Page 2213 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 16 August 2006
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There are those that have traditionally said that the strength of our democracy and of our commitment to the rule of law will protect us better than the enactment through a legislature of a set of principles and commitments to human rights as reflected through bills of rights. To this extent, the traditional attitude in Australia has, of course, differed markedly from the position which all of the other Western democracies and all of the other Westminster-style governments and democracies have pursued throughout the world. Almost the whole of Europe has signed up to the European human rights act.
Great Britain has specifically adopted it within its Human Rights Act and, interestingly, has taken a range of steps through the adoption of the European human rights framework in the area of social, cultural and economic rights, a debate which, of course, continues to be fostered through conferences such as that on which the legal affairs committee has reported. In addition, the other great democracies, the Western nations, the nations that have a long tradition of democratic right and principle, have all seen fit to enact a human rights act, a bill of rights, including most famously the United States of America, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India, the whole of the European Union, and the United Kingdom. They all have bills of rights. They all have national bills of rights.
Australia is the country that stands aside, that stands out. In fact, of the acknowledged strong, traditional Western democracies, we are the only one that considers that we are different, that our institutions are so sound, that our parliaments are to be so trusted, that the human rights of Australians would never be put at risk, that our society can operate on some other level, that we do not need a focus, a debate or a community conversation around human rights, that it is something that we all intrinsically understand and we do not need the line in the sand which a human rights act provides, we do not need to specifically incorporate that full range of civil rights into law. Of course, that is not a view that I hold, it is not a view that the Victorian parliament now holds, and it is a view which is now being tested in both Tasmania and Western Australia.
The better way to ensure not necessarily an adherence to human rights but an understanding of human rights is to legislate those rights, to incorporate them into the law, to provide a benchmark and, through that, a range of public service or bureaucratic processes that rely on an acknowledgment and a recognition of human rights to be a fundamental part of decision making. That is what we have done in the territory. It is what Victoria has now done; that is, all significant decisions of policy in their making and in their implementation take into account the human rights implications of the policy and of its implementation. That does lead to a society that is stronger, more inclusive and more respectful and, I think, better acknowledges the sorts of values of which we are so rightly proud but which we risk being put aside and to which we might turn a blind eye.
We have seen some quite famous examples or incidences of that over the last few years in relation to some of our responses to the rights and treatment of refugees. We might take a strict legal attitude to the incarceration or the detention of refugees. There is a significant difference between looking at the letter of the law in relation to the appropriateness of, say, sending refugees to Nauru in order to ensure that they cannot access legal rights to which we have committed under international law simply because we render them residents of another state and thereby unable to access our law.
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