Do we have the rights to a fair go? By Deb Anderson The Age October 26th 2010 p.

p.17 HUMAN rights principles may resonate with the ideal of a fair go, but the nation's leading academic centre on human rights fears Australia is on a path of least resistance. As the only liberal democracy without human rights enshrined in federal law, Australia lacks a "human rights culture" and myths about rights are rife, according to academics at the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law. As the centre at Monash University marks its 10th anniversary, three of its directors reveal concerns about the effect of public complacency. "Our work is centred around education educating the Australian community about what human rights are, and how they work because I don't think there is necessarily a lot of understanding," centre director Sarah Joseph says. "For many Australians, I think there is a lot of complacency, because . . . their human rights are not being abused and so they don't see it as relevant to them." Australia has yet to resolve big questions on rights issues including the Northern Territory intervention, disadvantage faced by indigenous Australians and mandatory immigration detention despite developments such as ending the Pacific Solution and the apology to the stolen generations. Debate on asylum seekers is a classic example of public misconceptions of Australia's international human rights obligations, Professor Joseph says. "There's been a lot of misinformation about the asylum-seeker debate in Australia," she says, which tended to steer clear of Australia's obligations under the Refugee Convention, which sets out the rights of individuals seeking asylum and the corresponding responsibilities of nations. Rather, she says, there has been hysteria about what is, in reality, a fairly small number of people seeking asylum here, compared with overseas. A recent United Nations report backs this up: only 0.5 per cent of the 1.18 million new global asylum applications were lodged in Australia in 2009. "But the focus here has been on terms like border protection and even the words fear and illegals," she says. Deputy director Adam McBeth says there has been a dominance of political rhetoric in law-and-order debates: "The idea that seeking asylum is illegal is just plain wrong and it goes to the ignorance about human rights that we face." Redressing ignorance and making human rights relevant to ordinary Australians remain priorities for the centre. It has garnered plenty of high-profile supporters and praise. Governor-General Quentin Bryce lauded its achievements when she became its patron-in-chief this year. Its other high-profile patron is Michael Kirby, former justice of the High Court of Australia. A key future undertaking is the centre's Accountability Project, which among other things involves responding to more parliamentary inquiries on human rights issues and increasing the centre's capacity to hold the government to account for its international human rights obligations. Dr Debeljak points out those obligations are not "foisted upon us". Globally Australia has a proud bipartisan history in the development of human rights laws. An Australian, H.V. Evatt, helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as president of the UN General Assembly in 1948-49. "In effect, it's quite hypocritical for them [politicians] to have one voice internationally, where they have these obligations, and to have a different voice at home where they're trying to avoid the obligations," Dr Debeljak says. Dr McBeth says Australia doesn't have a history of human rights in its legal culture unlike the US, Europe or, now, Britain. "So when politicians say things like 'Oh, a human rights act would just lead to a massive flood of litigation in the courts' or 'It would just be a criminals' picnic' . . . there's no real [public] understanding that that's not necessarily true."