would make the parliament more aware of human rights at all stages of law making, and more likely to insist that the executive, the public service, would act in accordance with those legislated human rights. How would this law change things on the ground? Under such a law, most of the ill treatment of people in detention could not occur. Official actions against those provoking violence or intent on acts of terror could occur, but with parliament monitoring and reporting on what was happening, and with protections for those wrongly caught up in such events. A Human Rights act for Australia is not a radical or extreme proposition. It would only bring Australia into line with all other western democracies. In the UK, in New Zealand, In Canada the community is protected by national laws. Why not in Australia? There is no good answer to that question. The federal parliament has the power to enact such a law. It simply refuses to do it. Our Prime Minister tells us he is fiercely opposed to such a law, but gives as his reasons only a completely wrong and misleading complaint that power would be transferred from politicians to judges. In fact under our proposed law, this would not happen. Courts would have a review role, but any changes to law would be made by parliament. The law we are proposing would strengthen the role of parliament in protecting human rights, surely a basic responsibility. If parliament at this stage won't act, we believe the community will. I will briefly outline our community campaign to you. Our human rights act campaign started in response to the concerns of the readers of New Matilda. New Matilda is an online weekly magazine, devoted to better public policy and a stronger democracy. As soon as New Matilda started up, contributors and readers expressed disgust and amazement at the practices in detention centres, the desperate plight of adults and children seeking our assistance, and other daily acts of government that flew in the face of international treaties on human rights. Readers were aware of the major international conventions on human rights, and knew Australian governments over the years had ratified these instruments, yet government was behaving daily in complete contravention of these obligations. If these repugnant acts of government and its agencies were actually legal, then the challenge was to change the law. We asked ourselves how in the current political climate how we could pursue such an act. The Howard government is not only inactive here, but a determined ideological opponent and itself a persistent violator of human rights. The Opposition, despite the great history of Labor governments supporting and acting on UN conventions, is disappointingly silent. Inspired by the readers of Newmatilda we formed a small committee and prepared a draft bill that embodies all major civil and political rights, and economic and cultural rights set out in the UN conventions. Last October we published this draft bill, and invited public input and comment, on newmatilda.com, and though public forums throughout Australia. We have had discussions with dozens of community, ethnic, civil liberties and church groups, and some members of parliament. Why did we prepare a draft bill and publish it in this way? We wanted to get a genuine community debate going, to help educate the community about rights and to highlight for parliament what could and should be done. We were convinced that it would be much more practical and fruitful to debate human rights law with an actual bill out there for consideration than trying to discuss these matters in abstract. Our open and consultative approach is working. Citizens welcome the chance to consider and comment. Please feel free to tap into www.newmatilda .com, and give us the benefit of your ideas on our draft bill. After all this extensive consultation we will refine the draft bill. We will then relaunch it; we plan, in August this year, in Melbourne. We are lobbying all parties for its introduction into parliament as a Private Member's bill with cross party support. We hope to have the bill in the parliament this year. The campaign can succeed, as long as we get extensive community support. Shortly before Justice Michael McHugh retired from the High Court, in reflecting on the Al kateb case, where the High Court found it had no power to prevent the detention for life of a stateless asylum seeker, Al Kateb, Michael McHugh urged "the informed and the impassioned to agitate the parliament for legislative reform". That is what we are doing. That is at the core of our people's campaign, the informed and the impassioned agitating the parliament for reform. On this Palm Sunday here in Parramatta you have assembled to make clear your support for a peaceful society in which discrimination of any kind is outlawed, in which there is no victimisation of any group or individual, in which we can all respect the humanity of all those who make up our diverse society. The enactment of our proposed Human Rights Act for Australia would play a big part in achieving your admirable objectives. Please help us. Susan Ryan is President of the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees, and chairs the New Matilda Human Rights Act Campaign committee. She is a Pro Chancellor at UNSW, and was a Senator for the ACT from 1975-1988, and the first woman Cabinet Minister in a federal Labor government, as Education Minister from 1983 to 1987, and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on the Status of Women from 1983 to 1988. In this role Susan pioneered extensive anti discrimination and equal opportunity legislation for women; the landmark Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and the Affirmative Action Act 1986. Our society and our civil rights today are sorely tested by the 'war on terror'. |
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© Walk Against the War Coalition 2003. |
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