Many delegates attending this week's ALP National Conference no doubt feel the motto of this government is: "Do nothing for as long as possible and then do as little as possible that you think you can get away with."

Subscribe now for unlimited access.

Login or signup to continue reading

That was certainly the case with tackling pervasive and destructive gambling advertising. It has also been true of dealing with the hopelessly inadequate returns Australians get from their gas resources.

It is also true in another area which has not got the attention it deserves: a human-rights act.

At least with gambling and gas, people can understand the government's reluctance because to act it would have to take on very powerful corporate interests who only have to throw a relatively small amount of money into the media ecosystem to raise merry hell for the government.

Human-rights inaction is less excusable.

First to some history. As in the US, when Australia's constitution was framed, the founders deliberately left out a Bill of Rights. The US corrected that within five years when the first 10 constitutional amendments were ratified. The correction did not happen in Australia. An early attempt at an Australian human rights act was attempted by Samuel Griffiths, the man who drafted the first version of the constitution for the 1891 convention and Australia's first Chief Justice. As a member of the Queensland Parliament he introduced a private member's Bill in 1890 to protect human rights, but it failed.

Since 1945 there have been 10 attempts at a human-rights Act but all came to nothing. It is not so much a case of the idea being firmly rejected by the people, but rather a failure of political impetus.

In 2009-10, lawyer and Jesuit priest Father Frank Brennan was chosen by the federal Labor government to lead a quality committee to hold 64 public meetings throughout Australia. It recommended a Human Rights Act but all that was adopted was a "framework" which included a review of draft federal laws and a joint committee of Parliament to scrutinise draft laws, sometimes before they passed, sometimes not.

In 2017, Coalition........

© Canberra Times