Page 214 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 December 2008
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stood the test of time. Sixty years later I do not think that you will find people in the world who are attuned to the needs of people and the way that they interact in a democracy or in their societies and in their nations that can find much to fault with it. I think that was because of the great minds that were brought to bear on it.
It is useful to note some of the great philosophers and thinkers of the time were involved in the creation of this document. The great French thinkers and philosophers, Jacques Maritan and Rene Cassin, who was one of the founders of the Christian Democratic Movement, and the philosopher and politician Charles Malik of Lebanon were important people who had significant input.
This was not a document crafted by bureaucrats. I do not mean to disparage bureaucrats. It was a document that was crafted and overseen by people who were deep thinkers and who were able to put a timeless element into this, and this is the important thing. The other thing about it—and I think that this is something that is interesting in the current debate in Australia—is that this was a declaration; it was not a treaty. It was nothing that required people to sign up to something that was binding. It was a declaration of aspirational views. This is something that we need to reflect on as we, as a nation, decide whether we have a bill of rights or some other element, and this is part of the work that Father Brennan has to take on board.
Mr Speaker, I want to comment on a couple of things that were said this morning. Both you and Ms Bresnan, in her opening remarks, talked about constant vigilance and that the price of freedom is constant vigilance. In some of the failed states, especially in Africa in the conflict in Rwanda and the current conflict in the Congo we see the price of our not being vigilant as a group of nations. There is much that we can do, and there still much to achieve, but this does not mean that we should give up hope because not everyone meets our aspirations for the best possible behaviour. There is much work to be done, but we also need to draw comfort from the fact that there are many nations in the world for whom protection of human rights is the bread and butter of political processes. I think that is one of the things that we need to dwell on here and to reflect on.
Mr Corbell gave a spirited defence about how the common law does not provide safeguards and that we need something more substantial, that we need legislation such as we have in the form of the human rights legislation in the ACT. I do not want to say this in any way as a criticism of the human rights legislation, but legislation itself does not provide the safeguard. The safeguard is about the culture and the intent of the people who implement it.
Ms Porter referred to the fact that Zimbabwe has a fine and beautifully crafted declaration of human rights. But that does not do anything for the people of Zimbabwe who are facing death by cholera and death by starvation because of the out of control inflation and the complete failure of the system of government. It is also worth noting that most of the eastern bloc countries that were members of the Soviet bloc had, in their way, in various forms, declarations on human rights. But that did not save those people from the gulags, from enforced famine, from death or from persecution, depending on which part of the eastern bloc you lived in, for 50 or close to 90 years.
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