Australia is the only major democracy without a human rights act. Is that about to change?
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australia-only-democracy-no-human-rights-act/0w2mj6us8Open linkView original on leminal.spacehttps://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australia-only-democracy-no-human-rights-act/0w2mj6us8Open linkView original on leminal.space
The human rights acts in other major democracies don't seem to be with the paper they're written on...
And we have a "left" government with the numbers to implement one here, but without the political will to do so, and already looking for loopholes to ignore those rights if they ever do codify them.
I mean, yes, we should have a bill of rights, but even if it does happen, I'm not holding out any hopes for it changing much of anything
Watch this be carefully crafted to prevent criticism of Israel
We do these things by international agreements don't we?
As I understand it, we have them by omission. So our constitution and legal framework grants specific abilities and powers to the various levels of government to allow it to perform its functions, and anything else that isn't explicitly mentioned is unrestricted.
It's relatively easy to have creeping expansion of powers eroding rights in this setup, but conversely, you don't have to think up and deal with every particular right that you want enshrined in law right now, you can let the "everything's allowed by default" future-proof things a bit.
The only constitutional protection we have here is political speech