Governments are the most powerful entities in the world we live in.  They only exist to serve the people they represent, unfortunately history has shown us, they are also the most likely to violate our rights, our privacy and our freedom.  This is why human rights are essential to protect the citizenry from its most likely oppressor, its government.

Australia is the only western liberal democracy that does not have a charter or bill of rights.  This may change in the near future as the new Rudd Labor government supports it, however the argument that has until now stopped the creation of a Charter of Rights goes something like this: “unelected judges shouldn’t be able to limit elected officials decisions”.  This is a terribly misguided argument, because it assumes that elected officials always act for the good of everybody (as opposed to what will win them some votes).  Judges have much less vested interest in the outcome of a human rights case than the politicians do.  In Australia,  mandatory detention of refugees (including children) and the wrongful detention without trial of Dr. Haneef under terrorism suspicion show that governments can often win the majority vote by picking on the minority.

Perhaps to understand this, the idea of democracy has to be quickly reconsidered.  We do not live in a Democracy, we live in a Liberal Democracy, popularly considered the same thing, but in reality very different.  Democracy is majority rules, Liberalism is individual liberty.  In ancient Rome, they fed Jews to the lions for the majority Romans entertainment, if they had taken a vote on it, the majority would have said it was ok to feed the minority to wild beasts.  In Australia up until the 1970’s the majority voted in governments who instituted a policy of taking the minority Indigenous children from their parents and raising them in white Christian schools.  In Rwanda in 1994, the majority Hutu’s of the country ganged up and massacred up to a million minority Tutsi’s, if they had taken a vote on the genocide, it would have passed with a large majority.  We live in a Liberal Democracy, which means that although its essentially majority rules, we should never undermine the basic liberal and minority rights of society.

Every death caused by war, every wrongful imprisonment, every wire-tap, every person who is banned from speaking, writing or praying about what he choses are caused by governments.  Governments are the most powerful entities on Earth, and to claim that we should trust them beyond encoding some basic protections of our (liberal) human rights is at best misguided, and at worst sinister.

Australia urgently needs a Charter of Human Rights.

Politics australia, charter of rights, democracy, human rights, liberalism, Politics