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	Championing human rights in the wrong way by Ben Saul University of Sydney & agencies Australia   Oct 2014   By co-opting the language of rights to protect their own business and political interests, the Abbott government denigrates those rights most Australians actually value.   As the Australian parliament adopts more stringent laws on terrorism and refugees, it is timely to ask how well the government is fulfilling its traditional “freedom” agenda. It famously retreated from its battle to maximise free speech by minimising racial hatred protections. It lost that battle but its ideological war for freedom continues.   Recall that George Brandis, the attorney general, announced a law reform inquiry into traditional civil and political freedom. Brandis is especially concerned about corporate, environmental and industrial regulations which restrict rights.   Brandis also appointed a “freedom commissioner”, Tim Wilson, who is conducting his own inquiry and is concerned, for instance, that native vegetation laws impinge on land rights, and that councils prevent those with ocean front land from developing it in the face of rising seas.   Nelson Mandela’s freedom agenda pales next to this. The suffering of News Ltd columnist Andrew Bolt, who breached racial discrimination laws, is especially incomparable.   The attorney general’s “freedom” agenda is really an ideological war on human rights that pretends to defend them. The freedom agenda is ridiculous for so many reasons. It is an attempt to co-opt the language of rights to protect business interests. Corporations are not generally downtrodden, and by the way, are not entitled to “human” rights.   It attempts to silence, diminish or deflect the human rights violations suffered by those who are most vulnerable, disadvantaged, or powerless. It denigrates the rights that most Australians think important, such as freedom from discrimination or being sacked for being pregnant. It fails to understand that the state is not just a threat to rights, but a necessary guarantor of them from intrusion or predation by private interests.   It is obsessed with boutique concerns, like defending bigotry, which most Australians believe to be cruel and unreasonable. It naively believes that law has no place in dealing with racism, and that victims of abuse on a bus can somehow engage a racist thug in a reasoned conversation and persuade them they are wrong.   The freedom agenda also cherry-picks some rights as indispensable to democracy when others are equally important. We can hardly participate fully in democracy if we are starving, homeless, illiterate, jobless, deprived of healthcare or social support. Social and economic rights matter as much as civil and political ones. Our social democracy is one of the most stable and prosperous in the world precisely because it takes care of those in need, and we have avoided the dysfunction and poverty that dogs free-enterprise America.   The freedom agenda is also philosophically incoherent. The attorney general’s idol, John Stuart Mill, would be turning in his grave at how he is being verballed. Mill was not a liberal extremist, and accepted social limits on rights. The musings of a 19th century Englishman are also hardly the last word on how multicultural modern Australia should be governed. Mill, after all, defended despotic rule over barbarians, plundered for the British East India Company, and wound up as a virtual socialist. Some liberal hero.   But let’s take seriously for a moment the government’s claim that it is really concerned about the erosion of traditional rights – and assess how well it is protecting them.   Freedom from arbitrary or illegal detention is one of the oldest and most cherished classic liberal rights, going back at least 800 years to the Magna Carta. Why then is the government arbitrarily detaining thousands of refugees for protracted or indefinite periods? Or locking away the mentally ill, even in police stations? Or not dealing with the extraordinary over-incarceration of Indigenous Australians?   I’m thinking here of the 22-year-old Indigenous woman from Western Australia who died recently in custody after being detained for unpaid fines; or the man scorched alive in the back of a paddy wagon in the outback heat not long ago.   If the government is so concerned about free speech, why is it now criminalising intelligence whistleblowers and journalists who expose illegality or impropriety? Or permitting excessive defamation laws to shield the powerful? Or retaining nanny state classification standards which unduly restrict what grown-ups may read or watch?   If the government is concerned about the classic freedom of association, why does it permit restrictions on the right to strike and freedom of association, including collective bargaining, in breach of International Labour Organisations standards?   Why does the government undermine freedom of religion by persisting with a school chaplaincy program that, in practice, makes Christianity the default religious presence in schools, dangerously blurring the separation between church and state, and making taxpayers subsidise Christianity?   Why does the government restrict freedom of movement by criminalising visits to a foreign place that the foreign minister does not want you to go, without the state having to prove that you did anything wrong? Or by coercing refugees to live in rural areas?   Why does the government disenfranchise many prisoners by denying them the right to vote – and thus undermine the very foundation of democracy, namely universal and equal suffrage?   Why does the government interfere in the private sphere of personal autonomy by prohibiting same-sex marriage; enabling mass surveillance of the innocent through deceptive warrants that access whole computer networks; allowing police to taser us on a whim; or not introducing a new cause of action to protect privacy? Why does it interfere in families by preventing refugees on temporary visas from reuniting with family members? Why does it infantilise and demean refugees by making them sign codes of conduct?   Why doesn’t the government do more to protect equality and equal treatment, in a country where female workers lag behind in every indicator, from equal pay, to workforce participation, to representation among CEOs, on corporate boards, and in parliament? And where sexual harassment is endemic in our military? And where a female prime minister is misogynistically pilloried by some in the attorney general’s own party?   Why is the government destroying traditional liberal ideas about the rule of law, such as by the near-total denial of procedural fairness to more than 50 refugees given adverse security assessments by Asio – which serves as judge, jury and executioner? Or through the current migration bill which eliminates natural justice?   What about the chronic underfunding of legal aid, which prevents the most marginal from vindicating their “traditional” rights? Why is the government eroding the already weak institutions we have for safeguarding rights, by reducing funding to the Australian Human Rights Commission and politicising it with an ideological appointee?   And these are just traditional civil and political rights that the government is failing to defend. It is also undermining economic and social rights. Equality of opportunity in education is at risk from the deregulation of universities. The quality of education in schools is under attack from the politicisation of the curriculum, with a renewed emphasis on Judeo-Christian and British heritage, and an obsessive focus on imperial British military campaigns like Gallipoli – as if Gallipoli is not already our most heavily remembered historical event.   Accessible and affordable healthcare will be compromised by new upfront fees. Vulnerable young people are having their welfare cut and are being punished for the government’s failure to generate enough jobs for them – violating the rights to social security, an adequate standard of living, and non-discrimination on the basis of age.   Private property rights are increasingly trumping collective Indigenous land rights. Indigenous peoples are being denied control over their communities and customary laws, and deprived of representative political institutions, and remain under the reign of a paternalistic, racially interventionist, centrist white state. It is little wonder that people deprived of control over their own future suffer across the spectrum of disadvantage.   These are just some examples of human rights abuses in the real world, not the terrifying perils of regulation in the corporate boardroom. “Restoring the balance” is another way of saying the government wants to pick and choose whose rights it respects and whose it violates with impunity. This is not a democratic “rebalancing”. It just gives more power to the powerful, and leaves the powerless with even less.   The point is that if the government were genuinely serious about addressing human rights problems, it would not shunt them off to distant inquiries. It would act now by repealing or amending bad laws, and refraining from passing new ones.   The government could even show its heartfelt concern for freedoms by adopting a bill of rights. Why dabble at the edges when a systemic fix is available? Why allow your colleagues, or future governments, to violate rights if you can entrust the independent courts to safeguard them for all time?   The government’s freedom agenda is breathtakingly hypocritical, incoherent and insincere. We already know the gamut of rights violations in Australia. There are no surprises. There is just no political will to fix them.   * Ben Saul is professor of international law at the University of Sydney. This is an extract of a speech delivered at the NSW Council for Civil Liberties.   December 2013   The Attorney-General George Brandis is waging an ideological war on human rights while pretending to defend them. His view that human rights have blown off course in Australia is not based on evidence or a coherent understanding of rights. It is also an attempt to divert attention from the government"s own serious rights violations.   Brandis wishes to "restore the balance" because "traditional rights, freedoms and privileges" have been "unnecessarily compromised". Already he has announced a law reform inquiry and made an unusual appointment as Human Rights Commissioner, by installing Tim Wilson, a former policy director of the free market think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs.   Among Brandis highest priorities are defending an absolutist idea of free speech (so as even to protect hate speech against minorities) and loosening corporate, environmental and industrial regulations that impair rights.   It is inevitable, and right, that those concerned about human rights should focus on the most harmful abuses. Usually this means speaking out for the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalised, and the powerless. This is why Brandis shows exceptionally poor judgment, and little grasp of the real world of human rights abuses, when he prioritises the right of powerful commentators to be able to say hurtful things about indigenous people, or attacks regulations that impinge on corporate interests.   Since the Magna Carta 800 years ago, the most important civil right has been freedom from arbitrary executive detention, without charge or effective judicial control. For 20 years, Australian governments have violated this freedom tens of thousands of times. Mandatory immigration detention is a grave human rights abuse, all the more so when it is inflicted on refugees seeking our protection.   If the Attorney-General was genuinely concerned about civil rights, he would phone the Immigration Minister Scott Morrison to release all asylum seekers detained for, say, more than 30 days. In seconds, he could stop thousands of serious rights violations.   But the Attorney-General allows them to languish. He is more worried about the suffering of columnist Andrew Bolt, who was found guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act over two articles he wrote in 2009.   Brandis is wrong to suggest that civil and political rights have been neglected. They have been deliberately violated. Australia periodically reports to the UN about its implementation of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Australia is often criticised by the UN experts for many violations, yet perpetually complains that it should not have to follow a treaty to which it agreed.   If Brandis is serious about protecting rights, he could start by immediately implementing the UN"s recommendations. He could also listen to his own Human Rights Commission. For example, it could guarantee civil and political rights to marginalised indigenous people, including those who were racially discriminated against by Howard"s Northern Territory intervention and whose representative bodies were abolished.   It could stop violating the right to life, and freedom from torture, by summarily returning Tamil asylum seekers to Sri Lanka. It could refrain from abolishing the "complementary protection" laws. It could stop disappearing refugees into squalor offshore, dehumanising them.   It could stop driving refugees in indefinite detention to suicide, treatment that the UN has found to be unlawfully cruel, inhuman or degrading. In a century"s time, our refugee gulags will be looked upon like we now look on the Stolen Generations: with disbelief at our cruelty.   These are human rights abuses in the real world, not the terrifying perils of regulation in the corporate boardroom. "Restoring the balance" is another way of saying the government wants to pick and choose whose rights it respects and whose it violates with impunity. This is not a democratic "rebalancing". It just gives more power to the powerful, and leaves the powerless with even less. It is perverse, facile and fanatical.   Brandis ideological war on human rights is also corroding the institutions set up to protect them. The Human Rights Commission is being shamelessly attacked and politicised. The point of creating a statutory body is to guarantee its independence from politics. This is all the more important where governments threaten rights but there is no bill of rights, the courts lack jurisdiction, the UN is pilloried, and international law is ignored.   It is an obvious point, but the Human Rights Commissioner should be a human rights expert, not an ideological appointee. Why not appoint one of the many Australians who have spent their careers working at the coalface, with victims of violations, in human rights organisations? Or a world-renowned human rights specialist like Professor Hilary Charlesworth or Professor Sarah Joseph? Why wasn"t the position publicly advertised and competitively selected based on merit?   The commission should also be free to expose rights violations and hold governments accountable without constantly fearing political interference. It should not be tamed as the lapdog of an ideologically obsessed government determined to protect its privileged mates, and stamp out criticism of its own extreme policies.   * Ben Saul is Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney.   Attorney General appoints Human Rights Commissioner who thinks Human Rights Commission should be abolished. (Extract: The Age)   Alone among the seven commissioners of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Tim Wilson never had to apply for the job. He never had to sit for an interview, be screened by an expert panel, or undergo the rigorous weeks-long selection process that applied to the others.   Instead, Attorney-General George Brandis rang him up a couple of weeks ago and asked if he was interested. He took 24 hours to think about it and consult his partner Ryan, (a Melbourne primary school teacher) before saying yes. By Monday it was official, and the twitterverse went into meltdown. So hasty was the cabinet appointment, the formalities of submitting it to the Governor-General will not be conducted until early next year.   Wilson, 33, says he was shocked to discover what he"ll earn in his new job - more than $320,000 a year, close to the $340,000 paid to a federal court judge. John Roskam, head of the right-wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs extols the virtues of his former employee, "I think it"s most appropriate that Tim is there," Roskam said this week, "Though, the IPA still thinks the Human Rights Commission should be abolished".   The IPA"s desire to axe the commission is not the only reason why many in the human rights field consider Wilson"s appointment perverse. "He has got no relevant qualifications at all," one commission staffer complained this week. "He has been a climate change denier, has done no law, little policy, he has an arts degree and a masters . . . but he has no technical qualifications in this field at all."   Barrister Greg Barns, spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance, sees the Wilson appointment as "overtly political", and "troubling" in terms of ensuring the body"s independence from the government.   But it"s clear Brandis has more planned for the commission than just the Wilson appointment. He said he was looking at its legislation and that amendments were likely.   Senior Coalition ministers have accumulated grudges towards the organisation. They believe it didn"t raise its voice loudly enough to defend free speech when Labor tried to bring in media regulations to counter the bias in the Murdoch Press. Nor did they feel it welcomed the debate over section 18C of the federal Racial Discrimination Act, the provision under which conservative columnist and Abbott favourite Andrew Bolt was found guilty of insulting Aboriginal leaders. Abbott and Brandis have pledged to repeal or amend the section.   Disability Commissioner Graeme Innes sparked further Coalition anger when he launched into Myer earlier this year over boss Bernie Brookes claim that a levy increase to fund the national disability insurance scheme was money better left in the hands of Myer"s customers.   * Note: Mr. Wilson does not support the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, consequently he is manifestly not qualified to hold the position of Human Rights Commissioner for Australia.   http://www.hrlc.org.au/aboriginal-ethnic-religious-and-community-groups-australia-must-retain-strong-and-effective-protections-against-racial-vilification
	The Meaning of Decent Society by Robert Reich Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley USA   December 2013   It’s the season to show concern for the less fortunate among us. We should also be concerned about the widening gap between the most fortunate and everyone else.   Although it’s still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million), the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re born into. Our life chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of our parents.   That’s not always been the case. The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches – with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone – was once at the core of the American Dream.   And equal opportunity was the heart of the American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed, raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.   But for more than three decades we’ve been going backwards. It’s far more difficult today for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.   The major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder the climb. America is now more unequal that it’s been for eighty or more years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.   Rather than respond with policies to reverse the trend and get us back on the road to equal opportunity and widely-shared prosperity, we’ve spent much of the last three decades doing the opposite.   Taxes have been cut on the rich, public schools have deteriorated, higher education has become unaffordable for many, safety nets have been shredded, and the minimum wage has been allowed to drop 30 percent below where it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.   Congress has just passed a tiny bipartisan budget agreement, and the Federal Reserve has decided to wean the economy off artificially low interest rates. Both decisions reflect Washington’s (and Wall Street’s) assumption that the economy is almost back on track. But it’s not at all back on the track it was on more than three decades ago.   It’s certainly not on track for the record 4 million Americans now unemployed for more than six months, or for the unprecedented 20 million American children in poverty (we now have the highest rate of child poverty of all developed nations other than Romania), or for the third of all working Americans whose jobs are now part-time or temporary, or for the majority of Americans whose real wages continue to drop.   How can the economy be back on track when 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent?   The underlying issue is a moral one: What do we owe one another as members of the same society?   Conservatives answer that question by saying it’s a matter of personal choice – of charitable works, philanthropy, and individual acts of kindness joined in “a thousand points of light.”   But that leaves out what we could and should seek to accomplish together as a society. It neglects the organization of our economy, and its social consequences. It minimizes the potential role of democracy in determining the rules of the game, as well as the corruption of democracy by big money. It overlooks our strivings for social justice.   In short, it ducks the meaning of a decent society.   Last month Pope Francis wondered aloud whether “trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness…”. Rush Limbaugh accused the Pope of being a Marxist for merely raising the issue.   But the question of how to bring about greater justice and inclusiveness is as American as apple pie. It has animated our efforts for more than a century – during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and beyond — to make capitalism work for the betterment of all rather merely than the enrichment of a few.   The supply-side, trickle-down, market-fundamentalist views that took root in America in the early 1980s got us fundamentally off track.   To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.   Lies About Inequality, by Robert Reich.   From 1979 to 2011, the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent, while the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent.   Even though French economist Thomas Piketty has made an air-tight case that we’re heading toward levels of inequality not seen since the days of the nineteenth-century robber barons, right-wing conservatives haven’t stopped lying about what’s happening and what to do about it.   Lie number one: The rich and CEOs are America’s job creators. So we dare not tax them.   The truth is the middle class and poor are the job-creators through their purchases of goods and services. If they don’t have enough purchasing power because they’re not paid enough, companies won’t create more jobs and economy won’t grow.   We’ve endured the most anemic recovery on record because most Americans don’t have enough money to get the economy out of first gear. The economy is barely growing and real wages continue to drop.   We keep having false dawns. An average of 200,000 jobs were created in the United States over the last three months, but huge numbers of Americans continue to drop out of the labor force.   Lie number two: People are paid what they’re worth in the market. So we shouldn’t tamper with pay.   The facts contradict this. CEOs who got 30 times the pay of typical workers forty years ago now get 300 times their pay not because they’ve done such a great job but because they control their compensation committees and their stock options have ballooned.   Meanwhile, most American workers earn less today than they did forty years ago, adjusted for inflation, not because they’re working less hard now but because they don’t have strong unions bargaining for them.   More than a third of all workers in the private sector were unionized forty years ago; now, fewer than 7 percent belong to a union.   Lie number three: Anyone can make it in America with enough guts, gumption, and intelligence. So we don’t need to do anything for poor and lower-middle class kids.   The truth is we do less than nothing for poor and lower-middle class kids. Their schools don’t have enough teachers or staff, their textbooks are outdated, they lack science labs, their school buildings are falling apart.   We’re the only rich nation to spend less educating poor kids than we do educating kids from wealthy families.   All told, 42 percent of children born to poor families will still be in poverty as adults – a higher percent than in any other advanced nation.   Lie number four: Increasing the minimum wage will result in fewer jobs. So we shouldn’t raise it.   In fact, studies show that increases in the minimum wage put more money in the pockets of people who will spend it – resulting in more jobs, and counteracting any negative employment effects of an increase in the minimum.   Three of my colleagues here at the University of California at Berkeley — Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester, and Michael Reich – have compared adjacent counties and communities across the United States, some with higher minimum wages than others but similar in every other way.   They found no loss of jobs in those with the higher minimums.   The truth is, America’s lurch toward widening inequality can be reversed. But doing so will require bold political steps.   At the least, the rich must pay higher taxes in order to pay for better-quality education for kids from poor and middle-class families. Labor unions must be strengthened, especially in lower-wage occupations, in order to give workers the bargaining power they need to get better pay. And the minimum wage must be raised. Don’t listen to the right-wing lies about inequality. Know the truth, and act on it. http://robertreich.org/   * See also: http://davidsimon.com/festival-of-dangerous-ideas-2013/ http://www.thenation.com/authors/greg-kaufmann http://www.thenation.com/section/inequality Visit the related web page
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