Newsletter Vol 5 Issue 7

Launch of the Pre Election Kit:

A Just Vote - Not just a Vote

Justice Marcus Einfeld

There’s no need for me to make a long boring speech because we’ve got Justice Marcus Einfeld! Marcus in the face of your sweeping coverage of history and technology I am almost speechless. In this current lethal mix of political manipulation, misinformation and war mongering to see you and your stance for Human Rights, stands out like a beacon and I thank you for that. These are not happy days as we look at the limitations and pettiness of current policies and your challenge to us to take a stand on these issues gives us a courage to stand for, what you call, our historic compassion. That is what I find in short supply and look for at the moment.

This evening you have helped us remove whatever blindfolds - be they black or white, that blind us to the realities, and in that sweep you’ve helped us. You have read the past with compassion and humanity standing out against the small mindedness and moral cowardice and the weakness of much of our political leadership. I have never been more despondent than I am at the moment so I am grasping at any symbol of hope. I have a memory that stands out for me. A number of years ago I visited a camp of Rwandan refugees in Tanzania. Rwandans are great gardeners and they were planting all over the place. They were living in rounded mud huts and I’ve never forgotten this and I hang on to it. Outside of those huts some people had planted flowers. Not for anything else, just for flowers. I think you’ve given us a flower tonight, and I thank you.

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Introduction

Can I commence by acknowledging our presence on traditional land and to thank you very much for this opportunity to speak on what turns out to be a very critical day because obviously we are about to have the directed. It’s a wonderful set of papers. I must congratulate everybody who is associated election to which this Kit and your papers are with it, an outstanding job of work. I can imagine the type of internal politics and other things that get in your way. I know the struggles you must have had to get approvals for this type of undertaking. It certainly is a remarkable achievement and it deserves the attention of all Australians and particularly of the parties that are about to stand to run candidates for the election. It’s very important, the more important because the timing of this paper means that we will be given an opportunity that might not otherwise have been available, and still be a struggle to focus upon some of these major humanitarian issues. Clearly this election is going to be fought on a whole range of strange issues that really the Australian people have no capacity to control or influence at all. Whereas the matters in your paper are all matters which effect our conscience, effect our humanity, effect our compassion and they are matters upon which we can all, or ought all have a say. And try to ensure that the next government of Australia is imbued with the spirit that permeates your papers.

Universal declaration of Human Rights

Fifty-three years ago this December a war-ravaged and war-weary world ushered in a new international order with what was called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a bold and brilliant document full of words, phrases and concepts that everyone wanted to hear. It spoke of recognising the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. It observed that disregard and contempt for Human Rights have resulted in barbarous acts which outraged the conscience of mankind. It called for the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want as the highest aspirations of the common people. It declares essential that Human Rights should be protected by the rule law. As a consequence a common standard of achievement was declared for all people of all nations. Every individual and every organ of every society was required to strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and to work to secure their universal recognition and effective observance.

It was too late for the 20 million Russians who had died in the freezing winters of 1942 and 3, it was too late for the 15 million civilians in other parts of Europe who had died as innocent victims in the power-crazed lunatics of the third Reich and their millions of German, Polish, French, Ukranian, Croation, Italian and other sympathers. It was too late to save the 17 million allied soldiers who had died in defense of the gravely imperiled frontiers of freedom and their German, Italian, Japanese and other compatriots who hardly had a stake in the cause which sent them to their inglorious deaths. It was too late for the 6 million Jews and the hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, Communists, Social Democrats, Catholics, non Aryans, Homosexuals and humanitarian sympathisers including one and a half million children who were subjected to the rifles, the preposterous death camps and the Zyklon B gas of the SS and the Einsatzgruppen.

The atrocities of the Nazi era and the horrors and devastation of the Second World War compelled the international community to unite in a vow to create a world free of persecution, war and injustice and never again to allow such horrors to darken the lives of humankind. On December the 10th 1948 the General Assembly of the newly created United Nations proclaimed this extraordinary declaration of humanitarian principles. The pen was almost still writing the universal declaration when the Iron Curtain descended on Europe. Behind this almost impenetrable barrier for other forty years the so-called workers revolution against the evils of capitalist materialism held sway. Under the guise of establishing and egalitarian proletariat Soviet and East European Communism constructed a secret society of repression, fear,inhumanity and nuclear mud. The build the monstrous Berlin wall. They attempted to blockade and perhaps obliterate United States by carpeting Cuba with nuclear missiles. They armed ruthless regimes oppressing their own peoples from North Korea to Angloa, from the Middle East to South America. In some places such as the Ukraine they engaged in genocide. They paralysed the United Nations with their infamous veto and built an environmental legacy in which to this very day hundreds, perhaps thousands die every year just by breathing the air and by drinking the water.

In response the Western world built armies, armaments and armadas of ships, planes, bombs and rockets. Amongst other places we fought in Korea, Indo China and the Persian Gulf as it turned out for very illusive results indeed. We ignored not infrequently funded ruthless dictators even though they butchered their own people because they were seen as friends of the West or at least as anti-communist. Yet when Mikhail Gorbachev almost single handedly brought the communist house of cards crashing down and when the tragic followers of the evil Sadam Husein gave up their unequal struggle we cried out victory.

The new international order

Forty years after the first one was virtually still born the second new world order of our era was born. This one was alive or so the politicians told us. There was no Universal Declaration Mark 11 we had done a good job of ignoring the first version and it was so well expressed there was no point in trying another exercise in grandiloquence. There had been other international treaties on Human Rights in the meantime but the world’s wanted nothing to do with them. Britain waited until it went into Europe before it actually joined the whole system. The United States ratified it’s first and only Human Rights treaty just six years ago with a veritable host of reservations.

The world had come a long way in that forty years. Colour television, people on the moon, space research and travel, the Salk vaccine and other fantastic medical advances prolonging life and alleviating suffering, the end of colonialism. The US Civil Rights Act, progress for Aborigines, a Human Rights Charter for Canada, and subsequently for the UK and NZ leaving only Australia of the Western industrialised world without one. Mobile and car phones which can telephone Germany as well as Glebe and so on. While all this was happening people were getting swamped by the tyranny of bureaucracy, the politics of the unprincipled or negligent, even of the dishonest and the effect of massive national debt brought about in part by the greed of the West and by bad government elsewhere. Millions became beset by famine, poverty and persecution by new war lords. The allies spent 150 billion dollars on ousting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait without achieving even a skerrick of democracy in Kuwait itself where women can still not have a drivers license let alone a vote. We permitted him to murder, starve and freeze to death thousands of his Kurdish and Shiite citizens. And we have allowed him to remain in power so that he can go on oppressing his own people and doing horrible mischief around the world. Just as we have allowed the Turks to persecute the Kurds from the other side of the border while we in Australia gave an AC to a visiting former President of Turkey.

We failed dismally in Somalia, we ignored the warnings about Rwanda, and then withdrew UN personnel allowing thousands more to die. We set up safe havens in Bosnia and then stood by while the people we were supposedly protecting were forcibly uprooted and mercilessly shot. We have largely ignored the massacres in Algeria, done little to assuage or reverse the suppression of the Burmese and the Tibetans. And for four decades we Australians virtually made love to the ruthless autocrat Soeharto and his voracious family in priority to helping the Indonesian poor and seeking justice for the East Timorese. And this is only a tiny part of democracy’s perpetuity to the humanitarian principles the Universal Declaration was supposed to get us to uphold. Sadly the remoteness of global humanitarian reform is truly great. There is no sign at all that at last economic equity and social equanimity are about to supplant the essentially selfish and aggressive pursuits of most nations. There is not even a whisper of a world united in its commitment to redirecting its abundant skills and resources towards taking up the challenges of the real problems of humankind.

These challenges include alleviating hunger and disease, confronting, exposing and overcoming exploitation and corruption, removing torture and cruelty, attacking prejudice and discrimination and addressing constructively the human imbalances and inequities which abound everywhere. At the end of 1998 for example, a million Indonesians were starving while the United States spent 40 million dollars on investigating the business activities and sexual peccadillos of its President and we Australians spent 30 million dollars or more, who knows, on a campaign to explain and sell tax reform which on everyone’s admission still has a long way to go before it will deliver the promised benefits. And just as we very recently refused 433 Afghans their entitlements to apply for refugee asylum in Australia we spent 300 million dollars a year on a refugee program to take in less than 10,000 people a year when if we and other Western countries handling many more put all this money to alleviating the plight of the world’s 25 million refugees, we might actually give real relief to these hapless victims of selfishness, racism and neglect and do away with the need for boat people at all.

The present international crisis

And now the world cries as the outrageous wicked destruction of human life and property in New York and Washington just two weeks and a little ago. It reels from the economic havoc caused by those events and others. It faces the realisation that humanity is threatened not so much by super power, rivalry or nuclear confrontation as we have all been brainwashed for so long. But by a much more sinister threat of chemical and biological attacks on such things as our water rsources, power generation capacity, oil supplies, transportation and communication facilities and other fundamentals to our way of life. And we brace for the apparent inevitability of a war on who’s meant achieve what we cannot understand but must trust in our leaders to choose wisely and execute efficiently when we generally do not trust them to do much simpler things almost every day.

There is to be sure not a lot upon which we can be happy and contented at this time. Although geographically remote and politically unimportant, Australia and we Australians are going to feel the pain, pay the cost and endure the risk that so many others are facing at this time. If nothing else it should make us take stock and look to what we can and should do to address our own weaknesses and faults.

Australian Human Rights

For most of these last 53 years since the Universal Declaration, Australia has been one of the leaders in accepting the high humanitarian standards it identifies. As a middle power with a respected human rights record Australia has been looked to and listened to by the international community on human rights issues. This proud tradition of support for Human Rights and dignity casts upon us a great responsibility as the largest developed democracy in our region, indeed the 6th oldest democracy in the world. Australia not only has an obligation to speak out and against persecution running rampart in other countries, we have an obligation to prevent and remedy human rights abuses on our own soil. The standards which we must observe are those we set for ourselves, not alien credos which we loudly and rightly reject.

Some people label these Human Rights Principles as foreign ideas imposed upon us by unattractive regimes or ideologies from elsewhere. But none of the tenets of the Universal Declaration and the raft of International laws which have followed have in fact been forced on Australia by anyone. The one thing, when they were passed the UN was firmly under Western control. More significantly, none of these principles are foreign to us or to decent people anywhere - all of them are recognised and accepted as part of ours, and many others cultural and legal framework in any event. The driving force for the enthusiastic adoption in Australian terms are the types of matter to which your papers refer. The evolution of our nation into a society where laws, employment and human relations reflect decency and honour. Where legitimate controversy is fought and resolved with a passion devoid of stereotypes and of a minority group or racial defamation. Where a fair sharing of our country’s resources and benefits is open to every sector of the community. And above all, where decisions of all kinds stem from considerations of merit and true deserts, free from preconceptions, prejudices and pre-judgements.

However in my perceptions we Australians together with the peoples of many others of the so-called developed countries are today in serious danger of forgetting these goals. Continuing to recall and nominally respect the Universal Declaration and all the other Human Rights treaties is one thing, it is quite another to ensure that our governments and people actually honour these rights and as of late our commitment is looking decidedly hollow and the world is taking notice. Contrary to what some of our leaders claim from time to time, breaches of Human Rights and decency occur every day in Australia. We fall far short of our obligations to children, to women, especially those in poor circumstances, to people with disability, to refugees, to new migrants, to aged persons and to many others. Recently cutbacks in this country in public funding for social justice allegedly due to economic imperatives sometimes rather ironically called economic rationalism might have produced a budget bonanza but they have resulted in major reductions in our provision of child care, job creation, education and social welfare programs and in efforts to care for children, especially refugee and new migrant children and to assist Aborigines and Islanders to improve their situation.

So that again the poor are being hit to help the rich and the gap between the two widens even further. The so-called trickle down effect supposed to flow to the poor from helping the rich become richer has again reversed or at best, stopped its flow as it always does. If I may say so, we need a little less economic rationalism and a little more rational economics! Judging by our reactions by the recent boat arrivals and the shocking events overseas we are even losing our historic compassion and tolerance to people different to ourselves. I am a proud patriotic Australian, but I have been ashamed of some of what we have been up to as of late.

Indigenous Australians

The greatest shame, there can be no doubt, as your pamphlets have identified is the continuing suffering of Indigenous Australians and the deprivations endured by the children are the very worst aspect of that shame. Many people in this country, including many leaders and moulders of public opinion speak of everyone having or being given equal rights in our society. This is a glib or be it seductively expressed point of view. If two people commence life far apart in assets, whether personal or material, and they thereafter receive proportionately equal benefits the gap between them actually increases. In other words equal treatment of people on unequal levels of the outset of the equalisation process merely perpetuates the inequality. Hence the superficially attractive appeal of everyone should be treated equally as from now, is in fact a recipe for retaining differences, imbalances and discrepancies because of the commencing inequality. When used in relation to our indigenous peoples it is also surreptitious and insidious discrimination if not racism. For whether conscious or unconscious, its consequences for the victims are exactly the same.

The truth is that in this 8th year of the UN- declared decade of the World’s Indigenous peoples and despite the increased volume of legislation and significant financial allocations by governments from the 70s onwards, Australia’s indigenous peoples still face gross inequality deeply rooted in history and the prejudiced intolerant or stubborn attitudes of the white community. Which ever social indicator is looked at, whether its health, education, justice, employment or housing, Indigenous Australians are identified as the most disadvantaged group in the country. This situation represents a manifest and fundamental breach in Australian and International law. What it says about the morality of our nation I leave you to contemplate.

National Apology

Many people blame past generations for what had happened. Indeed one of the reasons given for refusing the National apology has been that this generation should not take responsibility or have to take responsibility for what has gone before. Slave labour was outlawed by Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago. The Australian convict settlement ended about the same time. Yet for decades up to as late as 1970 many Stolen children were effectively enslaved to white farmers and were the victims of shocking crimes. It does not strike me as well meaning to require a 6, 8, 10, 12, year old to work 14 hours a day and more 7 days a week and to pay them $1.00 or $5.00 for doing so. Yet that is what often occurred. Many of these Aborigines are well and truly alive today. Many of the white people involved are still with us. To my mind an apology is the least we owe for this wickedness. There is much that can be said about the blame of today’s generation not least in the gigantic problems relating to health and education and unemployment. Let me just mention one of them because it’s mentioned in your papers.

Juvenile Justice

Mandatory sentencing, which I prefer to call Compulsory jailing is a nasty insidious creation of our generation that not even the convict settlement introduced. I oppose it absolutely and have been doing so for many years. As Christ Sidoti will remember we were in the Human Rights Commission when the compulsory jailing was introduced by the government of Western Australia in 1987. We went to try to talk them out of it. It is to my everlasting dismay that we failed. Tragically it took a young boys death early last year to bring public and political attention to it. As a general statement I do not believe that politicians unaccountable to consistency or case by case review should replace judges and magistrates as arbitrators of appropriate penalties for the Commission of Criminal Offences. Nor do I think that Australian people trust their politicians more than their judges to do this work. What is more - compulsory jailing legislation expressly abandons the internationally agreed principle of imprisonment as a sanction of last resort, with priority given to other interests. [Section 125 Young Offenders Act 1994 (WA)]

However there are much more important reasons why these laws must be opposed. Whatever their actual words, compulsory jailing laws clearly discriminate against Aborigines and were intended to do so. Why else were they framed to require the compulsorily jailing people convicted of offences mostly petty, which have disproportionately involved Indigenous Australians because of their poverty. How can we impose the same or a greater penalty on the offender who has stolen one can of beer than on one who has destroyed thousands of dollars of public property? How can stealing half a pizza because a young Aboriginal thief is hungry, receive an automatic jail sentence, when fraudulently use by a white adult of someone else’s credit card to buy the pizza to take to a party with friends, does not. And even more significantly how and at what cost will the community be protected from a young person turned into a confirmed criminal by unnecessarily too early and excessive exposure to hardened criminals in prison.

There are dozens of cases I could quote but because of my short time today I invite you to take a look at just one. That of a young Aboriginal lad named Chris of Gunbalanya in the Northern Territory. This 18 year old copped 28 days in jail for receiving, not stealing $2.00 worth of petrol. As far as I can find out there have been at least five other cases in recent years for stealing or receiving similar amounts of petrol. That petrol was certainly not taken to fuel their company cars, it was to feed their addictions as petrol sniffers.

In the Northern Territory we have been jailing kids not because they’re dangerous criminals but because they’re ill. In the Northern Territory magistrates hearing these cases have been prevented by law from taking into account that these kids are petrol sniffers. As much as I support them, where is the logic of having treatment orders as an option for heroin addicts but not for petrol sniffers. What jurisdiction in Australia, indeed what country in the world would jail petrol sniffers. Where in the world is such inhumanity? We are not yet quite in a position to lecture too many other countries.

Unequal Justice

When Australian government representatives so frenetically attacked international bodies for having the temerity to criticise our performance in this field, as they have been doing in recent times. They might think for a moment about some other facts as well. Imprisonment of blacks continues to be far greater than whites everywhere in the country, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics reporting last year that the weight of Aboriginal imprisonment was 15 times greater than for the rest of the population. In the Northern Territory a full 70% of the jail population are Aborigines against 28% of the population. In Western Australia where Aborigines make up 2% the rate of imprisonment is 21 times that of the total WA population.

A fair go for all

These things should not be happening. The things in the past should not have happened. Together they are human wrongs not for blame in the crude sense, but for deepest regret and for a commitment to put them right as a matter of the utmost urgency. If they represent what some have called a black arm band view of history, I for one, wear it as a mark of sorrow and a commitment to reconciliation. Rather a black arm band than a white blind fold to shut out the truth. It can never be right to be wrong or to continue a wrong. We certainly do not need to convict ourselves of a past over which we did not influence and over which we had absolutely no control. But future generations will undoubtedly judge us harshly if we do not respond now. This is not a question of anyone’s attitudes to people different to ourselves, it is about justice and fairness to all people, not just some.

Asylum seekers

I want to conclude by picking another of the subject matters which your papers cover, I can’t obviously deal with them all. Let me say a few things about the way we are approaching the current problems faced by asylum seekers arriving here by boat.

The first thing to say about it is this. People seeking refugee asylum are not illegal migrants. In making their applications for refugee status, they are doing something expressly permitted by Australian and International Law. No one suggests that we have open borders, there must be controls on movements of people in and out of countries not their own. But the problem has been caused by many events and many countries and it is not within power of any one country to regulate. While the world finds a way to deal with the problem we should not resort to false labels to heighten the rhetoric, inflame the passions and the intolerance, and try to gain a political advantage.

Second, to denigrate people escaping persecution, torture, terror or starvation because they are Muslim, is pure prejudice and intolerance. To label them as actual or potential terrorists as some of our politicians and others have recently done demonstrates breathtaking arrogance, displays appalling ignorance and plays shameful and unashamed politics. These people have rejected or been rejected by their leaders, that’s why they are here.

Third, to turn them away because they arrive without papers is cruel. If you are fleeing your own government because it is persecuting you or will not protect you from the persecution of others in your homeland, obtaining papers from them is a nonsense. Australia has no office to apply to for authorisation in most of the countries concerned. When you can and do apply you wait for two or three or more years for permission to come. How do you survive lack of food and water and gangs of killers and rapists while all that’s going on?

Fourth there is no such thing as a queue of refugees. Refugees escape persecution and possibly death or starvation for themselves and their children. They do not fix or regulate the times or places for their terror. It is true that a boat person granted asylum may temporarily displace someone else wanting to come here. But this is partly because Australia has in recent years substantially reduced the number of refugees it is willing to accept. We have come down from 25,000 to around 10,000 in a period when the number of refugees and displaced people has grown substantially and our population has increased by around 3 million not to mention our national wealth and levels of personal consumption. It is also partly because we have linked the onshore and offshore refugee programs so that once the yearly quota has been reached, and mostly it has not been reached, the processing of overseas asylum seekers stops. We have thus created the situation that even if there were a queue for asylum seekers to join, no one can be sure that his or her application will even be considered when reaching the head of the queue. Human beings facing personal horrors ought not to be the plaything of bureaucratic procedures.

Like other similar countries we have a binding legal obligation to all refugees not just some. Who is to say that people arriving on our door step by informal means are less likely to have suffered or be likely to suffer persecution than those living under someone’s protection overseas whom the bureaucrats have chosen after years of procrastination and delay which showed no recognition of urgency in their cases.

Fifthly we are now the only developed country in the world which practices indiscriminate, indeterminate, incommunicado detention of asylum seekers. Alone of all the countries in the world including Canada, the United States, the nations of Europe and Scandinavia to which we normally compare ourselves. We have indiscriminately detained all of them - the elderly, the children, the sick and the pregnant, at a cost by the way of around $50,000 per person per year while the Catholic Archbishop of Perth was offering free accommodation in Catholic homes while the review process ground on.

In any civilised country freedom from arbitrary detention is a fundamental Human Right derived from the common law. As our own Human Rights Commissioners have found the detention centres are more like overnight police lock ups than places suitable for the lengthy detention of people who have committed no crime.

Currently some 482 children under the age of 18 face this very horror. 30 or so are facing it alone. Some have spent, and normally spend, the year from age 0-5, 3-8 or 6-11 in compulsory detention behind barbed wire without having committed a single offence. Both the United Nations Human Rights Committee and our own Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission have condemned the Australian legislation as breaching fundamental rights. But much of this criticism has been brushed aside as bleeding hearts stuff, not worthy of serious consideration. I do not agree that inhumanity can be accepted with impunity. We simply must protest this fundamental violation of decent conduct.

Most of the world, including Australia has for 50 years unequivocally declared a commitment to provide protection for such persons and to assure that people seeking asylum as refugees are treated in accordance with internationally recognised human rights standards. Some of our own foreign military adventures notably in Vietnam and Cambodia, which we entered by the way, not for their peoples, but as we were told to protect ourselves- and in the process, wrecked, have actually created refugees, yet we would detain them too.

From recent political propaganda in Australia you would think we have been swamped by boat people. It may interest you to know that in the last 12 years less than 20,000 boat people have arrived on Australian shores. Not the tens of thousands a year the preachers of doom and racial prejudice would have us believe. We have given refugee status or entry on other humanitarian grounds to around 4,000 of the 20,000 meaning that we have held and paid for all these people in detention for up to five and six years without charge, trial or bail and have eventually found 25% of them innocent of even the technical offence of arriving in our country without appropriate documentation. There would be a furore if this statistic applied to people detained on criminal charges.

Moreover, contrary to the scare campaign and playing to peoples fears that we are bringing boatloads of gangsters from the Middle East it should be recorded that of the recent arrivals of Afghans and others from Iran, Pakistan, and elsewhere, more than 90% have been granted refugee status by the department itself or by the Refugee Review Tribunal. So much for the so-called invasion by criminal Elements! So much for the absurd publicly funded and government authorised publicity campaigns that characterises Australia as the land of snakes, sharks, man-eating crocodiles and fearless spiders. It’s amazing however that our Olympic visitors escaped unscathed! How do we ourselves survive? If we had a land border with a country of oppression our problem would be thousands of times worse. Our protection is our geography, not draconian laws or advertising slogans.

And make no mistake the millions of dollars a day it is costing us to have the Navy transport people to Nauru and to pay, some would say bribe, Nauru to take them will not save us from a single refugee. For at least 85-90% will be back here after processing and of course, after the election. The same number that would have been admitted if we had taken them onshore in the first place at much less cost. And after Nauru is full we will do the same in Kirabati and other tiny Pacific Nations. Even in our own Christmas Islands which we are about to cut adrift from our national unity of treatment - is this madness, or just politics? It is certainly not compassionate and in accordance with our voluntarily undertaken legal obligations.

I have been in some of the Pakistani camps that these people have come from. They are as bad as can be imagined and worse than most of us would ever conceive, if I were there I would accept a trip in a bath, let alone a leaky boat to anywhere at whatever cost, even an island of bird droppings like Nauru or one about to disappear under water like Kirabati to save my children from death due to gang warfare or starvation brought about by inadequate food or insufficient clean water. And by the way, the camps do not have television, if they did Australian leaders would not be on them. Let us forget this nonsense about sending a message, the boat people are desperate, not balancers of risk.

During the recent court case brought by the Tampa people, the Federal Court heard evidence that some of these people have had to watch while their parents were murdered and and their wives raped. I mean who is kidding who? My questions are simply these: What have people fleeing persecution and the risk of injury, torture or death done to deserve this unconscionable treatment at the hands of supposedly compassionate people. If there are some cheats amongst people seeking asylum in Australia, what crime have the rest committed to warrant the Australian parliament and its members from its two major political groupings taking leave of their senses? What are the crimes of the children and the elderly? The nicest answer is the opinion polls, which on this subject as on all humanitarian matters, leaders should lead, not follow. The worst answer I leave to you.

Conclusion

And so I conclude. The human spirit has proved over and over again the remarkable ability to resurrect itself under the most difficult conditions. Spirituality itself is an essential feature of our capacity to survive. But if these saintly concepts are to take hold and survive in 21st century democracies, a new international order based on morality and the eternal sanctity of the human condition must be made to prevail over brutality and terror.

This essential need involves recognising and embracing the equal worth of all people and providing all of us, especially the children with the knowledge and understanding to combat the lies and distortions that currently tend to swamp this fundamental principle. The recent divisions in Australia over the Tampa asylum seekers have thrown up this challenge in a stark and disturbing way. The paper in which I am proud to launch today, your paper, A Just Vote, not just a vote, is a major contribution to reversing this unhealthy and unholy trend and I congratulate you all on having achieve it.

Human Rights are, as their most famous Declaration says, universal. They are for all of Humankind. No one person is more of a human being than another. What we are looking for in Australia is the emergence of a noble society which seeks national dignity for itself and grants personal dignity to everyone in it. We will fail this challenge at the peril of our nation’s soul. Australia is too wonderful a country to allow this tragedy to occur.