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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 461 ..

over those 50 years, while the endlessly praised United Nations has been bound by its impotence, millions have died at the hands of madmen, tyrants and sadists whose nations in the main had high-minded constitutions that claimed to ensure all sorts of rights. They had the proper bits of paper, but the bits of paper did not prevent millions being massacred. From Armenia to Afghanistan to Angola, Russia to Rwanda, Somalia to Sudan, Ethiopia to Eritrea, Korea to Kenya to Kurdistan, Zimbabwe to Zanzibar to Zaire, from China to Cambodia to Congo to Colombia to Cuba, and on our own doorstep to tiny East Timor, with an estimated 200,000 alone. Think of that for a moment. That’s equivalent to the population of Greater Geelong wiped from the face of the earth like so much dust. Yet we averted our eyes for decades.

This horrendous list of monstrosities goes on and on and has gone on while the torch of human rights has been held aloft by all those who in their worship of the light seem to have been blinded by it. The real horrors were happening in the shadows all around them and they were afraid to acknowledge that fact, walk into the dark and stop it happening. It has been easier to worship the light and pretend that what was in the shadows would go away. I think of how over recent decades the souls of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis alone have been snatched away by the inhumane regime of Saddam Hussein and of how the crushed, broken, blinded, raped, stabbed, strangled, shot. poisoned and gassed poor, sad, abandoned shells of his slaughtered victims have been silently blending with the blood-soaked soil, their mouths and eyes and ears slowly filling with the ancient sands of Iraq. These are the images that haunt me and drive me to ask, What about their rights? Why is it that the so-called rights of these departed souls seem to have been worth so little?

When someone wants to do something about that, when someone has the courage to take action to stop the endless, sickening obscenity, to try to bring something better to those who have been brutalised and had their rights stripped from them, who have been treated and killed like animals, why is it that those who strut about attending conventions and drafting new lists of rights and engaging in meaningful, sophisticated, international dialogue and lecturing democratic communities on those rights and telling them what’s good for them never come up with the answer of how to ensure the rights of the innocent and the vulnerable—except to trot out inane mantras like “War is never the answer”. If that is so then what is the answer? More hollow platitudes, more lists of rights, more bits of paper, more international dialogue between hobbyhorse academics, more verbal waffling and self-congratulation, more endless whining about how ashamed they are?

I have never heard from the apologists for the doers of evil, from the appeasers of creatures like Saddam Hussein, a single suggestion that was worth uttering in the first place. (Extension of time granted.) Instead, they wrap themselves in a cape of self-righteousness and, knowing they do not have it in themselves to do something concrete, proceed from the comfort of their ivory towers to chant endless criticism of those who are willing to confront evil head on, who know from our long and sometimes tragic history that you can’t appease evil, you can’t bargain with the devil and win. They will continue to harp on new and more legislation for rights, to claim that only such legislation can guarantee rights.

There is something wrong here. The body of universal rights legislation was developed over the decades following the Second World War and it bred and reproduced all over the place. It has hardly mattered a damn in practice. Instead it has been open slather for

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