This stuff always starts out with the best intentions,

you’re of course referring to that potent mixture of boring legalese and three-hundred-year-old French enlightenment theories that always creates the average genocide, right?
‘Coz I don’t doubt your allusion to Frank Brennan being the next Pol Pot is legit, it’s just I’d hate to see the poor man round us up and move us out to the countryside only to stop dead in his tracks and say, “Shit, I’ve forgotten my cliffnotes book about three-hundred-year-old French enlightenment theories. Oh well, have to put off starting Year Zero for another day.”
That’d be awkward[Hitler smiley face]//:=)

Andrew B, agree on Doc Evatt’s legacy: he was flawed as are all human beings, it seems he was mentally ill around the Petrov hearings time; but his work with the nascent UN has stood the test of time.

I must cavil with your tone in one regard though: “a bronze medal for nose picking”???? It was a SILVER!! And our little Aussie Nose Battler was edged out of first place [Gold, GOLD, GOLD to Australia!!! in Nose Picking] by some dodgy judges from former Soviet Bloc nations; completely unfair, the winner obviously used banned nasal sprays, and if you look here at the visdeo, you can see that the Czech…; I must write to Mr Molotov and get this sorted out.

Doc

??? “Better” rights? Rights exist, or else they don’t. Is there such a thing as “better” nitrogen? (And I don’t mean nitrous oxide).

Perhaps instead of “better ‘rights’”, what you really meant to say was better *stuff*.

It seems to me that by using such a slippery understanding of what “rights” are that you think they can be “better,” you are opening the door to a whole zany arbitrary world of legislative nuttiness. This stuff always starts out with the best intentions; next comes the stammered claims of, “but that giant mountain of skulls is not what I meant!”

ALl I’m saying is that any Bill or Charter (assuming it happens, which is still a big if, given the over the top scare campaigns that have been and are being run) won’t involve any Constitutional amendment. At best, it will be legislation of its own – a la the Race Discrimination Act – at worst it will be a Victorian style thing or even just a Parliamentary Committee reviewing every new law for its impact on rights (which is not overly different to what already happens at a federal level and is regularly ignored whenever it is politically expedient).

As I read the terms of reference of the Committee headed by Frank Brennan which the govenrment has just set up, the option of any sort of Constitutional amendment has already been ruled out.

As to Evatt, his reputation is still pretty visible. I’d only forgotten his contributions to foreign negotiations (which I must have at least pretended to pay attention to in high school & uni) because it’s a subject neither as sexy as local partisan fights or true international shenanigans e.g. Churchill giving Stalin the Balkans on a paper napkin.

Pop Quiz: Who was Percy Spender and why is he actually Australia’s most important forgotten minister for foreign policy?

Adrien–I see that you, Bartlett and his commenters all lean towards putting a human rights amendment into the constitution when we become a republic, naturally.

I think our comments crossed over Nickws, but just to make clear, I don’t support putting a human rights amendment into Australia’s Constitution at any stage in the forseeable future.

I’d love to see Australia become a Republic, and I’d love to see some clearer recognition in the Constitution of Aboriginal and Torres Straity Islander peoples being the original inhabitants of the land. I’d also love to see a Treaty (not in the Constitution though). But I don’t think we should have a Bill of Rights or broader rights based items in the Constitution – not for many many years anyway. Try out a legislative based one first and see how it goes.

Much as there is a lot about the US system of democracy and rights that I admire, I do think some of the criticisms of the way their Bill of Rights is interpreted by the Courts has validity (in my view ironically compounded rather than mitigated by the fact that most of the Judges are not “unelected” and even the appointed ones can have a politicised appointment process)

Most commentary I’ve seen about Evatt over the years mentions either his mental illness (usually in a fairly derogatory or dismissive way) or his role regarding the efforts to ban the Communist Party (which was a major triumph for true liberal democrats and I imagine would have been like standing up arguing for the rights Australian Muslims accused of terrorism today).

Perhaps unless you’re a Prime Minister, your contribution doesn’t rate a mention (and even then we have clowns like Downer who try to degrade the record of people like John Curtin – who not totally coincidentally worked through significant mental health issues of his own).