2018-11-08
By Max Larkin, GI Co-editor
As Australians we should be ashamed of the continued inaction on our many haunting human rights issues and by all means we should be (and some are) rioting in the streets against our government’s total inability to recognize the rights of our offshore prisoners.
But Australians have no right to be mad… right? We have nothing like the Americans do in terms of promises and rights. We have nothing like the Statue of Liberty gracing our nation, I mean, besides the occasional colonialist in bronze soaking up the sunlight like the earth soaked the blood of the countless lives he was responsible for taking.
We have no monument declaring our dedication to freedom, opportunity and equality and why should we? Our constitution doesn’t support the values of a forward-thinking society.
Americans should be mad, they have a Bill of Rights that promise personal freedoms. A constitution laid down as the bedrock of American society and your eyes can easily glaze over the hypocrisy of freedom and liberty laced throughout the constitution as the amendments were wrote on paper in a nation that was built by slaves and signed by slave owners.
Now the Australian constitution on the other hand, though an achievement in itself, was implemented in the same period and if not by the same people who championed the first infamous White Australia policies like the Immigration Restriction Act and the Pacific Island Labourers Act.
In all, it has five passages that allude to human rights and are, as always, subject to loopholes. The constitution allows the right to vote, protection against acquisition of property on unjust terms, the right to a trial by jury, freedom of religion and the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of State of residency.
So, besides these five, we rely on common law, statutory law and the UN (whom we habitually ignore) to afford us human rights.
Australia is missing too much in our constitution and our legal framework for us to champion human rights and, if anything, the very few rights that we hold dear in our country are being methodically stripped and ignored by our government.
But in essence we weren’t promised very much anyway, just the five laws in the constitution and some relics of the British common law system. We did sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that we habitually ignore. We do have some wonderful acts that have been passed by parliament over the last fifty years, though, these can easily be undone. I am not just saying that our human rights can be stripped, we have literally seen it happen over the last few years.
Australians might very well be institutionalized because for some reason we all seem to believe we would never have our rights taken away from us, or at least not without reason. Tony Abbott proved that we are asleep to the issues of our rights with the introduction of his draconian counter terrorism laws and Malcolm Turnbull cemented the fact we are in our very own Australian Dream when his government pushed through laws in 2016 that authorize unlawful detention of people who have already served for terrorism related crimes.
No, I’m not talking about the Australian Dream of a suburban house on a quarter acre block and a Holden (or god forbid, Ford) rumbling in the driveway. Although, that is definitely a conversation for another time, as many Australians young and old struggle with the reality that they may never own property and will for eternity be stuck in the mud with all the other serfs paying a huge chunk of their income for the privilege of living underneath a roof. This generation’s nickname has been coined, it’s Generation Rent.
I’m talking about a fugue like state that Australians have been living under since before the enactment of the constitution.
I only point this complacency out to add with even more gravity, that at this pivotal point in our society we are cornered by corrupt banks that stoop to the lowest levels by charging our dead transaction fees. We have super funds that rip hard earned cash out of our workers hands and a government that doesn’t seem to represent our values in almost any capacity, be it the insane corporate tax cuts which borrow from our healthcare, welfare and education or the dissolution of workers’ rights that will leave many Australians out of pocket by the end of the weekend
But it doesn’t stop there. The Coalition and the ALP are responsible for so much pain, suffering and worry, such as the myriad of Indigenous issues like over-incarceration, the despicable failure to close the gap, the failure to produce or even acknowledge the possibility of a treaty. The abysmal lack of environmental policy that is putting our very future on the firing line. And finally, the horrid and continuing mistreatment of asylum seekers in our offshore prisons.
Our now PM Scott Morrison (one of the key architects of the offshore detention centres) said in a video recording played to every asylum seeker residing on Manus Island that "You will NEVER be settled in Australia. The Australian government will NEVER change its mind. You will NEVER call Australia home.”
And why would the government care about asylum seekers? They’re not even bothered about the rights of First Nation’s, the consumer rights of their citizens and environmental rights that need to be implemented now more than ever. The world is hotter than ever and the 29th Prime Minister of Australia has just been ousted over an energy policy.
The amount of fuss the Murdoch press had made over Turnbull’s prime-ministerial duties was something you would usually only see pointed towards the left. Alan Jones a Sky News commentator and radio host told the ABC’s 7:30 report that he had called several MP’s and urged the change of leadership in the coalition. Malcolm even cited media powers as a reason for his eventual political demise. In some conspiratorial eyes, Murdoch was the instigator of the entire debacle with the Liberal spill happening only ten days after his arrival in Australia.
Perhaps in this age of information the media needs more regulation, not to curtail their responsibilities as a fourth estate; to protect democracy by being the revelator of crucial ongoings in parliament house and the misdeeds committed by our representatives. But to ensure responsible reporting and to make sure the media takes the time to look through thinly veiled prepackaged politics.
The digital age has pushed already questionable journalistic integrity to a tipping point by forcing journalists to churn out drivel consistently. No wonder we don’t question the public’s continued trends of disinterest in political ongoings and elections.
Winston Churchill said “Never let a good crisis go to waste” and our media has gone ahead and used the refugee crises to gain a political foothold, to feed into the fears and minds of our country and pit us against each other. We are being divided day by day, it is seen with the right and the left feeding on each other to gain views on YouTube and likes on Facebook.
The Australian government is culpable of tearing our fragile multicultural eco-system apart with their outrageous campaign that leverages the fears of the white and elderly with the appalling ‘Sudanese gangs’ ‘issue’. While at the same time offering much sought after asylum to white South African farmers who are being chased off ‘their’ land. Racist and preventable, these tactics show a government out of touch. Mungo called it in April saying the coalition would resort to tactics worse than Abbott’s ‘ditch the witch’ campaign and that the budget will be a mixture of bribery and spin.
The bribery spoken of seems to be the government’s unfathomable miscalculation of their constituent’s intelligence by dropping 444 million dollars into a private foundation (that has links to major energy corporations) knowing full well that the corporation who staffed only six workers at the time of the grant wouldn’t be able to spend that money by 2020 which is, as we now know, the deadline for a 714 million dollar commitment to UNESCO to preserve the Great Barrier Reef.
So why does the Australian government consistently ignore our rights? Is it because they don’t respect the culturally diverse landscape they helped build? Is it because they are putting profits over people? Is it because they are (said satirically) being realistic?
Our environmental rights, our humanity and our freedoms are put on the firing line every day by the people we vote for in our very lucky country.
Australians just like Americans, are tearing each other apart; the picture of those two elderly republicans wearing T-shirts saying “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat” comes to mind. The observation of parallels and contrasts between the American and Australian political climate is necessary to realize that we, as people, are more than our political party or our viewpoint because above all else we are all human.
We need to recognize the lessons of America and come together and look past our differences to realize our rights, the rights of our environment, the rights of the disenfranchised and the basic rights of all human kind.
I’d rather be an Australian than an asylum seeker.
I’d rather be aware than an Australian.
I’d rather be human.
Header photo: Shealah Craighead Photography 202-379-6659 Wikimedia Commons