23 - Rights

Summary

Australia is unusual in lacking a formal bill of rights. Nevertheless, rights protections have developed, initially in the context of the emergence of settler colonialism within the British Empire. While Indigenous people were only gradually brought within the status of subjecthood, and have continued to be denied fundamental rights, early settlers including convicts had a well-developed sense of their rights as freeborn Britons. The development of the jury system, self-government and democracy were the context for a rights regime associated with a colonial liberal order in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the late nineteenth century, Australia developed a system of social rights based on the elevated status of the male breadwinner. Through the first half of the twentieth century, the British basis of rights claims remained dominant in Australia, but from the 1940s Australia was gradually drawn within an international human rights order, in a manner that strengthened the ability of marginalised groups to make rights claims through appeals to international standards and covenants. Despite the continued absence of a constitutional or legislative bill of rights, governments and courts have been active in recent decades in developing rights protections across a wide domain.