human rights act
2 Jul 2009
Don't Let Them Kill The Bill
Campaigners for a human rights act should have known they'd face stiff opposition. Now their failure to engage ordinary people has put the whole thing at risk, writes Tanja Kovac
It was all so predictable. On 15 June, the final day of submissions to the National Human Rights Consultation, the "No Bill" campaign embarked on a carefully planned media blitz, coming shortly after the launch of the Menzies Research Centre's book, Don't leave us with the Bill.With Australian war hero, prominent Catholic and all-round nice guy, Major Peter Cosgrove as guest speaker, extracts of the book had been read out to applause, and were distributed for publication in mainstream papers. The event and the book, which aim to scuttle support for a federal human rights act before it's even drafted, were well timed and received national airplay.
And where was the Australian Human Rights Group at that moment — the loose affiliation of organisations, supposed to be providing strategic leadership for the pro-rights campaign on this important day? Where was GetUp?
Only Amnesty International seemed to recognise the importance of the submission process as media stunt, handing over 10,000 individual submissions to Consultation Panel member Mary Kostakidis.
At this moment the campaign for a human rights act hangs in the balance. While submissions from the usual suspects of community legal centres and human rights academics may be enough to persuade the consultation panel to make a supportive finding, it is unlikely to move conservative members of the ALP Cabinet or parliamentary caucus. It's also unlikely to inspire Senators Fielding and Xenophon, whose vote will be needed to get the law over the line. A groundswell of public support for a human rights act — whether actual or illusory — is crucial to the success of the campaign.
At this stage, it is hard to see any motivating of public opinion — or any strategy for that matter — coming from the Australian Human Rights Group. The media management is reactive and limited to letters to the editor. There have been no broad-based national information campaigns and events designed to attract media attention. The campaign suffers greatly from having no centralised pro-rights branding — no campaign slogan, posters or stickers, or other pro-rights paraphernalia to generate public support in a practical way.
Instead, all the focus, so far, has been on preparing lengthy, technical legal submissions. And while a record number of 34,000 submissions has been received, thanks to the help of GetUp and Amnesty, the sophisticated e-advocacy we have become used to from both organisations has been less than brilliant. The campaign for a human rights act seems not to be core business for either organisation.
Also conspicuous by its absence in the campaign is the ACTU. Given that the "Your Rights at Work" campaign — the most effective political campaign in decades — had rights rhetoric on TV every night for a year, you'd think the pro-rights alliance would want to build on that success by seeking to engage the union movement. But it hasn't.
Blame for the misplaced strategy must fall on the hubris of academic and professional lawyers who are the people largely behind the campaign.
There is more than just a touch of elitism in the decision of the Australian Human Rights Group to steer away from mass participatory techniques of traditional progressive organising. Many lawyers, particularly top-end-of-town, pro bono types, enjoy the separation from the great unwashed that the client-lawyer relationship affords them. The concept of engaging with real people — through rallies and via broad based education campaigns — is anathema to them. So too is explaining rights in everyday language.
Further, there is a real lack of knowledge among lawyers about how best to engage in political advocacy. Lawyers lobby with an obsessive reliance on submission writing. The profession's dependence on the written word skews their campaigning towards passive lobbying, rather than the face-to-face and behind the scenes wheeling and dealing that is required to transform policy into law.
There may also be another explanation for the lack of campaign activity from the Australian Human Rights Group — a misplaced belief in the small target.
In the lead up to the Victorian Human Rights Consultation in 2006, it was commonly understood within progressive circles that for the Victorian state government to enact a human rights act, it would be necessary for human rights advocates to maintain a low profile. Activists were persuaded by bureaucrats and senior members of the ALP not to use the media too much or engage in on-the-ground community advocacy, for fear of stirring up anti-rights forces.
Ultimately, the small target strategy achieved its objectives in Victoria, with the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities stealthily shepherded through Parliament by Attorney-General Rob Hulls with little public discussion.
There were of course some important losers out of this process: ordinary people. The combination of a poorly advertised consultation period, the enactment of legislation without an individual complaint mechanism and the failure by the State Government to allocate a sufficient budget for community education, has done very little to raise the appreciation of human rights within Victorian voters.
The small-target strategy has never been viable for a federal human rights campaign. This is because the anti-rights movement nationally is formidable, as the recent book launch bears out. Three things make the "No Bill" campaign a force to be reckoned with.
Firstly, the No Bill campaign has at its disposal a national broadsheet, the Australian. The Oz steadfastly refuses to publish pieces in support of a human rights act, offering its pages instead to a weekly barrage of opinion pieces from the No Bill campaign. With other News Ltd newspapers hostile to rights and the Fairfax papers lukewarm at best, the Australian's journalistic activism is a significant problem for progressives.
Further, the No Bill campaign is spearheaded by Bob Carr. The ALP heavyweight had been peddling the No Bill cause for at least a year before the consultation was announced. With direct access to Parliament House, the ear of key decision makers in Cabinet and a history while Premier of NSW of stripping the rights of injured people to sue, only a highly organised and disciplined human rights campaign will defeat him.
Finally, the No Bill campaign has aligned its hatred for human rights laws with the hard religious right. Recently, at the invitation of the Catholic Archdiocese in Melbourne, Carr spoke with Jim Wallace, head of the Australian Christian Lobby and Professor Greg Craven, Vice Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, on why rights laws were a threat to decent Christian people.
Christians, the ACL tells us, should be opposed to a bill of rights because it provides no protection for the unborn. Carr, dog whistler par excellence, hopes to stir the pro-life forces within his own party and the Cabinet to defeat the bill.
None of this should be a surprise to progressives. The Australian Human Rights Group, and the many individual pro-rights organisations within its network, have known for years that the No Bill campaign would be real, highly organised and well connected. There is no excuse besides poor planning for failing to win the human rights debate this time.
As a supporter of a human rights act for Australia, I am disappointed in the campaign so far. The campaign is not just about a legal document. It's an entire framework for governing that places compassion for the individual and respect for human dignity ahead of corporate and government interests. A human rights act in Australia is therefore fundamental to the future of the progressive movement in Australia and deserves a disciplined, well funded and slick campaign strategy.
Human rights advocates — you need to take a great leap forward. Get out of the comfort of your academic ivory towers, away from the legal precincts of William Street and Queens Square and start talking rights with ordinary people. Stop having a sook over the press not running your well researched (but dead boring) analysis of international human rights covenants, and start holding rallies, online happenings and a fundraising event or two. Work the media. Get someone young and YouTube friendly to be your spokesperson. And start talking about how rights are the rules of fair play, not hard-to-grasp legal principles.
And while you're at it put out a goddamn badge or something I can wear! The human rights revolution is just a t-shirt away.
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As someone who’s been very involved with the campaign for a Human Rights Act, as a volunteer with Amnesty International, and happens to be sitting in the public hearings going on at Parliament House right now I’d completely reject the notion that Amnesty International has in anyway neglected its campaign, especially in its online activities.
Amnesty International was also campaigning at both the Big Days Out (a large music festival which tours the country every January), and Homebake. Thousands of young people were able to give their input to the Human Rights Consultation at these two campaigning events alone.
As new matilda would now, right now Amnesty International has a team of staff and volunteers at the public hearings streaming content out through Twitter, Facebook and flickr, giving some of the best coverage of a government consultation hearing I’ve seen yet from any organisation taking campaigning and access to information on the internet seriously. They’ve setup a portal, and encouraged all their subscribers to engage with the content they’re putting out (you can see how good it is for yourself at http://amnesty.org.au/yourhumanrights)
Amnesty’s team live-tweeting and blogging at the Human Rights Consultation public hearings
I’d also like to point out that the campaign is not over, Amnesty International Australia and GetUp!alone made up around a third of submissions, and I’m confident in the fact that both organisations will see this campaign through.
The consultation has been the first step. Lobbying government to adopt an adequate and aspirational Human Rights Act or Charter of Rights is the next step.
I’ve been a member of the New Matilda HRB project and have also followed this process, attending one of the Brennan committee consultative sessions in Wollongong. I’ve been disappointed in the lack of advance notice from the organisers of this week’s meetings in Canberra (preventing my attendance) - but that’s an admin issue, and I look forward to reading the range of proposals and detractions which are distilled from the process.
I’m willing to work (and wait) for a long time to achieve the first step of a charter - even if the Rudd government seems to be cooling their support for shorter-term change, and may well affirm the process … but set this aside ‘for a while’.
WE will still be here.
It’s all very well for the consultation process to involve those who are IT literate, but what of other often older (and perhaps even wiser) individuals who are not?
If the Bill of Human Rights was going to be used in conjunction to an already well enunciated set of universal values as expressed in international bodies and charters such as the UN, it may have some relevance and bite.
Because the basic problem is that federal legislative powers can override all other laws, including international ones that are not covered by treaties. And so other than the interpretation of legislation by the judiciary, where an individual’s rights can be weighed against those of the common good, there is not much opportunity to engage a Bill of Rights.
A Bill of Rights could set in stone legislation that may still be placing the individual’s rights in jeopardy, with no room for change.
Whereas if judges were allowed (through a Bill of Rights) to refer to international legislation like the International Covenant for Political and Civil Rights etc., they would have less internal political pressure to allow Federal or State legislation to override individual rights. And therefore they would also be less likely to abandon the rights of an individual who is now protected by international laws in international covenants.
HR legislation will allow judges to pronounce incompatibility of legislation with basic human rights. That’s all. Such judicial opinion, if issued, does not change anything. It will signal to the Parliament to look again at the impugned legislation.
HR legislation is of great importance to the majority of us, because we collectively can press the legislators to change the unjust laws. The barons who have written the book against do not need just laws; they have enough money to buy justice.
I wish to congratulate Tanja Kovic as a spokesperson for PolMin (Policy Ministry) in pointing out the insidious machinations of prominent conservative Catholics to kill the proposed Bill of Rights. The ringleaders in this cabal are Cardinal Pell, Professor Greg Craven and General Peter Cosgrove and I feel very much for Fr Frank Brennan, who chairs the consultative process, and who is the employee of Professor Craven at the Australian Catholic University, where Brennan works and which Craven heads. In fact the paramount position of the Catholic Church is pro-Human Rights and I would like the opportunity to explain why I think this extraordinary phalanx of opposition to a Human Rights Bill has been mounted.
The Catholic Church played a major role in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. Indeed the teaching of the Church is so forward looking on this point that it declares in relation to social conservatives, who often seek to contain human rights through reference to countervailing human responsibilities, that there are no such detractive responsibilities, but if there were responsibilties the first of these would be to protect such rights! I speak incidentally as one who coordinated the Teaching for Human Rights Project in Queensland when the Qld Government under Bjelke-Petersen proscribed state school involvement in it while Catholic education endorsed it for its schools.
I want also to take issue the above persons for taking a view of human rights that appears somewhat narrow and which constructs them principally in terms of bio-ethical rights, which of course they do include but which on their own provide a distorted account of a much fuller human rights discourse. In this regard some Roman Catholics have sought unashamedly to develop common ground with fundamentalists, who view morality in purely personalistic terms and reject a view of ethics as social and political. The reasons for this are numerous, but especially relate to the liberation of woman and their right to procreate. Inevitably the position of the Catholic Church, which opposes abortion as a form of birth control (a position that I share), has unfortunately been drawn into making abortion the only issue on which its position on human rights can be determined. An associated issue is stem-cell research.
I think that the safeguards for Catholic and similar other doctors afforded by the Victorian Bill of Rights are adequate and, having expressed the moral reservations precluding them from carrying out a termination based on birth control grounds alone, it is reasonable to expect such doctors to refer their patients to other doctors. In a pluralistic democracy like Australia’s, it seems to me, one can expect little else and ought not to expect extraordinary safeguards for Catholics to impose their views on others and I doubt if many of my co-religionists would take issue with such a view. I think in fact that the real issues relate to the exemptions that the Catholic Church regularly seeks in respect of anti-discrimination requirements for employees of its schools and other services.
Such exemptions do not exist in other OECD polities and, while they are a point of contention, the special character of Catholic institutions is widely seen to be successfully safeguarded without seeking exemptions for such requirements. Indeed in some Australian jurisdictions, such as Tasmania, such exemptions are neither sought nor allowed and have had no negative impacts whatsoever on preserving the special character of Catholic institutions. This has led to the Catholic Church in such jurisdictions playing a more wholehearted role in good faith in championing human rights without fear to the kind of dualism that infects a Catholic discourse on human rights and equal opportunity issues in the majority of Australian jurisdictions.
While much of this discourse is focussed on protecting vestiges of homophobia in Catholic educational circles, the cost to Catholic institutions has been colossal in terms of foregoing funding of an amount equivalent to state schools for children enrolled in Catholic schools. The argument I advance here is that without such exemptions there would be no hindrance to Catholic schools, for example, to seek funding for their students equivalent to that for state schools (as happens in several overseas jurisdictions). Now here’s the rub: from 2012 the Commonwealth Government is proposing to fund all schools, public as well as private on a basis differentiated only according to the socio-economic status of students enrolled in each school. This reform will once and for all remove the artificial ‘class’ binary between private and state schools as well as dramatically reward non-government schools that enrol students regardless of their capacity or willingness to pay fees.
Some Catholic authorities, aware that their demographic has steadily shifted to reflect similar trends for mainly higher SES students to enrol in non-government schools, are petrified that government funding of an amount equivalent to state schools will bring with it the kind of social and cultural accountabilities relating to inclusion and diversity that some conservative Catholics would be reluctant to tender. And accordingly the likes of General Cosgrove and former Premier Carr have arguably been dragooned into making a case against such a thing happening. A Bill of Rights would almost certainly make such exemptions much more difficult to attain and so the Church is prepared to gainsay the enormous contribution of Catholic Social Teaching to the discourse of Human Rights by siding with people who are its natural abusers.
In addition, there is some possibility that disaffected Catholics, such as the priest, Fr Peter Kennedy of Brisbane, would be able to avail of civil law and human rights provisions to advance their case against summary dismissal from their employment when it is clear that they enjoy the support of the vast majority of their parishioners. In other words such persons would be able to avail of safeguards in relation to due process, the right to a fair and open trial etc., that the Church’s own Code of Canon Law, for all its inflections regarding subsidiarity and the like, does not permit and this would make it more difficult for an Archbishop to sack a priest on instructions from Rome without the opportunity for such a person to seek redress in a civil court.
In other words Australia, like the rest of the world before it, will at last recognise that protocols internal to the governance of the Catholic Church do not provide sufficient safeguards for the protection of the human rights of employees of the Catholic Church which is Australia’s largest private sector employer and the second largest employer in this country. Be therefore prepared for a fight, and a very dirty one at that, similar to the Split, in which a substantial section of the Catholic Church chose to try and consolidate its hold over a major political party and influence its members ‘confessional’ voting patterns in that regard!
The campaign has already started in the Catholic Press and in sections of the non-religious media, such as The Australian, which incontestably support a conservative anti-human rights ideology or at least a very neo-conservative and watered down view of it. Such a campaign takes many forms, such as currently evidenced in the character assassination of President Obama for lifting sanctions on the use of condoms as development aid in AIDS prone countries, and which were imposed by Bush and his fundamentalist constituency. (One of the more absurd claims in this battle was that of the Vatican which stated that condoms were useless because they permitted sperm to flow through tiny apertures in them!) In this battle a most useful voice in this discourse has been that of Sr Joan Chittester, an American Benedictine sister and Catholic scholar who defended the decision of Notre Dame University, Indiana, to invite the President to speak to Convocation on his social policy program.
Nice piece Tan, and if those badges come through put me down for one.
Terrible that the Australian Human Rights Group should be putting its energy into ‘lengthy legal submissions’ at a time like this rather than placing the emphasis on buttons, t-shirts and crappy slogans. Huh???
While I can see aspects of some of your points Tanja, I’d be interested to know, given that you mention community legal centres, whether you are including us under the ‘ivory tower, out of touch with ordinary people’ rubric.
As Policy Officer with the peak body for Victorian CLCs, the Federation of Community Legal Centres, I know how hard many CLCs worked on organising community consultations (partly because there was no government funding made available for this, and the Round Table process was limited), including running stalls at festivals, talking with clients and community groups in their local areas, putting on plays and photo competitions, setting up youth Internet sites… and yes, writing submissions, because this appears to be one submission process where sheer numbers count.
CLCs were represented on the Australian Human Rights Group but on top of all our usual work we were just too damn flat out and underresourced to run a slick media and politician campaign ourselves, although it would have been nice.
Various NGOs, including the Federation of CLCs, could also easily take issue with your characterisation of activists being co-opted by govt in the Victorian Charter campaign. VCOSS and ourselves did some of the most extensive community-based work on a possible Charter, again within the limits of our resources.
I think it is too easy to conflate the failures of Government and the elitism of the corporate end of town with the efforts of all lawyers committed to human rights. In that vein I could just as well lay part of the blame at the feet of PolMin for apparently not getting out there and doing it yourselves. ‘Ivory tower’ as a characterisation of all academics in the human rights realm also seems a bit too simple for how things work these days. Probably not dissimilar from the idea, in 2009, that distributing T-shirts and badges will automatically do better at changing the world.
Chris Atmore (Policy Officer, Federation of Community Legal Centres (Vic))
"The human rights revolution is just a t-shirt away."
LOGO =
HUMAN RIGHTS
I’M LOOKING AFTER YOURS
WILL YOU LOOK AFTER MINE.
I’m sorry for the disappointment Tanya but I think an Act rather than a Constitutional (Federal) Ammendment is too light and too prone to contention and over-rule.
But I agree that it has to be carried by the young, esp every time they are on a street corner canvassing for a charity. Have you a flyer for them to distribute?
Atheistno1
News Ltd & Bob Carr would be very worried if a Bill of rights was past & for that fact, so would many others who supported torture & oppression in the past. It’s all well & good to say that one should stop sitting in ivory towers, get out & speak to the public, when most of us are suppressed by a pack of evangelists in political power. Catholic women’s groups are calling for the use of torture & politicians are holding the public in a strangle hold with the lowest form of Mafia tactics, that most of the public have never seen, or don’t recognise.
Part of my reluctance to throw myself enthusiastically behind a push to give more power and authority to a Human Rights establishment in Australia is the way I feel it has betrayed genuine human rights in Australia.
It’s something I did not predict. In the late 80s, when the Human Rights Act passed, I was an enthusiastic supporter.
Doubtless HREOC (now the HRC) has done some good work. But in my naive way, I thought it would be a bulwark against attempts to curtail free speech. That’s because freedom of opinion and free speech are so clearly enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 (see articles 18 and 19).
To watch the Human Rights Commission become part of an elaborate extended exercise by Australia’s organized Jewish Lobby (notable the AIJAC) to CURTAIL free speech was a rude shock.
Human Rights should be about protecting the weakest and most vulnerable in our society - not favouring one of Australia’s most powerfully lobbies, which seems to have a fixation on ensuring everyone else concurs with its preferred historical narratives.
The article charaterises lawyers with these words:
"Many lawyers, particularly top-end-of-town, pro bono types, enjoy the separation from the great unwashed that the client-lawyer relationship affords them. The concept of engaging with real people — through rallies and via broad based education campaigns — is anathema to them."
As a lawyer I reckon that’s pretty fair, pretty accurate.
And that’s exactly why I don’t support a Bill of Rights. Why would you want a group who enjoy their separation from the great unwashed deciding important issues affecting how ordinary people live? Politicians, for all their failures, at least spend substantial amount of time shaking hands with the great unwashed and kissing their babies. Politicians have their finger on public opinion more than probably any other profession save perhaps the advertising industry.
Whilst our system of government is not perfect at least the great unwashed have representatives who are very aware what they think and feel. Giving more power to lawyers "who dislike engaging with real people" doesn’t sound like the best deal for real people to me.
As a member of the Australian Human Rights Group (AHRG) Steering Committee, representing the Uniting Church in Australia National Assembly, I am disappointed that Tanja Kovac has expended energy criticising those who share her aims. She rightly describes the AHRG as a ‘loose affiliation of organisations’ but it was never envisaged as a campaign group and was not structured or financed in a way that would have enabled it to run a campaign as Ms Kovac hoped it would.
The intention behind the AHRG was to form a hub and a network where a diverse range of groups and individuals (the list of members can be found on the website http://www.humanrightsact.com.au/ahrg/) could share information with each other, encourage broad and effective participation in the National Human Rights Consultation, support each other’s educational and campaign activities and signal to the Government and the Australian community that a diverse range of groups and organisations shared a hope for the development of a national Human Rights Act.
Within this structure AHRG members were able to continue to work with their own constituencies and networks on their particular issues in ways that made sense for them. GetUp! and Amnesty both ran their own successful campaigns which were widely publicised across the AHRG network. In my own context, UnitingJustice Australia’s capacity to provide high quality, well-researched and thoughtful resources for the Uniting Church was greatly enhanced by our participation in the AHRG. Members generously shared their resources. We adapted and used each other’s materials to suit our own situations. As a network we issued a number of press releases and made a focussed and concise (not lengthy and technical) submission to the National Human Rights Consultation Committee.
Under these arrangements, UnitingJustice Australia was able to target our work where we believed we could be most effective. We focussed our limited resources on education within the Uniting Church and encouraging the members of the Christian ecumenical community and organisations within Australia’s multi-faith networks, maybe for the first time, to consider the state of human rights in Australia. Buttons, t-shirts, postcards and a slogan would not have helped to bring faith-based groups on board with the idea of a Human Rights Act. Church members not already committed to a cause will not, and should not, be swayed simply by a catchy slogan.
The Uniting Church (and as demonstrated within the AHRG, many other community groups as well as legal centres and human rights academics) is concerned with the deep and lasting transformation of our culture in order to build a society where justice, peace and compassion are the values underpinning public policy. We believe that campaigns play an important role in this mission and we engage and support them whenever it is appropriate. In this case, we joined the AHRG, precisely because we believed we needed to engage in a different kind of work. Ms Kovac is, of course, entitled to believe we made a mistake.
However, if as a result of the current debate, Australia fails to entrench human rights protections in Commonwealth law, I believe that it will be for myriad more substantial and concerning reasons than the lack of a catchy slogan.
Elenie Poulos, UnitingJustice Australia
Knockers of T-Shirts and Badges should offer alternatives as to how to engage our youth who have the energy and "front" to get the issue in the public’s eye.
Has anyone approached the Teachers Federation for support?.
It seems to me that a Bill of Rights is the natural aspiration of a modern enlightened state. It certainly should assist Foreign Affairs in international dealings. Not having one suggests insincerity or imposing double standards.
I find the MFurtado contribution very useful, in analysing the opponents to an HR charter and their motives. These people like Carr must just be pressured into expanding their arguments (many based so far in vague fears, like "unelected judges") with more detailed proof and rational examples, which I think they’ll find difficult.
The present (Brennan) project is still a constructive process - within its 2009 timescale the Rudd government might still choose to "defer" any responding action - but the need for, and growing awareness of possible ways forward will not be suppressed.