Bills of rights do not protect freedoms

By Andrew Bolt

As American judge Learned Hand said: "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it."

Just when it seemed safe to be openly proud of Australia, the cultural cringers are at it again. This time we need to be ashamed of ourselves because Australia does not have a bill of rights. Forget the fact Australia is one of the world's oldest and most successful liberal democracies. Forget the fact bills of rights did nothing for enslaved African Americans or those persecuted in Stalinist Russia. No, we need a bill of rights to "keep up" with the rest of the world. The cringers are the same activists, lobbyists and lawyers unable to secure political objectives at the ballot box. Some Labor states, and the Labor Party's national organisation wing, are in on this as well.

Now there is a new voice in the chorus: Geoffrey Robertson, QC. Fresh off the plane he argues that Australia needs a bill of rights for two reasons: first so that we can become an "advanced" democracy; and secondly so that our High Court and other judges can make more of an international contribution than they do now. According to Mr Robertson, the High Court has lost some of its standing because a few overseas human rights lawyers tend not to quote its reasons for judgment. I think that says more about the human rights lawyers than it says about our own court.

The High Court of Australia is a formidable institution, of which all Australians should be proud. Current members of the High Court enjoy a very high international standing. From among the current justices two had enormous international and local practices as barristers (one was acknowledged as the best advocate in the common law world since Barwick); one was a law professor at 30, the youngest dean of an Australian law school and is an undisputed academic powerhouse; and all have studied, practised or lectured overseas.

The truth is that Australia is one of the most advanced democracies there is. Our constitutional order came about, not through war or other violence, but as a result of various popular processes in Australia in the 1890s. Even those who did not have the vote back then were often involved informally. Since federation, Australians have been at liberty to amend the constitution, and we have done so from time to time.

Bills of rights do not protect essential freedoms - all they do is present the very real risk of having judges imposing personal opinions as law, leaving everyone to guess about what the law might be. In Canada, for example, without direction from the parliament, judges have decided that all asylum seekers are entitled to an oral hearing, that there should be gay marriage, that persons awaiting trial must be released after eight months on remand, no matter how serious the crimes involved (this position was later reversed), and that tobacco advertising is free speech.

In Britain last year a suspected car thief climbed onto the roof of a home and threw bricks and tiles at police. Officers provided him with Kentucky Fried Chicken and cigarettes, just to be sure that his "human right" to sustenance while being "detained" could not be called into question. In 2001 the European Court of Human Rights held that certain tenants who were behind in their rental payments could not be evicted because of their "right" to "their" home. In 2006 the House of Lords followed and applied that decision.

I doubt that many Australians would welcome these outcomes. I would also doubt that many Australians would want our High Court to reduce itself to this kind of decision making. In a proper democracy, it should be the people's elected representatives, not an unelected elite, who make these kinds of social and economic decisions. I have no doubt that if there were a national bill of rights, Australian judges would approach questions relating to rights in good faith. However, they would become involved - even if unintentionally - in making policy.

I suspect that those advocating a bill of rights in Australia have a different view from the Australian Government on difficult issues such as responding to terrorism and people smuggling. I also suspect that they do not have the courage of their convictions to put this to the electorate. As one activist in the United States was quoted as saying, "We have to look to the courts to create new rights that we won't be able to get from the legislature." That is anything but democratic.

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A Bill of Rights for Australia?

Tim Blair has some more facetious comments

Posh lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC - previously prominent during the Republican debate when he argued in favour of severing ties with the British, using a British accent acquired during many decades living in Britain - believes Australia needs a Bill of Rights. "Australia is the only country without a Bill of Rights," Robertson said this week, Britishly. "We are alone among advanced liberal democracies in not having a Bill of Rights which has a presumption in favour of freedom of expression."

A fine idea, Geoffo. But who would compose such a Bill? Ideally we'd be able to go back 150 years or so, grab four or five normal middle-class citizens and put them to work: "Pay attention. You've got 30 minutes to come up with a list of rights held by all Australians. You there, top hat - take notes."

A sensible charter would result. Trouble is, in 2007 any Bill of Rights project would be captured by panic lobbyists and grievance shriekers and other types generally confined to asylums in enlightened 1857. You'd end up with a legal document enshrining the rights of bisexual SBS employees to state-funded vegan heroin, or something that allows people to vote via YouTube. Full human status might be granted to sugar gliders. Or Greens senators.

No. That won't do. As one of the few mid-19th century throwbacks currently employed in the Australian media - you may recognise us by our monocles and refusal to recognise any post-partition maps of India - the responsibility for an Australian Bill of Rights clearly falls to me. So, let our rights now be upheld:

1. Australia shall have a free press. That is to say, it shall not have a press funded without the consent of taxpayers, who otherwise might be compelled to hand over some $750 million every year for a load of commie bull on the ABC.

2. Should a person decide to open an establishment in which citizens are welcome to enjoy a cigarette with their drink, no law may prevent this.

3. Were a person to advocate a Australian population limit of between six and 12 million, as Tim Flannery did in 1995, Tim Flannery shall be prevented from having children. Of which he has two, the ridiculous hypocrite.

4. If an intruder unlawfully enters a house and is confronted by an armed homeowner, all bets are off.

5. Those who sneer at tabloid newspapers, because news printed on smaller pages is somehow inferior to news published on larger pages, shall retain the right to admit at any time that owners of massive plasma televisions receive higher-quality news than owners of smaller televisions.

6. Artists may attack Islam with the same vigour they attack Christianity. Please, go ahead. Try it right now. Good luck with all those changes of address.

7. Any wealthy environmentalist living in a coastal property shall place said property on the market at half its estimated worth the moment they make public any fears that Australia is threatened by rising oceans.

8. The right of singers, actors, dancers, cartoonists, sculptors and other practitioners of the emotional arts to proclaim on serious social, scientific or military matters shall be balanced by the right of audiences to mock them to the point of breakdown.

9. Any opponent of nuclear power shall be granted the right to never visit France, the US, Japan, the UK, or any nation where nuclear power is used. This right will also extend to a ban on them buying or consuming any goods sourced from those nations.

10. Protesters at events such as APEC will retain the right to be treated gently by police, as has become customary, despite incendiary provocation. Except for one event per year, not to be indicated in advance, during which police may respond as they wish with absolutely no fear of prosecution.

11. Any Australian citizen may at any time write a book, present a play, make a film, or complete an art work of any type, entirely free of any government intrusion. Including intrusion in the form of grants.

12. Upon the death of any Australian listed among our National Living Treasures (especially Phillip Adams, Julian Burnside, Peter Garrett, Jennie George, Marcus Einfeld, Bob Brown, Tim Costello, Robyn Williams, Pat O'Shane and Michael Leunig), citizens may help themselves to all their stuff.

13. The right - no, the responsibility - shall exist for media commentators who complain about the gap between rich and poor to immediately request a substantial pay cut.

14. To preserve the right of Australians to be protected from toxic waste, radioactive metals, noxious gases and deadly biological agents, all such materials should be stored in Adelaide, where they will have the incidental side-effect of boosting property values.

There. That's enough for Robertson QC to chew on during his next series of Hypotheticals. By the way, do you think Robbo's author wife Kathy Lette speaks at home in the same pun-swamped manner we see in her books? If so, all mockery is withdrawn. The poor bloke has suffered enough.

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Addle-headed literature curricula

By Imre Salusinszky

Last month's Australian Literature in Education Roundtable, organised by the Australia Council for the Arts, came up with many suggestions for raising the profile of our national literature, past and present, within the education system. And on the eve of the roundtable, federal Education Minister Julie Bishop took one great leap for mankind by announcing the Howard Government would endow a new chair in Australian literature at whichever university put forward the best proposal. At a stroke Bishop increased the number of such chairs by 50 per cent.

But while the state of Oz lit received a decent airing, there was much said at the roundtable that applied to the teaching in our schools of literature generally. As university specialists have ceased to be included on the state boards of studies, which shape curriculums and reading lists, two related developments have occurred. First, the cart seems to have overtaken the horse, with assessment and outcomes assuming precedence over content. Second, curriculums have come to be couched in a formidable bureaucratic jargon, an edu-babble that is inaccessible to mere mortals including, I suspect, most teachers. Here is a passage from the introduction to senior English in the South Australian curriculum:

"Through the study of English, children and students learn that language transmits cultural perspectives, including gender, ethnicity and class; and who or what is or is not important as they think, imagine, challenge, remember, create and narrate.

"They learn how language shapes meaning and reality, what this means for issues of identity and interdependence, and how it is used for a range of purposes in different contexts. Learners need to know how language is constructed and how it is used by different groups in society to shape power relations."

And this, from Western Australia's senior literature curriculum:

"In the literature course students develop skills and understandings of textual production and reception through reading practices that foster the close analysis and interrogation of textual languages and constructions. In addition to expanding their imaginative and intellectual experience, students develop and extend their social, cultural and textual knowledge through a greater comprehension of cultural meaning-making systems.

"Through critical engagement with a range of text types and cultural and historical contexts, students develop their understanding of different approaches to reading texts. This enables them to ask questions about the nature of literary text and how literature is defined by, and functions within Western cultural history.

"Such questions include the reasons why cultural value is assigned to one kind of text and not another; the changing nature of what is valued as literature at different times and in different historical and cultural contexts; and the ways particular social groups are given or denied the power to define what is 'literary' and what is 'not literary'."

It would appear, to put it bluntly, that senior-level courses in English expect students to be able to theorise the process of reading before they have done any. The sorts of inquiries outlined in these documents are perfectly appropriate to the graduate seminar room, but to place them at the beginning of a literary education is like starting arithmetic with advanced calculus.

It seems a particular style of literary theory that enjoyed its historical moment in universities in the 1970s and '80s has returned as farce in the curriculum prescriptions of the Australian states and territories. I am reminded of the way the Finnish system of dexterity training known as Sloyd got taken up in Victorian state schools in the '50s and ended up being plain old woodwork.

There are a couple of significant verbal giveaways in the documents quoted above. One is the use of interrogation, a word that spread through the humanities in the '80s and '90s like privet. When you interrogate a text you are apparently doing something far more important that simply reading or analysing or asking questions about it: you are standing in the middle of the road of ideas, raising your hand as some benighted Western cultural juggernaut rolls towards you, and announcing: "No further!"

The other giveaway is the grammatical slippage evident in "the nature of literary text". It suddenly appears as if literature has become indivisible, like milk. The view implied is that the particularities of author, style and imaginative vision, which arguably distinguish literary texts from each other, are secondary to an ideological impulse that unites and transforms them into an undifferentiated porridge.

The first point to be made about these kinds of curriculum statements is that they are, in all likelihood, harmless. I have little doubt teachers in high schools largely ignore such guff and simply get on with introducing their students to set texts without too much cultural theory clogging the gears.

However, it is the extent to which the texts are chosen to illustrate the frequently tendentious statements in the syllabuses that is a worry. As my friend Peter Holbrook asked in The Australian last month, would there be a glaring lack in a syllabus that simply declared students would be "introduced to some of the most rewarding and influential writing of the 19th and 20th centuries in English"? Such a syllabus would generate a reading list based on notions of quality, or at least canonicity, rather than illustration of appropriate contexts. My fear is that we have become so devoted to interrogation that we are embarrassed by concepts - sorry, constructs - such as genius or greatness.

Senior secondary studies in English enjoy an advantage right now that is unprecedented and may not last: the reading bonanza among younger children being driven by their enchantment with Harry Potter. We will not leverage this advantage by making disenchantment the object of high school literature courses.

What should that object be? Quite simply, literary experience, for its own sake. Until students have undergone at least the beginnings of an inductive survey of poems and stories, they are substantially under-prepared for the deductive assertions of literary theory that await them at university. And only such a survey can form the beginning of an appreciation of specifically literary attributes such as style, structure and influence.

By beefing up the literary content of secondary English courses and elbowing some of the more noisy curriculums out of the way, we would leave students and teachers freer to go wherever a dialogue with the text - which is very different from an interrogation - may lead.

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Moderate Muslim says not to appease the radicals

UNIVERSITIES must resist politicised Muslim groups seeking special treatment on campus, a commentator has warned. Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatric registrar and a graduate of the University of Sydney, said it was now clear that British universities had inadvertently lent support to the growth of home-grown radicalism by giving in to this kind of campus pressure. "(These groups) are very assertive, very quick to cry racism, they've taken advantage of the impression among some academics that they're a marginalised, victimised minority,'' Dr Ahmed said.

On Monday he will address the first national conference on Muslim university students, being held at the University of Western Sydney. He said overseas Muslim students, appreciating the freedoms of Australia, often become less religious. But local Muslim students, who had suffered "social deprivation'' tended to be attracted to an Islamic identity of opposition to the wider culture. "University is often the beginning of their path to greater religiosity and at times radicalism too,'' he said. Politicised Muslim groups might seek to build their profile by pressuring a university to allow a certain speaker on campus, for example.

Dr Ahmed said another pattern was for these Muslim groups and leftists to ally themselves. "I remember going to a protest (in Sydney during the recent Hezbollah-Israel conflict in Lebanon) and seeing environmental groups going Allah Akhbar (God is great) in harmony with some Lebanese groups,'' Dr Ahmend said. "The God is great line wasn't about religion, it was about social protest.''

Also on Monday Hass Dellal, executive director of the Australian Multicultural Foundation, will report on a series of Muslim youth summits held around the country. About 200 university students were among those involved. Mr Dellal said feelings of isolation and not belonging were common among the students. "But a lot of these young people didn't want to bury their heads and say, poor me. They wanted to get out there and do things -- one of the ways was by volunteering,'' he said.

He said Muslim students overseas sometimes felt they were not welcomed even by their own communities within Australia while local Muslims were troubled by the anti-terror laws. "They didn't understand what these laws meant,'' Mr Dellal said. "They were worried they were going to get locked up for saying something or doing something or looking like something.'' He said students also expressed their anger and frustration at the violent actions of extremist Muslims overseas and felt they had done everything they could to demonstrate their loyalty to Australia.

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