{"id":630,"date":"2009-05-01T08:07:02","date_gmt":"2009-04-30T21:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/?p=630"},"modified":"2009-05-01T08:22:26","modified_gmt":"2009-04-30T21:22:26","slug":"australias-monarchist-hangover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/?p=630","title":{"rendered":"Australia&#8217;s monarchist hangover"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The government is in the process of conducting a &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.humanrightsconsultation.gov.au\">Human Rights Consultation<\/a>&#8216; with a view toward establishing some sort of Bill of Rights or human rights declaration. Good idea. We don&#8217;t have basic human rights codified in Australia, not even freedom of speech\/expression.<\/p>\n<p>However, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.humanrightsconsultation.gov.au\/www\/nhrcc\/nhrcc.nsf\/Page\/Terms_of_Reference\">Terms of Reference<\/a> for this consultation negate its very existence. Last note in the Terms:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The options identified should preserve the sovereignty of the Parliament and not include a constitutionally entrenched bill of rights.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Rights doctrines do one thing and one thing only- protect citizens from excessive exercise of government power. They&#8217;re of little value if they are enacted on a statutory basis, where they can be modified, overridden or even dissolved by a simple act of Parliament. <\/p>\n<p>The notion of &#8216;preserving the sovereignty of the Parliament&#8217; could only be acceptable to authoritarians and monarchists. Governments in liberal democracies are constituted of, by and for the people, not the other way around. You don&#8217;t get imbued with the right to deprive others of human rights merely because you have been elected to a public office. The only sovereignty which should be established by a rights doctrine is that of the citizen over the government. <\/p>\n<p>If there&#8217;s to be a human rights declaration, it must be a constitutional instrument or it has little value. Regardless, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.getup.org.au\/campaign\/rights\/407\">GetUp are pushing participation<\/a> in the human rights consultation: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThis government consultation is a once in a lifetime chance to call for a Human Rights Act to permanently protect human rights in Australia. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sorry, but the Act as framed will not &#8216;permanently protect human rights in Australia.&#8217; It will be white-anted by the present or subsequent governments, merely because it will not be entrenched as part of the Australian Constitution, which offers some resilience against tampering by a simple Parliamentary vote. I can&#8217;t support GetUp&#8217;s campaign unless they lobby to change the terms to specify a constitutional rights declaration. <\/p>\n<p>-weez<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The government is in the process of conducting a &#8216;Human Rights Consultation&#8216; with a view toward establishing some sort of Bill of Rights or human rights declaration. Good idea. We don&#8217;t have basic human rights codified in Australia, not even freedom of speech\/expression. However, the Terms of Reference for this consultation negate its very existence. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}