Human rights consultation

Went to the Human Rights Charter con­sulta­tion in Danden­ong today. Was very inter­est­ing – lots of dis­cus­sion at my table on polit­ical rights vs social and cul­tural rights, the frame­work for rights in Aus­tralia (con­sti­tu­tional vs legis­lat­ive), dis­cus­sion of the need for rem­ed­ies and enforce­ab­il­ity and so on and so forth. Not enough brain to detail at the moment… besides, I plan to write a sub­mis­sion to the con­sulta­tion (you can too: sub­mis­sions due May 29, and don’t use the GetUp site to do it unless you’re really time poor – write your own, con­sidered, multi-page submission).

I’m involved with this for a number of reas­ons: it’s a once-in-a-life­time chance to par­ti­cip­ate in the estab­lish­ment of a human rights charter in this coun­try; I’ve always been inter­ested in global gov­ernance and this is a step­ping stone to help­ing shape my world; I want to be able to tell Harper I was involved with it and didn’t sit by and let others do it; I strongly believe civic par­ti­cip­a­tion is a duty we all share; even more so after yes­ter­day, I’m wor­ried about those who argue we don’t need a charter, either because they think God will take care of it or because they think we are sub­jects of the Crown or because they think that laws restrict rights (yes, all of these points were raised by people at the con­sulta­tion) [1]; and selfishly because I hope my par­ti­cip­a­tion may lead to a career change that I find ful­filling and challenging.

Still on the human rights theme, it turns out I won the video com­pet­i­tion! Since I don’t own the rights to the Bob Marley song I used, I have to replace the music by next Tues­day so they can play it every­where and pro­mote the human rights charter. To say I’m thrilled is an under­state­ment of massive proportions.

[1] Well, what do you know? I’m less of a liber­tarian than I thought. I’ve been com­fort­ably aware that I’m more an anarcho-syn­dic­al­ist than a ‘pure’ anarch­ist for many years but recently I’ve been moving more towards lib­er­al­ism on some issues, at least for the dur­a­tion of my life­time, as I can’t see a com­plete lack of laws as work­able *yet* given stuff like honour killings and child brides. I still believe edu­ca­tion and not pun­ish­ment is the key to erad­ic­at­ing these things but I think having these things be ‘legal’ or having no laws made about them gives the wrong mes­sage. It’s very complicated.