Australia and Bill of Rights

Tony Abbott: Does Australia need a Bill of Rights? | Daily Telegraph Your Say Blog

Almost no one who voted for Kevin Rudd last year was thinking: “Australia is such an unfair and dictatorial place that we really need a bill of rights”. Regardless of any fine print buried deep in Labor’s platform, a bill of rights is quite counter to the carefully contrived pre-poll image of Mr Rudd as a younger and less divisive version of John Howard. It’s further evidence of the impossibility of changing the government without also changing the country.

What’s the point of having a consultation process unless the Government has already made the decision, in principle, to bring a bill of rights in? It’s clearly designed to soften people up to accept what would otherwise be suspicious.

What are the terrible injustices that only a bill of rights can correct? Surely not immigration detention or police powers under national security legislation because these are all matters where Mr Rudd claimed to be just as tough as Mr Howard? And if these are to be dropped shouldn’t the Government and the Parliament do it openly and accountably rather than have judges do it by stealth?

Proponents ask: who could be against rights? In fact, everyone who believes in the role of parliament should be against allowing judges to invent new rights. Bills of rights are left-wing tricks to allow judges to change society in ways a parliament would never dare. Even the British Labour Government is now having second thoughts with the Home Secretary saying that rights legislation has become a “villain’s charter”.