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The Inaugural Alice Tay Lecture on Human Rights and Law

 

A Culture of Human Rights and Responsibilities

 

Professor Jim Ife

Jim Ife is Haruhisa Handa Professor of Human Rights Education and Head of the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. He previously held chairs in Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Western Australia, and at Curtin University. His research and teaching interests have been community development and human rights. His most recent book is Human Rights and Social Work: towards rights-based practice (Cambridge University Press, 2001). He has also had a long involvement in community activities and activism, having been President of Amnesty International Australia in the mid 1990s, and an international observer at the East Timor independence ballot in 1999.

 

It is indeed an honour and a privilege to have been invited to deliver the Alice Tay Memorial Lecture, in honour of a very significant advocate for human rights in Australia, whose memory we honour and perpetuate today, in the hope that her aspirations and her commitment will never die. I would like to thank the Freilich Foundation and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission for the invitation.

I would first like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal People, as the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting. No discussion of human rights in Australia should take place without an acknowledgement of the human rights violations that have been perpetrated in the past, and continue to be perpetrated today, on the descendents of the original inhabitants of this land, and I wish to emphasise that everything I say this evening is meant in a spirit of reconciliation. And as we are meeting in Parliament House, I cannot help also sharing a wish that one day the sittings of our national Parliament will start not only with a prayer denoting allegiance to the God of those who colonised this land in the last two centuries, but also with an acknowledgement of the traditional owners and custodians of the land and their spiritual traditions that have lasted for over 50,000 years.

The struggle for human rights has arguably never been more important than it is today, with increasing global interdependence, through the process of globalisation, linking human beings as never before. It is ironic, perhaps, that in this time when we are so clearly dependent on each other, when the future of the planet demands that we act together on major global environmental issues, where communications technology and rapid transport bring us closer together than ever before, and where the global market affects all our lives, the idea of independence is still so highly valued; it is seen as good to be independent, whether we are talking about an individual, a community, or a nation, and struggles for so-called independence continue to stir the passions, whether it be the struggle for personal independence in an economic or emotional sense, or a nation's political independence. Yet the very idea of independence as a transcending value is a nonsense; there can be no such thing in the contemporary world. Whether we are talking about individuals, families, communities, nations or corporations, independence is a myth; a convenient myth, perhaps, but a myth nonetheless. We are all dependent on each other, we cannot even survive, let alone reach our full human potential, without depending on others, and others in turn depend on us. Instead of the ideology of independence I would suggest that we should be recognising and celebrating our interdependence, recognising that it is only through our interaction in human community that we can realise our full potential. That is the approach to the understanding of human rights, and human responsibilities, that I want to explore this evening.

I have chosen to discuss both rights and responsibilities because there is often a reluctance to discuss both together. Some people, especially those on the political left, seem reluctant to engage in a discussion of responsibilities lest they be seen to be reinforcing the ideology of mutual obligation, with its coercive overtones. Similarly, some on the political right seem reluctant to talk too enthusiastically about rights, seeing them as dangerously socialist, and prefer instead to emphasise responsibilities and obligations. The separation of discourses of rights and responsibilities, while often driven by ideology, is also based on simplistic analysis. It might be argued that a discourse of rights is essentially a selfish discourse, concentrating on what I should receive, while a discourse of responsibilities is essentially an altruistic discourse, concentrating on what I should contribute. But that only holds true if I am talking about my rights and responsibilities. If, on the other hand, I am talking about your rights and responsibilities, a discourse of responsibilities can be punitive and controlling, while a discourse of rights can be liberating and empowering. We need to move beyond a simplistic dualistic position that sees either rights or responsibilities as inherently virtuous and the other as inherently dangerous, and instead see them as belonging together as essential components of our shared humanity. We also need to understand them in terms of the power involved. Defining the responsibilities of welfare recipients to contribute to the society, for example, is very different from defining the responsibilities of the rich and famous to do likewise. Some of us are far more comfortable with the latter than the former, while others find it easy to define the obligations of the poor but would not dare do the same to the rich. Whether you believe in rights for the poor and obligations for the rich, or rights for the rich and obligations for the poor, the reality is that you must treat both rights and obligations together, as neither makes sense without the other. Neither can be the exclusive province of either the political left or the political right. They belong together, and demand to be treated together, whatever one's ideology.

Responsibilities represent the hard part of human rights work. As any human rights worker or advocate will know, it is relatively easy to assert a right, and to persuade people of the legitimacy of that right, especially if it is already enshrined in UN declarations, covenants and conventions. The difficult part is spelling out the associated responsibilities, in identifying whom to hold to account for the protection and realisation of the claimed right. Here I believe we have often been far too simplistic in our analysis, and have assumed that it is the nation state that should be held accountable, in large measure if not exclusively, for human rights. But the nation state is losing its power, its autonomy and its legitimacy, in a world of increasing globalisation, where the power of global markets, those who control them, and the media interests which support them, is such that governments only have a relatively narrow set of policy parameters in which to operate. I do not want to argue that national governments have no role in human rights matters; on the contrary they have a very important role, and I believe the Australian Government has, over recent years, been negligent in fulfilling its human rights obligations. This has been noticed by the rest of the world, as evidenced not only in the consistent criticism from UN human rights bodies and from human rights NGOs, but also in the reception one now receives as an Australian abroad. I have been closely examined by international colleagues in this regard, and I have found that in international forums it is only after explicitly distancing myself from the policies of the Australian Government that what I have to say is given any legitimacy. It is sad that, in an international forum, one has to begin by publicly criticising one's own government, in order to be taken seriously, and this should lead us to ask hard questions about how our government is positioning this country in the international human rights arena.

So when I suggest that we need to be looking at other actors than national governments as having human rights obligations, I am not wanting to let the Australian Government off the hook. The evident lack of commitment of the current Australian Government to human rights, through for example, its policies on asylum seekers, its approach to Aboriginal Reconciliation, land rights and allowing an adequate representative voice for Indigenous people, its anti-terrorist legislation denying fundamental civil rights we used to take for granted, its evident lack of concern about Guantanamo Bay, and its evident disdain for the human rights instruments and structures of the international community, should be of grave concern not only to Australians whose human rights are under threat, but also to those of us who would hope to see Australia return to taking a leading role as a human rights advocate internationally. And it is sad to say that, while the record of the current government has so significantly lacked a commitment to human rights, the record of the Opposition seems to be little better, and is characterised by embarrassed silence, muttered platitudes or covert support for the main thrust of Government policy, rather than a clear articulation of alternative policies based on a strong commitment to human rights, not only for all Australians, but for others who may come to our shores, or with whom Australians may come in contact elsewhere in the world.

That having been said, I think it is also true that other actors need to accept responsibility for the protection and realisation of human rights. The nation state is not all-powerful, nor is it autonomous, and in a pluralist society there needs to be pluralist responsibility for human rights. The nation state has a vital role to play, and many of us wish the Australian state would play that role much more vigorously, but while this is necessary, it is not sufficient if we are to live in a society where human rights are valued, protected and realised. Indeed, it might even be argued that the lukewarm approach to human rights from political leaders has resulted in a number of other Australians taking up the cause and providing, through support of refugees and asylum seekers, through support of Indigenous People in their struggle for justice, and other similar actions, an alternative version of Australian citizenship rights and responsibilities, and a view of a more caring and interdependent society, based not in the qualified and timid commitments of our political leaders, but in the inherent decency and generosity of the experience of human community, and the assertion of the values of the human spirit.

There is a responsibility for human rights that lies with the person or group claiming the right, and might best be stated as the responsibility to exercise one's rights responsibly. Here, rights and responsibilities actually merge, as our rights also become our responsibilities. In Australia we give legal force to such merging with our system of compulsory voting; not only is voting seen as a citizenship right it is also seen as a citizenship obligation. Similarly with education; it is clearly regarded as a right, but also as a responsibility, and the idea of compulsory education up to a certain age, to ensure people meet their obligation to be an educated citizen, is widely accepted and uncontroversial. Work is also seen in this way; the idea of a right to work implies that people should be able to find jobs if they want them, but the responsibility to work, sometimes recast as the "work ethic", is seen in the strong belief of many Australians, reinforced by the rhetoric of the Federal Government and sections of the media, that those who are able to work should be required to do so, if necessary with the assistance of state coercion. Work has become both a right and a responsibility of citizenship.

The association of human rights with the classic liberal doctrine of freedom has led to the false assumption that if we have a right we should be able to exercise it in whatever way we wish, and to whatever extent we wish. This is clearly not so; taking the example of freedom of expression, it is generally accepted that this does not mean I can say anything I like, anywhere, and freedom of expression is circumscribed to ensure that people do not engage in racial or religious vilification, slander or libel.

The unlimited exercise of the right to freedom of expression can serve to reinfirce and legitimise bigotry and prejudice. In exercising my right of freedom of expression, I have a responsibility to do so responsibly. That is relatively clear in the case of freedom of expression, and indeed there is legislation to ensure this. So why do we not apply the same thinking to other rights, for example the right to own property. Those who own lots of property tend to think that their property rights extend indefinitely, and that they have a right to own as much as they wish, or can afford (indeed in too many cases, more than they can afford). But, as with freedom of speech, excessive exercise of property rights can infringe the rights of others, for example by creating a shortage of available housing for everybody else, and thereby driving up the cost of housing to a level where some people can no longer afford it. Similarly, there is a common view that the right to own land means not only that we can own as much as we like, but also that we can do as we like with the land we own, even though it is obvious that the land, which has been there for many millions of years before it was "owned" and will continue to be there long after the "owner" is gone and forgotten, should be held as a sacred trust rather than seen as a private plaything, and that because the use to which the land is put will impact on other people, including future generations, all land-owners have a basic responsibility to use their land in such a way that respects the rights of others, including those yet unborn. We might also apply similar reasoning to the right to health. With health services barely adequate to meet the basic health needs of the population, and long waiting lists for some important operations in the public system, is it really responsible for some people to tie up medical resources by demanding unnecessary cosmetic surgery as their right? We might make similar arguments about other rights, but the point I wish to make is that debate about what constitutes the responsible exercise of rights, and the responsibilities of rights holders, has been lacking. This is largely due to the western liberal tradition of confusing rights and freedoms; contrary perhaps to popular belief, they are not the same thing.

There is also in some instances a responsibility on us to exercise our rights, or at least to take our rights seriously. Let us take as an example the right to join a trade union; a right defined in international conventions to which Australia is a signatory, and a right which was hard won by the sacrifices of many workers in previous generations who fought and sometimes died to establish that right. This heritage, it can be argued, gives us a responsibility to take that right seriously; either to join a trade union in our workplace, or alternatively, if we choose not to join a union, to do so for well thought-out reasons. Those who do not join a union simply because they can't be bothered do a disservice to the cause of hard-won human rights, and betray those who fought for them. The same can be said of the right to vote; a right that is sufficiently important that we all have a responsibility to take that right seriously, and to cast a serious and informed vote, not just a superficial and uninformed reaction to the propaganda of the party machines. I recall the humbling experience of watching, as an international observer, the people of East Timor vote in the independence ballot of 1999. Many of them had risked attack from militia groups by making the journey to a town to vote. They arrived at the polling stations at 6am, ready to queue all day. They knew full well the consequences of what they were doing: that the militia groups would run wild, that villages would burn, that women would be raped, that people would die. It started to happen while votes were still being cast; the memory of meeting a group of frightened people fleeing a burning village on the afternoon of polling day is with me to this day. But they voted anyway, in a 98% voter turnout - and we all know the result. A few weeks later we had in Australia the constitutional referendum on the Republic, and I watched sadly the levels of apathy, misinformation and simple ignorance that were evidently so widespread at the time in relation to the issues at stake. Waiting in a line of some half-a-dozen people at my local polling station I heard people complaining about the short delay, and I thought of those who queued all day in the heat in East Timor only a few weeks before and who, unlike many Australians, knew exactly what they were voting for. I asked myself which society has a better understanding of, and commitment to, human rights and democracy, and the answer was clear. Recently I was invited to East Timor to speak about civil and political rights, but I felt somewhat uncomfortable in doing so; I think the East Timorese have a much better understanding of the importance of such rights and what they really mean than we do - it is they who should be coming here, to teach us about human rights and democracy, not vice versa.

I chose those examples specifically to emphasise the point that we have a long way to go in Australia before we have a society which is truly committed to human rights, and which understands their importance. But they illustrate only one aspect of the responsibilities that go with rights. It is not only the individual right claimer who has responsibilities. The individual citizen also has responsibilities to respect and promote the rights of others. One important aspect of this is our responsibility to pay taxes, at a level sufficient to ensure that all the rights of our fellow citizens are adequately met. But this responsibility also is met through voluntary acts of ordinary people, which can do much to help others realise their rights: rights to be treated with dignity, to be free from abuse and intimidation, to safety, to education, to family life, to free cultural expression, to a healthy environment, and so on. As I will suggest later, a human rights culture requires an active citizenry, people not only exercising their rights but fulfilling their citizenship responsibilities to contribute to the good of others and to the community as a whole. Hence a wide range of voluntary activity - those many contributions that in total make up so-called "civil society", is important for creating and sustaining a human rights culture.

The next area of responsibility I want to consider briefly is the family, or, to reflect the variety of living circumstances of contemporary Australians, "household" might be a better and more inclusive term, though this excludes the extended family which is still important for many Australians. The responsibilities held by families and households are often not included in human rights discourse. This is because the traditional framing of human rights has been largely in the public domain: rights of freedom of expression, political rights, freedom of assembly, and so on, the rights to participate in civil society. But as feminist writers have pointed out, this framing is gender-biased. Women suffer human rights abuses more in the privacy of the home than in the public domain (e.g. rape and domestic violence) and so traditional understandings of human rights have tended to protect the rights of men rather than of women. In order to redress this it is important to understand human rights applying across the public/private divide, so that the right of free expression applies as much in the family as in civil society, the right to be free from harassment applies in the household as well as the workplace, and the right to an adequate income applies to the division of wealth within a family as well as to the division of wealth through the labour market and through investment. If human rights are applied in the private or domestic sphere, they are less well protected by the mechanisms of the state; in the private domain, legislation has only a limited role in preventing the most extreme forms of abuse, and even there it does not work very well. To respect and protect human rights in the domestic sphere, the family or household must accept its human rights responsibility. This is hardly ever mentioned in research or policy about families, yet a society that valued human rights would find respect for those rights embedded in family structures and practices.

It is not only individuals and families who need to accept responsibility for human rights, of course. Other key players include civil society, through NGOs and other associations, governments, and the business community. Human rights discourse is strong in many NGOs, and it is perhaps significant that it has been NGOs rather than governments that have really led the way internationally in pushing for the ratification of human rights instruments. The role of business in human rights, however, is somewhat controversial. There is no doubt that some corporations have made significant commitments to respecting human rights, but there also remains the uneasy question of how much of this is window-dressing. Corporations are inevitably driven by the profit motive, and glib rhetoric about the so-called "triple bottom line" (the term itself is an oxymoron - the whole point is that there can only be one line at the bottom) cannot hide the fact that in the end corporations have to put profit before anything else, including environmental responsibility, social justice and human rights. We are deluding ourselves if we think otherwise, and I would suggest we would be better off admitting the primacy of the profit motive instead of accepting the rhetoric and the glossy publications at face value. That way at least we could negotiate with the private sector openly and honestly. However this is not to say that corporations should be absolved from their human rights obligations. As major players in the economy, and indeed in the whole society, we must find ways to hold corporations responsible for the protection and realisation of human rights, for their employees, contractors, customers and the communities in which they are located. Sometimes this will not conflict with the rights of their shareholders, but where it does, a combination of legislation and community pressure is required to persuade, cajole and coerce corporations to recognise their other responsibilities.

In the increasingly globalised world, we can see the need for human rights responsibilities to be born by larger-scale structures as well. Many human rights issues, such as treatment of refugees, migrant workers, environmental degradation and the impact of trans-national corporations, are beyond the reach of the nation state acting alone, and require global responses if they are to be adequately addressed. At the global level the UN struggles heroically to protect and promote human rights around the world, despite the best efforts of some of its member states to sabotage it, and the human rights work of the UN deserves strong support. Regional structures can also play a major role, as evidenced by the strong human rights stance taken by the European Union. How good it would be if regional bodies in our own corner of the world took a similar view of their role, and perhaps this is an area where we could look to the Australian Government to exercise some regional leadership.

The responsibility for human rights, therefore, can be understood as widely spread, and a conscious attempt to link human rights and human responsibilities spans the full range from the individual through to the global community. Linking human rights with human responsibilities emphasises our interconnectedness as human beings. Rights make no sense in isolation; a single person on a desert island has no rights, simply because there is nobody to meet the corresponding responsibilities. We only have rights because we are interconnected and interdependent, and are bound together in a community of rights and responsibilities. In this sense, the highly individualist construction of "my rights" as an aggressive assertion of one's individuality is quite inappropriate, and indeed dangerous; it can lead to a selfish assertion of a right to discriminate, and can reinforce, rather than confront, bigotry and intolerance. Rather, we need to be talking about "our rights", as the manifestation of the social bonds that hold us together. And the idea of "human rights" seeks to link all people together in this way, out of a shared sense of our common humanity. In this sense, human rights, far from being by nature individualist as some writers have suggested, are inherently collective. Human rights only make sense within human community, and strong human rights require strong communities.

There has been, in the human rights literature, a tendency to separate individual rights and collective rights. Indeed, the so-called "Asian Critique" of traditional human rights held that the conventional framing of human rights was too dominated by western individualism and did not take account of Asian cultural values where people are seen as realising their full humanity as part of the collective whole, and hence it is the whole society that can be seen to have "rights" and the individual has duties to contribute to the whole (it should be noted in passing that this is not an exclusively Asian perspective, as it also resonates with Rousseau). Of course this argument was used by certain authoritarian Asian rulers to attempt to justify why traditional human rights standards should not apply in their countries, and it is notable that their views of "Asian values" were not shared by those of their countrymen and women who were detained in prison for daring to criticise their governments. But this is not to deny the validity of the criticism, and the "Asian critique", despite its political agenda, did sensitise many people to the importance of both individual and collective understandings of human rights. And by extension, this must also be applied to responsibilities, which can also be understood both individually and collectively. The traditional western liberal view has emphasised individual rights and individual responsibilities, but this is only one perspective. Socialist views suggest an idea of individual rights and collective responsibilities, largely through the structures of the welfare state. The Asian critique has emphasised the Confucian view, of collective rights and individual responsibilities, and the fourth possibility, collective rights and collective responsibilities, remains the ideal of communitarians, and, one might add, of communists. In a more mature political system we should surely be able to move beyond a debate as to which of these four conceptions of rights and responsibilities was "right" or preferable, and accept the validity of all four as reflecting different value positions, and allowing human rights and responsibilities to be understood in different ways according to different cultural and political traditions. This becomes part of the agenda of moving beyond the western liberal domination of human rights discourse, which has become the aim of most human rights scholars in seeking to open up new possibilities through dialogue across cultural, religious and political divides.

I believe it is a mistake to create separate categories of individual and collective rights, as is evident consistently in the human rights literature, and in the conventional "three generations" framework for understanding human rights. Rather, we need to understand that most if not all human rights can and should be understood both individually and collectively, and not fall into the trap of seeing civil and political, and economic social and cultural, rights as attaching only to individuals. The right of freedom of expression, for example, applies not only to individuals, but also to the rights of groups, such as Indigenous People or people with disabilities, to have their voices heard. The right to health care, as another example, can apply to groups, as in statements about women's health or the health care rights of Aboriginal People. Similar arguments can be made for almost any first or second generation rights, including the right to education, to housing, to be free from harassment, to equality before the law, and to an adequate share of the nation's wealth and resources. For this reason, to talk about "collective rights" is misleading; they are not a separate set of rights, but rather we can understand all human rights as having both individual and collective dimensions. This also helps us to transcend the constraints of western individualism, and to develop an understanding of human rights that moves well beyond the so-called "Asian critique".

A culture of human rights and responsibilities, embedded in strong community structures, where people take their own rights and those of others seriously, and where they are both aware of their own citizen responsibilities and also committed to ensuring that the responsibilities of others, including governments, are met, seems a long way from contemporary Australia. The dominance of individualist values means that when people talk about rights they are concerned with "my right" rather than "our rights", and ideas of citizenship responsibilities are conveniently forgotten, or are applied to others rather than to ourselves. Individualism and the ideology of self-centred material gain, now exploited by the major political parties in their attempt to claim our allegiance, detract from ideas of community well-being, and there seems to be an unquestioning acceptance that money and material goods buy you happiness, and that the more you have the happier you will be. This is in spite of the research which has failed to find evidence of any correlation between material wealth and human happiness, beyond the level where basic needs for security and a minimum standard of living have been met. This dominant ideology of individualism and personal greed, which serves the very powerful interests who make profits from our increasing and unsustainable consumption and our striving to gain even more, is not compatible with a culture of human rights and a celebration of our common humanity, but rather creates a ready breeding ground for bigotry, prejudice and discrimination. Hence in a society like Australia, the idea of a culture of rights and responsibilities presents a major challenge. In the remainder of the time available to me, I want to discuss and evaluate some of the ways in which this challenge might be met, by considering the various strategies that have been proposed by those (and there are many) who hope that ideas of human rights will come to play a more active role in the lives of Australians than they do today.

First, let me consider the critically important issue of education. This is an area where the Australian Government is on record as specifically supporting human rights, arguing that "the answer is education". This is at one level so obviously true that it is hard to disagree, and human rights education is an important priority for any society wishing to move towards a culture of human rights. But if that education is to be effective we need to consider it a little more closely. Supporting human rights education can be an easy way out for governments, as it can become an excuse for not addressing human rights issues which are harder to deal with; effectively it leaves it for a future generation, perhaps better versed in human rights. When critics question a government's commitment to human rights it is good to be able to say "the answer lies in education", as of course it is an argument with which few would disagree. However it is well known that the least effective teachers are those who say "do as I say not as I do", and a government that itself places little evident value on ideas of human rights has no credibility when it extols the virtues of human rights education. Effective human rights education requires a climate that is receptive to the message, and this requires a clear commitment in deeds, not only words, to the strengthening of human rights. Human rights education - in primary and secondary schools, TAFE colleges and universities, is an essential component of establishing a culture of human rights. But while it is necessary, it is not sufficient, and must never be used as an excuse for inactivity on other fronts. It is also worth mentioning that, in my view, human rights education is not most effective if it is only seen as a subject apart - a separate unit that is done at a specified point in the curriculum. Such units are important, but human rights material can also be brought into the teaching of many different subject areas, and thereby made relevant to a much broader range of a student's experience. More importantly still, it is necessary to look back on one's own schooldays and realise that while we might have forgotten most of what we were taught in school, what we remember, with crystal clarity, is how we were treated. It is in how children are treated in schools, whether and how they are respected, whether diversity is encouraged, how bullying is dealt with, how racism is addressed, how student representation is validated and taken seriously, how democracy is practised, and so on, that human rights can be most effectively taught; the curriculum study of human rights is important, of course, but it will fail unless students can experience a culture of human rights and responsibilities within the school environment.

The next area I want to mention is community development. I have already touched on the necessary connection between community and human rights, and this connection is sufficiently strong that the development of human community becomes an essential component of any strategy to establish a culture of human rights and responsibilities. This, after all, is what community development is all about: seeking to link people together in a meaningful way so that their common humanity (the goal of both human rights and community development) can be celebrated and realised. A yearning for community is a common theme in western societies, as people realise that extreme individualism somehow does not meet all their needs. This often takes the form of a nostalgia for a previous era, which in reality was not as inclusive or as comfortable as we might like to think. The experience of community is of fundamental importance for human beings, but that community needs to be reinvented and reconstructed in different historical and cultural contexts. Further consideration of how this can be achieved is beyond the scope of this evening's discussion, but the simple point I want to make is that those of us concerned with human rights must also be concerned with human community. Community development is a problematic and contested area. Again, governments cannot do it alone, but governments can encourage the process by helping to create environments where community development can happen. There is a widespread wish in government circles, in civil society and in the private sector to engage with community development, to help create stronger, more viable and more resilient communities, and to relocate bureaucratic and legal mechanisms in community contexts where they are more closely related to people's lived experience. This has the potential to create a culture of human rights and responsibilities, but it must always be remembered that there is no single "right way" to do community development. Attempts to impose models from above will nearly always fail. Community development is a much more organic process, and here it is important to introduce the idea of human rights from above and human rights from below. Human rights "from above" are those rights defined for us by others: in legislation, in UN conventions, in the Universal Declaration, and so on. They are important, but they are only one side of human rights. The other side is human rights "from below", where ordinary people take a more active role in the definition of human rights and what they mean. Most human rights conventions are, by necessity, constructed by a select few: politicians, academics, lawyers, and a few prominent human rights activists. Though well-intentioned, their experience of life is necessarily limited, and the vast majority of humanity, including those most at risk of human rights abuse, is excluded. This, we might argue, itself represents a human rights abuse: the denial of our right to a voice in defining our rights. For this reason it is important that there be meaningful attempts to broaden the debate about our rights, and we need to establish more community processes such as the consultation that occurred here in the ACT as a lead-up to the human rights legislation. At another level, however, we need to recognise that people are in fact active in defining human rights within their daily lives: the way we treat other people, the respect we give to others, the way we negotiate daily living in queues, in traffic jams, on buses, in workplaces, in shops, in pubs, and so on is based on assumptions we make about the rights of others and our responsibilities to them, and on assumptions about our own rights and the responsibilities of others. This is the core of human rights from below, and represents a powerful starting point for human rights education and consciousness raising.

A culture of human rights and responsibilities will, by its very nature, be inclusive rather than exclusive. The very idea of human rights is that people are treated a certain way on the basis simply of their humanity, rather than on the basis of their membership of a particular group. This means that programs promoting inclusion are an essential part of the community development that accompanies human rights. Yet discourses of division, and disadvantage, are powerful. Gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, disability, age and sexuality are all dimensions of disadvantage which exclude and marginalise people, and which both represent human rights abuse themselves and also render people more liable to other forms of human rights abuse. To move beyond these, it is not sufficient merely to provide "mainstream" programs and to pretend that these divisions will go away if we don'0t talk about them. Rather, it is necessary to have programs that specifically address these "fault lines" of disadvantage, and which incorporate the people most affected, whose voices are too often marginalised and unheard in policy debates, not merely as people to be consulted and then ignored if necessary, but as the people who will drive the process and who will themselves set its direction.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), one of the sponsors of this evening's event, is a very significant institution in Australia in terms of its role in safeguarding human rights. The United Nations has defined an important role for national human rights institutions such as HREOC, and they play an important part in the international human rights network. HREOC is held in high regard internationally, and its investigation both of individual cases and also of systemic issues has been very significant in protecting the human rights of Australians and in drawing public attention to major human rights issues that need to be addressed. Indeed, in the absence of an Australian Bill of Rights, the role of a strong HREOC becomes even more important than it would be in other countries where human rights have a stronger level of constitutional protection. In terms of a culture of human rights, HREOC has the capacity to provide significant leadership in human rights education and in raising the profile of human rights across different sections of the Australian community. A nation with a strong culture of human rights and responsibilities would have a strong and effective human rights commission. It is disturbing to see the government paying so little attention to the reports of HREOC, for example dismissing the highly critical report on children in detention as "yesterday's issue" as if that somehow absolved the government of any moral responsibility. At a time of heightened international criticism of Australia in relation to human rights, as can be seen in the recent highly critical report from the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, one would expect our government to be asking HREOC how we can improve our record, and providing additional resources and powers to HREOC so that these issues can be addressed. Instead we see an apparent marginalising of HREOC, and this suggests that we are a long way from the kind of human rights based nation that many Australians would wish. Support for HREOC, and lobbying for its role and resources to be strengthened, is an important priority at this time.

The lack of a Bill of Rights for Australians, or any specific constitutional guarantee of human rights, has long been of concern to people in the human rights community. We are very much the odd one out in the international community, and contrary to the dire predictions of some, the introduction of bills of rights in countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom has not resulted in the end of civilisation as we know it. Rather, such measures have been important in raising community awareness about human rights matters, and it is evident that bills of rights are important in creating a culture of human rights and responsibilities. Here, the experience of the ACT government in introducing human rights legislation, following extensive community consultation, demonstrates that, given strong political leadership, Australians will respond positively to the idea that human rights need to be protected in this way. The lack of significant political leadership in this regard at a national level, from both major political parties, is one of the biggest obstacles to the achievement of a culture of human rights in this country. The debate about bills of rights, what form they should take, what they should cover, how they should be enforced, and so on, is complex. There are different legitimate views about the best way to do it, and there is no simple answer. An Australian bill of rights must be grounded in Australian cultural, political, and legal traditions, and would be an important affirmation of a commitment to a culture of human rights and responsibilities. In some ways such legislation is more important for its symbolic significance than necessarily for its capacity to bring human rights violators to court. What is important at this stage in our history, however, is that we have the debate, that the question of a bill of rights be placed firmly on the public political agenda, and that there be strong political leadership to drive such community discussion. Whatever the outcome, the process of having the debate itself will do much to establish a culture of human rights and responsibilities in this country.

In the absence of a Bill of Rights, Australia's participation in UN treaties and conventions takes on an added significance, as one of the few mechanisms available to Australians for protection of their human rights. Australia in the past has a proud record of not only ratifying such conventions, but of contributing to their formulation and providing international leadership in promoting them. Human rights, by their very nature, are universal, even though they may be applied and realised differently in different cultural contexts. The universality of human rights requires an internationalist perspective in their definition, protection and realisation, and the enthusiastic endorsement of international human rights instruments, in both the spirit and the letter of the law, is what one would expect of a country with a strong culture of human rights and responsibilities. In Australia, however, we see a lingering doubt about international human rights conventions, on the grounds of their supposedly interfering with national sovereignty. This implies a world where nation states can exist in splendid isolation and not be part of the global community. This was probably never true in the history of the nation state, but in the current context of globalisation, and the imperative of impending environmental disasters, it is not only a naïve view of Australia's place in the world, it is also a dangerous one. It is worth noting that Australia is party to well over 800 international agreements of one kind or another, covering things such as Interpol, air traffic control, Antarctica, customs, postage, shipping, sea rescue, cultural exchange, and of course a large number of agreements about trade and economics. Most of these are accepted as necessary for us to play our part in the world, and are seen as unremarkable and uncontroversial; they enable us, for example, to post a letter to another country in the expectation that it will actually be delivered there. Why is it only the small number of human rights conventions, and a couple of others such as the Kyoto protocol, that seem to arouse the passion for sovereignty? What is it about the Convention of the Rights of the Child, or the Treaty for the International Criminal Court, that provoked such opposition and suddenly had people talking about our sovereignty being eroded, when we are happy to accept international agreements touching so many other aspects of our national life? Recent years have seen an apparent wavering by the Australian Government in relation to international human rights conventions, while at the same time international economic and trade agreements have been pursued with evangelical fervour. We need to ask why we are so keen to be part of the global economy but so reluctant to be part of the global human rights regime. A nation that embodied a culture of human rights would surely value our participation in global human rights mechanisms as being of paramount importance.

The final area I want to touch on is the idea of corporate social responsibility. At a time when the private sector is expected to take greater responsibility for things that were once seen as the role of government, it is only natural that there should be an expectation that this could include human rights. As I indicated earlier, I believe that such expectations of corporations can be unrealistic, in that corporations must be first and foremost concerned with profit, despite the rhetoric of the triple bottom line. We cannot expect corporations to promote and protect human rights voluntarily, if to do so means to lose a competitive edge and reduce profits, and to think otherwise is naïve. However this does not mean that corporations have no role to play, and indeed it is important to find ways to encourage corporations to protect and promote human rights as much as possible. Sometimes, of course, human rights can be profitable for corporations, and this will increase if consumers are more knowledgeable and aware about human right matters. Boycotting companies seen as having a poor human rights record can be very effective, as can deliberately choosing those with a better record on human rights. Ethical investment also has the potential to change the balance a little, so that human rights responsibility becomes more attractive and likely to generate greater market share. Such informed consumerism, of course, will increase with a culture of human rights and responsibilities, with the idea that we can exercise our human responsibilities in the consumption or investment choices we make each day. It is perhaps naïve to expect that the private sector can act as a significant driver of human rights, though there are some firms that have been able to do so. But it is certainly realistic to expect that the private sector will respond to the establishment of a culture of human rights and responsibilities, and will seek to prosper within such an environment. Currently business responds to the dominant individual materialist consumerism; we cannot blame business for that, nor can we blame business for promoting such an ideology which is so clearly in the interests of further profits. However if, through some of the other strategies I have outlined, a culture of human rights and responsibilities is encouraged, there is no doubt that businesses will reposition themselves to operate in such a context, and will become themselves significant promoters of human rights.

The idea of human rights and human responsibilities being embedded in a culture, rather than being merely legislation, brings them much closer to the reality of people's day-to-day experiences. Bringing about such a cultural change is not an easy task. Indeed, it is a radical agenda in a society such as ours where many regard this thing called "human rights" with suspicion, and where our political leaders, from both major parties, seemingly do little to challenge this view and do not demonstrate the political leadership we should expect of them. It is also radical because it challenges the individual consumerism which many now take as a given of the human condition. However our study of history should teach us otherwise. The world we know is of very recent origin; for most of human history people lived with very different world views, and will undoubtedly do so again. Change is not only possible, it happens, and the current world order is so blatantly unsustainable that it is inevitable that the radical questions will be both asked and answered. History also tells us that the human spirit has a habit of emerging triumphant from the most devastating and destructive of environments, and I have no doubt that it will do so again. Human rights, and human responsibilities, are our collective manifestation of that human spirit. This is perhaps expressed in two of my favourite quotes from one of the heroes of the late 20th Century, Vaclav Havel, written in 1981 when he was in detention in Czechoslovakia, and when Soviet power over his homeland seemed unshakeable - yet in less than 10 years the Soviet hegemony was over, and Havel was President. He described what I have called a community of rights and responsibilities in these words:

We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy and tolerance, but just the opposite: we must set these fundamental dimensions of our humanity free from their "private" exile and accept them as the only genuine starting point of meaningful human community.

He also wrote at the same time the following words, which resonate with all those Australians who work for human rights in these difficult times:

Does not the perspective of a better future depend on something like an international community of the shaken which, ignoring state boundaries, political systems and power blocs, starting outside the high game of traditional politics, aspiring to no titles and appointments, will seek to make a real political force out of a phenomenon so ridiculed by the technicians of power - the phenomenon of human conscience?