Queensland's Labor Government is conducting a parliamentary inquiry into the desirability of a human rights act. Such inquiries are routine fare for newly elected Labor governments in Australia.
Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory have enacted comprehensive human rights legislation which provides a working model for those other Australian jurisdictions tempted to give it a go. The ALP right faction, like their Liberal and National Party colleagues, have long been suspicious about human rights legislation. This has always been the case in New South Wales.
I was privileged to chair the National Human Rights Consultation Committee for the Rudd government in 2009. Two of the strongest opponents of a federal human rights act were Bob Carr, who had served a record term as New South Wales Labor premier, and John Hatzistergos, a retired federal prosecutor who had come into the New South Wales parliament when Carr was premier. He then became Attorney-General under Carr's successor, Morris Iemma.
In April 2008, long before the federal Labor government had asked me to chair their inquiry, I attended a spirited address by Hatzistergos who was feeling the heat from some of his Labor colleagues, who were urging him to consider a human rights act along the lines of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act.
Hatzistergos was having none of it. He thought the Victorian charter was an expensive, trendy piece of academic window dressing. He told his Sydney Institute audience that if the proponents of the Victorian Charter were correct, you would expect to see a strong flow of traffic down the Hume Highway with people migrating from Sydney to Melbourne in pursuit of the Australian human rights paradise.
I was so bold as to suggest that if his doom and gloom about a human rights act were correct, you would expect to find a crushing flow of traffic in the opposite direction. Given that there was no such flow in either direction, I remained an agnostic fence-sitter about the benefits of a human rights act.
During the National Human Rights Consultation, a sizeable majority of those who put in submissions and those who attended community consultations were strongly in favour of a human rights act. There was also moderate support within the focus groups and in the anonymous telephone polling we commissioned. In the end, my committee came out in support of a human rights act.
The most compelling argument for me was a fairly technical