Human rights in Australia

Human rights in Australia are generally respected and recognised. Although Australia is the only western democracy with no bill of rights, numerous laws have been enacted to protect human rights and the Constitution of Australia has been found to contain certain implied rights by the High Court. However, Australia has been criticised at various times for its immigration policies, treatment of asylum seekers, and treatment of its indigenous population.

Legislation

• Racial Discrimination Act 1975
• Sex Discrimination Act 1984
• Disability Discrimination Act 1992
• Age Discrimination Act 2004
• Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission

Main article: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) is a national independent statutory body of the Australian government. It has responsibility for the investigation of alleged infringements under Australia’s anti-discrimination legislation.

Matters that can be investigated by the Commission include "discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or ethnic origin, racial vilification, sex, sexual harassment, marital status, pregnancy, or disability."

Private members, the Greens party and the Democrats party have tried to add "sexuality" and/or "gender identity" to this list above, which has always failed to pass at least one house since 1991 through to today due to a lack of sufficient support from the major political parties.

Universal suffrage

Women

South Australia was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to grant women suffrage when it allowed women to vote and to stand for Parliament in 1894. The passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act gave women the right to vote at the federal level in 1902. The dates for the other states of Australia are summarised below.

	Right to Vote	Right to stand for Parliament
South Australia	1894	1894
Western Australia	1899	1920
Australia (Commonwealth)	1902	1902
New South Wales	1902	1918
Tasmania	1903	1921
Queensland	1905	1915
Victoria	1908	1923

Indigenous Australians

1967 is often recalled as the year that the Aboriginal people of Australia gained the right to vote, however this is an incorrect date, and an over-simplification of the processes involved. When the state constitutions of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania were framed in 1850s, voting rights were granted to all male British subjects over the age of 21, which included Aboriginal men. However, few Aborigines were aware of their rights and hence very few participated in elections.

The situation became murkier when the Commonwealth Franchise Act was passed in 1902. The Act gave women a vote in federal elections but Aboriginal people and people from Asia, Africa or the Pacific Islands (except for Māori) were excluded unless entitled under Section 41 of the Australian Constitution. Section 41 states that any individual who has gained a right to vote at a state level, must also have the right to vote in federal elections. The Solicitor-General, Sir Robert Garran, interpreted it to mean that Commonwealth rights were granted only to people who were already State voters in 1902. What transpired was a situation where Aboriginals who had already enrolled to vote were able to continue to do so, whereas those who had not were denied the right. This interpretation was challenged in Victoria in 1924 by an Indian migrant, where the magistrate ruled that Section 41 meant that people who acquired State votes at any date were entitled to a Commonwealth vote. The Commonwealth government instead passed laws giving Indians the vote (There were only about 2300 in Australia at the time), but continued to deny other non-white applicants.

In the 1940s, groups began to lobby the Commonwealth government to grant Aboriginal suffrage, and in 1949 the Chifley Labor government passed an Act to confirm that all those who could vote in their States could vote in the Commonwealth. However, little was done to publicise the changes, and many Aboriginal Australians remained unaware of their rights.

In the 1960s, reflecting the strong Civil rights movements in the United States and South Africa, many changes in Aborigines’ rights and treatment followed, including finally full voting rights. The Menzies Liberal and Country Party government gave the Commonwealth vote to all Aborigines in 1962. Western Australia gave them State votes in the same year, and Queensland followed in 1965.

Capital punishment

The last use of the death penalty in Australia was in Victoria in 1967. Ronald Joseph Ryan was hanged at Pentridge Prison at 8:00 AM on February 3, 1967 for the murder of a prison guard, George Hodson.

Capital punishment was officially abolished throughout Australia by the Death Penalty Abolition Act 1973.

Aboriginal Australians

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy set up in Canberra by activist agitating for the rights of Indigenous Australians.

Australian Aborigines are the indigenous peoples of Australia. Their ancestors arrived in Australia over 50,000 years ago.

Massacres and dispossession of land

In 1770, Captain James Cook took possession of the east coast of Australia and named it New South Wales in the name of Great Britain. The Aboriginal population was decimated by British colonisation which began in 1788, when news of the land's fertility spread to Europeans. a combination of disease, loss of land (and thus food resources) and war reduced the Aboriginal population by an estimated 90% during the 19th century and early 20th century.

A wave of massacres and resistance followed the frontier. The last massacre was at Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928. Poisoning of food and water has been recorded on several different occasions.

Stolen generation

Main article: Stolen generation

'Stolen Generation' is the term controversially used to mean the Australian Aboriginal children who were removed from their families by Australian government agencies and church missions between approximately 1900 and 1972. The nature of the removals, their extent, and its effects on those removed, is a topic of considerable dispute and political debate within Australia to the point that the term "Stolen Generation" is often referred to in the media as the "so-called Stolen Generation".

According to a government enquiry on the topic, at least 30,000 children were removed from their parents and the figure may be substantially higher (the report notes that formal records of removals were very poorly kept). Percentage estimates were given that 10–30% of all Aboriginal children born during the seventy year period were removed.

Health

Many Aborigines now live in towns and cities around Australia, but a substantial number live in settlements (often located on the site of former church missions) in what are often remote areas of rural Australia. The health and economic difficulties facing both groups are substantial (for instance, life expectancy of Aboriginal people is often 20 years shorter than the wider Australian population, with alcoholism being a serious issue) and the root causes are poverty, alcohol, and violence. The solutions to these root causes are contentious in political issues.

Life Expectancy

Over the twentieth century in Australia, life expectancy for women increased 26.7 years; while for males it increased 28.7 years. Other statistics show remarkable reductions in the impact of diseases. For example, death rates from cardiovascular disease have fallen 30% in the general population in Australia since 1991, and 70% in the last 35-years and the infant mortality rate figure reduced 25% over 1993 - 2003 and 48% over 1983 - 2003. These statistics demonstrate that significant improvements in the health and life expectation of population groups can occur within decades.

However, despite significant health gains being made by Indigenous peoples in the 1970s and 1980s, health inequality continues to grow across a number of indicators. This can be attributed, in part, to both a slowing up of health gains being made by Indigenous peoples and the rapid health gains made by the non-Indigenous population in recent decades.

Indigenous peoples' self-assessed health status shows they believe little improvement has occurred over the past decade. Over the NATSIS 1994 - NATSISS 2002, the percentage of Indigenous peoples assessing their health as 'fair/poor' rose from 17.5% to 23.3%. Correspondingly, there was no statistically significant increase in the number who assessed their health as 'excellent/very good' or reported reductions in smoking; or alcohol consumption.

The ABS has estimated that the life expectation for Indigenous females decreased slightly from 63 to 62.8 years over 1997 - 2001. For males, it increased from 55.6 to 56.3 years. The life expectation inequality gap increased: between Indigenous and non-Indigenous males: rising from 20.6 to 20.7 years; while between Indigenous and non-Indigenous females, it rose from 18.8 to 19.6 years. The life expectation formula that was used to produce these estimates has now been superseded by a formula that produces an estimate over five year periods.

Under a new life expectation formula adopted by the ABS in 2003, Indigenous males' life expectation was estimated to be 59.4 years over 1996-2001, while female life expectation was estimated to be 64.8 years. A life expectation inequality gap of approximately 18-years was identified, a reduction of approximately three years on estimates produced in 2001 under the now superseded formula. The next estimate will be calculated over 2001 - 2006.

Indigenous life expectation appears to be similar to that of people in low development states. Although international comparisons should be made with some caution (because of the different formulae with which life expectation is calculated between jurisdictions), with reference to the 2004 United Nation's Human Development Index, Indigenous peoples appear to have a life expectation approximating that of the people of Pakistan (60.8 years).

Immigration and asylum seekers

White Australia policy

Main article: White Australia policy

The White Australia policy, the policy of excluding all non-white people from the Australian continent, was the official policy of all governments and all mainstream political parties in Australia from the 1890s to the 1950s, and elements of the policy survived until the 1970s. Although the expression “White Australia Policy” was never in official use, it was common in political and public debate throughout the period.

Mandatory detention

Main article: Mandatory detention in Australia

The entrance of the former Woomera IRPC.

The term 'mandatory detention' describes the legislation and actions of the Australian government to detain all persons entering the country without a valid visa, including children. The policy started under the Hawke Labor government with the passing of the Migration Amendment Act in 1992. The immigration minister, Gerry Hand, explained that the policy, to be applied on a case-by-case basis would facilitate the processing of refugee claims, prevent de facto migration and save the cost of locating people in the community. However the Migration Reform Act of 1994 introduced by the next immigration ministor, Senator Nick Bolkus, made the detention of 'unlawful non-citizens' mandatory [1].

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, these unauthorised arrivals, popularly referred to as boat people, were transferred to one of the Australian immigration detention facilities on the Australian mainland, or to Manus Island or Nauru as part of the Pacific Solution. Mandatory detention is considered by many to be a violation of basic human rights, and remains a very controversial aspect of Australian immigration policy.

National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention

The HREOC held an inquiry into mandatory detention and found that many basic rights outlined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child were denied to children living in immigration detention.

The Inquiry has found that Australian laws that require the mandatory, indeterminate and effectively unreviewable immigration detention of children, and the way these laws are administered by the Commonwealth, have resulted in numerous and repeated breaches of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Inquiry made a range of specific findings in relation to:

• monitoring of conditions in detention centres
• Australia's detention laws and policy
• Australia's refugee status determination system as it applies to children
• safety and security
• mental health
• physical health
• children with disabilities
• education
• recreation and play
• unaccompanied children
• religion, culture and languages
• temporary protection visas.

These specific findings, based on evidence received by the Inquiry, were assessed against Australia's human rights obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. From this, the Inquiry reached its major findings and recommendations.

Homosexuality

Main articles: LGBT rights in Australia and Recognition of same-sex relationships in Australia

Homosexual sex has been legalised progressively from 1975 (in South Australia) through to 1997 (in Tasmania), legislation exists against some forms of discrimination against homosexual persons. Every state and territory has legislated either a registered partnership or domestic partnership recognising same-sex relationships. However the Commonwealth government, as of today, does not give the same level of government recognition to same-gender couples as de facto opposite sex relationships in 58 federal (Commonwealth) law statutes. These statutes only recognises relationships with a 'member of the opposite sex' [2] [3] [4] [5]

Same-sex marriage, civil unions and/or civil partnerships can not be performed and/or recognised under Australian commonwealth (federal) law. Under section 51(xxi) [6] of the Australian Constitution, both the federal and state governments are permitted to pass legislation regarding marriage, but any state law recognising same-sex marriage would be over-ridden by federal legislation to the extent of the inconsistency (as per section 109 [7]). Until 2004 the Marriage Act 1961 did not define marriage, but the common law definition of marriage as "a union between a man and a woman" was applied by Australian courts and was taken to be "settled law." A 2007 Galaxy Poll found that 57% of polled Australians "support" same-sex marriage.

External links

• The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission website
• Australian Human Rights and Civil Rights Index
• Censorship in Australia - (IFEX)
• List of Australia's human rights violations
• NSW Council for Civil Liberties