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It’s good to be amongst human rights friends at this conference. I’ve admired the work of the Castan Centre for a long time so I’m looking forward to today’s discussion. 

I thought I’d start by setting the scene around where I think we’re at with protecting human rights in Australia and then talk about where we need to get to. 

We are meeting on Wurundjeri land. I acknowledge their elders and their unbroken continuing culture and connection to country. I acknowledge their Kulin Nation neighbours and all First Nations people here today. 

One the best work days I’ve ever done was with the Yoorrook Justice Commission on Wurundjeri Country. It was on a warm April day in 2024 out on the old Coranderrk mission land -  a site of incredible natural beauty, in a grassy clearing overlooked by huge ancient Manna Gums and tree ferns by a beautiful creek. 

It’s the place where Wurundjeri elders like Aunty Di Kerr and Aunty Irene Morris and women like Mandy Nicholson have brought back the Wurundjeri girls coming of age ceremony, restoring pride in culture and identity in the process and wellbeing for the girls. 

Yoorrook arranged for Premier Jacinta Allan to meet with Commissioners and Wurundjeri women and girls to hear about the positive impact of culture on the girls. 

It was a powerful and beautiful day and speaks to the potential for truth-telling to bring about understanding and transformation. 

Universal Periodic Review 

I want to start by talking about the upcoming United Nations review of Australia’s human rights record, called the Universal Periodic Review. 

This review happens every 5 years at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.  

The Human Rights Council is a bit like the world’s human rights parliament and the Universal Periodic Review is a peer review process. Each of the 193 UN member states is reviewed every 5 years by other states. In January next year, it will be Australia’s turn. Other states will look at our human rights record and make recommendations for progress. 

Last time in 2021, 122 states made around 250 recommendations to Australia. The Australian Government supported 177 of the recommendations. Our assessment is that it has fully implemented only 6% of the recommendations and partly implemented 86%. 

The review is a good time to take stock of Australia’s human rights record. 

The Australian Government provides a report outlining progress and regress since the last review. The integrity of the process is bolstered by reports from NGOs and any relevant National Human Rights Institution – in Australia’s case the ºÚÁÏÇ鱨վ. 

We submitted our report last week and the main NGO report was also submitted and endorsed by around 150 NGOs. 

Working with NGOs, we will brief UN member states on our views on Australia’s progress and regress on rights and suggest recommendations they could make. 

The review also has input from UN treaty bodies and experts. 

It’s not a perfect process, but it’s an important international accountability measure. 

So how is Australia doing on human rights? 

Progress 

The last time we were reviewed in 2021, we were deep in the COVID pandemic. Australia’s responses saved thousands of lives but in some respects, like international travel restrictions, went too far in limiting people’s rights. 

There has been some important progress on other issues including: 

• The implementation of Respect@Work reforms to address sexual harassment and sex discrimination in Australian workplaces. This includes amending sex discrimination laws to have a greater focus on prevention through a positive duty to eliminate unlawful conduct. The Commission is the national regulator of the positive duty.
• The expansion of gender equality reporting and budgeting processes.
• The establishment of the new National Plan to End Violence against Women and ºÚÁÏÇ鱨վ.
• Commissioning or progressing responses to Royal Commissions into abuse of people with disability, aged care, robodebt, institutional child sex abuse and defence and veteran suicide.
• Establishing the National Anti-corruption Commission and the National Administrative Review Tribunal.
• Providing funding to develop the Commission’s National Anti-Racism Framework.
• Progress on some of the Closing the Gap targets particularly early childhood education, jobs and land rights. Other measures like year 12 and tertiary education completion are improving but not fast enough to meet targets.
• Progress on truth-telling, treaty and voice in Victoria and South Australia.
• The end of temporary protection visas for refugees.
• Improvements to our commitments to address climate change with a legislated goal to reduce emissions by 43% from 2005 levels by 2030, and to reach net zero by 2050 - noting that this is not enough to avoid massive climate impacts on people’s lives in Australia and globally. 

The Albanese Government also made election commitments to improve Medicare, housing, access to childcare as well as to improve higher education by reducing HECS debts and making TAFE more accessible. 

Regress 

Unfortunately, Australia has gone backwards on many issues: 

• Racism has risen – linked to the failed Voice referendum and the war in the Middle East.
• Most of the Closing the Gap targets are not on track and some like First Nations imprisonment and child removal are getting worse.
• The Northern Territory and Queensland in particular are leading a race to the bottom on criminal justice policies. The Northern Territory has reintroduced unjust mandatory sentencing laws that make it harder for courts to ensure the punishment fits the crime. Queensland has abolished child rights protections to remove the principle that imprisonment of children should be a last resort.
• There has been limited progress on raising the age of criminal responsibility. Most jurisdictions, including federally, allow children as young as 10 (Year 5 in primary school) to be arrested, prosecuted and locked up. Victoria has raised the age to 12 and ACT has moved to 14 with some exemptions. The Northern Territory recently lowered the age from 12 to 10.
• Australian laws still permit asylum seekers arriving by boat to be turned back without a proper assessment of any refugee protection claims. ºÚÁÏÇ鱨վ and others arriving by boat must be detained and then sent offshore to the tiny island nation of Nauru.
• Queensland abolished its truth-telling inquiry and treaty process.
• At the national level there has been no progress on truth-telling and treaty. 

How to better protect human rights in Australia 

Part of the UPR process is that in the lead up to a review, states usually make voluntary commitments – promises to take action to improve rights. NGOs and the Commission will be engaging with the Australian Government to suggest voluntary commitments it could make. 

Australia will also respond to the recommendations made by other nations – choosing which ones to accept and implement. 

So what should the Australian Government be doing to improve people’s human rights? 

This is a big question. A big part of the answer lies in work already done by the Commission and others. 

The Commission’s multi-year Free and Equal project has done the groundwork to lay out a human rights agenda for government.  

There are 7 actions the government should take to better protect people’s rights namely: 

• Adopt a Human Rights Act for Australia – legislation that protects in Australian law the rights that Australia has promised to protect at the international level.
• Make our national anti-discrimination laws more effective and comprehensive with a stronger focus on prevention.
• Establish a national human rights education plan.
• Improve Parliamentary scrutiny of human rights.
• Support the establishment of a human rights tracker – a way to measure progress and regress and rights – a bit like the Closing the Gap dashboard but for all Australians.
• Deliver an annual statement to Parliament on human rights priorities.
• Increase support for civil society and the Commission to protect human rights. 

The Parliament’s own human rights committee recently looked at how to better protect human rights in Australia. Last year it recommended establishing a Human Rights Act, drawing heavily on the Commission’s model. 

The Disability Royal Commission also looked at the Commission’s Free and Equal work. It adopted much of our work in its own recommendations to improve the Disability Discrimination Act. 

Last year the Commission published the National Anti-Racism Framework. It’s an ambitious document that draws on extensive community consultations and research and makes 63 recommendations to government and beyond to eliminate racism in this country. 

The priority now is getting government buy-in to establish a Taskforce to work through each of the recommendations and build implementation plans to action them. 

This is just a snapshot of some of the actions we hope government will take.  

There are so many more things we need to better protect people's rights in Australia – from ending deaths in custody to guarding against the dangers of new technologies like AI and neurotech. 

Reflections on a career in human rights advocacy 

I want to finish the speech by sharing some reflections on human rights advocacy and some comments on Australian values. 

As I’ve got older and my career has got longer, I’ve got better at understanding how positive social change happens in this country. 

I don’t think that the law and policy reform process is taught enough in our schools and universities. 

It’s been a personal journey of understanding for me. 

When I started in community law, at first it was about helping people to get individual results and win cases. 

We were making a difference for individual people, but I quickly got sick of doing what often felt like band-aid work in a system that wasn’t fair for the clients I was helping. 

I was lucky to work with amazing advocates like Amanda George who taught me about law reform, community development and social change. That became my passion. 

When I started at the Federation of Community Legal Centres I reached out to an experienced and excellent public servant Chris Humphreys for advice on policy reform. 

He told me to read a book – John Kingdon’s work on public policy.  

The central thesis of the book about ‘policy windows’ is spot on.  

Kindgon says a policy window opens when three things align: 

1. The problem is well understood by government, experts and the broader community
2. The solution is available and feasible
3. The political will is there 

For people advocating for human rights reforms, we need to do our policy work, be credible and trusted, have the right relationships and then be ready for when a policy window opens. 

Often policy windows open unpredictably. 

I remember in the last UPR cycle encouraging the then Morrison Government to make a voluntary commitment to implement the reforms recommended in the Commission’s Respect@Work report. 

We didn’t get any traction. 

Then there was the international and domestic focus on women’s rights brought on by the advocacy of the #MeToo movement, the women’s marches for justice and powerful advocacy by Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame and others. This raised public and political awareness of the problem and made political will happen. The Commission’s recommendations meant there was a solution available and feasible. 

The policy window opened and government committed to a range of reforms including the Respect@Work reforms. Across both the Morrison and Albanese Governments, all of those reforms have now been implemented. 

So many human rights changes happen this way. Years and sometimes decades of strategic advocacy, campaigning and legal action are often involved. Sometimes good work goes unrewarded for long periods until a window opens and the change is won. 

Working as a Commissioner at the Victorian Law Reform Commission taught me the importance of understanding the perspectives of all the different interest groups on particular reforms. 

If we want government or business to take up a reform, we need to understand the perspectives of those who might oppose some or all of the reform. If we don’t agree with their perspectives, we need to be able to explain to government why they should prefer our approach. We also need to look for compromise, common ground and consensus to make it easier for government to implement reforms. 

I was at Yoorrook when the Voice referendum happened. It was heartbreaking turning up to work the next day and seeing First Nations colleagues like Aunty Eleanor Bourke who had spent her lifetime fighting for advances in Aboriginal rights.  

In her wisdom she helped me to process the rejection by a majority of the voting public of a proposal for a modest step forward for First Nations rights. 

The referendum result helped to crystallise changes in my own thinking on human rights advocacy. 

At Yoorrook we’d spent a lot of time looking the best evidence and crafting good policy solutions for change. 

The referendum result showed that unless we convince the Australian public of the need for change, the best crafted policy solutions will go nowhere. 

The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald commissioned some polling on why people voted different ways at the referendum. One of the questions they asked was whether colonisation had been good, bad, or mixed/unsure for First Nations people. 

Working at Yoorrook and reading and hearing about massive land theft, massacres, disease, the suppression of language and culture, the stolen generations, mass imprisonment and more, the answer to the question was obvious to me. 

But the polling results showed that twice as many Australians - around 40% to 20% - thought colonisation had been good for First Nations people, with about 40% choosing mixed or unsure. 

These results for me helped to explain why the Voice referendum failed. The problem wasn’t well enough understood by the public. 

This is why truth-telling is so important. If you haven’t done it, I encourage you to read the final report of the Yoorrook Justice Commission – – which tells the history of Victoria from First Nations perspectives. Or watch the brilliant 4 Corners episode earlier this year by Bridget Brennan which is available on  

And to give you some hope, after the referendum result, I looked at research around what non-Aboriginal Australians understand about injustice affecting First Nations people. 

In good news, there is strong understanding of the injustice of the Stolen Generations. 

Why? 

Because of generations of incredible advocacy by survivors, their families and communities. 

And because of the Commission’s 1997 landmark report. 

A report which was rejected by the then Howard Government. 

But which led to the apology by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008. 

And which if you fast forward - led to redress schemes being established in every jurisdiction except Queensland, including by the Morrison Government in 2022. 

No political party has a monopoly on human rights.  

It was the Whitlam and then Fraser Governments which signed and ratified the two major human rights treaties. 

The Human Rights Commission was first established by the Fraser Government and then made permanent by the Hawke Government. 

The Howard Government which rejected the Bringing Them Home report brought in important gun law reforms which have made our communities safer, significantly reducing the number of gun deaths. 

The Rudd Government which delivered the Apology and helped to elevate the injustice of the Stolen Generations in our national consciousness also launched a policy 12 years ago this month under which no one who arrives by boat who is found to be a refugee will ever be allowed to settle in Australia. 

Human rights are Australian values 

I want to end by talking about human rights and Australian values – and hope we can continue that discussion in the panel. 

What is it that unites us as Australians?  

How do we define what we stand for as a nation? 

 At Federation in 1901, Australian identity was closely linked to Britain. Racist laws and policies sought to keep ‘’. The drafters of our Constitution deliberately rejected including equal rights guarantees, not wanting to give them to First Nations or non-white people.  

We ended up with a minimalistic Constitution with very limited human rights guarantees. 

On some human rights issues, like worker’s rights and democratic reforms, Australia has led the world, introducing the eight-hour day, the secret ballot, women’s voting rights and preferential voting. Prime Minister Billy Hughes told a British audience in 1916 that Australia was ‘the most democratic government in the world’ conveniently ignoring the disenfranchisement of First Nations peoples.  

 During WW2, the language of rights emerged more strongly.  

Australia was an original signatory to the 1942 United Nations Declaration which sought to define what the Allies were fighting for. The signatories declared, ‘complete victory … is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands’. 

Australia was a leading force in drafting the 1945 UN Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Australia’s Doc Evatt and Jessie Street pushed for stronger rights guarantees including an international court to enforce the Declaration. Successive Australian governments signed and ratified the major international human rights treaties that followed the Declaration. 

Fast forward to 2007 and John Howard introduced the controversial citizenship test in an attempt to build social cohesion around a perceived ideal of what it is to be Australian. The subsequent Labor government-initiated review of the test said it was ‘’ and it was revised but retained. 

So what does our say about what makes us Australian? How do we define what we stand for as a nation? 

The booklet says: Australians believe in shared values such as the dignity and freedom of each person, equal opportunity for men and women, and the Rule of Law. Australian citizenship is about living out these values in everyday life.  

It goes on to describe other ‘core’ values including freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion. 

New Australian citizens must make a pledge saying: 

I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, 
whose democratic beliefs I share, 
whose rights and liberties I respect, and 
whose laws I will uphold and obey.  

The Prime Minister in his election night speech in May drew on similar themes when he said: ‘so let all of us work together to build our national unity on the enduring foundations of fairness, equality and respect for one another.’ 

So it seems that human rights values are at the heart of what it means to be Australian. 

The problem is, we’re not properly living up to these values. 

You see, while Australia supported the Universal Declaration and promised to protect the human rights set out in the treaties that followed it, Australian people can’t enforce these treaties in Australian courts if their rights are breached.  

Our human rights protections are patchy and our human rights safety net has holes in it.  

An Australian Human Rights Act would help with this. 

It would be like a reverse citizenship pledge where Australian governments and parliaments legally promise to protect the human rights of all Australians. 

It would also foster understanding and civic education by listing in one place, protected by law, the human rights that all Australians should enjoy. 

An Australian Human Rights Act would help to build a culture of preventing human rights breaches, and so it was taken seriously, it would give people the power to take action if their rights were breached. 

We already have Human Rights Acts operating effectively in the ACT (2004), Victoria (2006) and Queensland (2019) applying to their respective state and territory governments. 

There are so many examples of the differences, big and small, they are making in people’s lives. 

Stopping families from being evicted into homelessness. 

Securing dignity and equality for people with disabilities. 

Helping women fleeing family violence. 

Across the country, survey work commissioned by Amnesty and the HRLC shows that support for a national Human Rights Act is strong. It grew under COVID when there was a deeper appreciation of the lack of protection afforded to rights in Australia. 

There is a good community campaign for a Human Rights Act with over 100 diverse organisations - First Nations, disability, faith-based agencies and more – all backing the call.  

An Australian Human Rights Act would translate our values into legal protections to improve people’s lives. It would help make our society fairer for all. It’s time it happened.