6 - The protection of rights

Summary

As Australia approaches its constitutional centenary, there is a new urgency in informed public debate about how well human rights are protected and what additional measures ought to be adopted for better protecting rights, including, most notably, a bill of rights. Australia is inevitably caught up in the international wave of concern for enhanced protection of human rights that is producing an expanding web of influential international agreements and expectations. Comparable liberal democratic countries with which Australia is accustomed to identify itself, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and New Zealand, have all adopted bills of rights or, as in the case of the United Kingdom, become increasingly subject to European international rights jurisdiction.

Heightened concern with protecting human rights in Australia has been evident in a range of public statements and forums in recent years. In 1988 the chief justice of the High Court, Sir Anthony Mason, announced that he had changed his mind in favour of a bill of rights because Australia was going against the international trend and getting out of step with comparable countries such as Canada (Mason 1989). Again in 1988, the Constitutional Commission, after exhaustive consideration, came out in favour of a Canadian-style entrenched bill of rights for Australia and proposed that a new chapter be added to the Constitution for that purpose (Vol. 1, 1988: 435–838, 1012–21).