Seriously admire your calm and measured approach to refuting the garbage produced by Albretchsen. Unfortunately anyone who has read her blog knows Janet never lets facts get in the way of a good piece of conservative vitriol. Virtually every article she writes is corrected and generally dimissed by a large number of bloggers. To her credit the ongoing humiliation doesn’t deter her from leading the conservative culture war charge. This of course could be attributed to plain stupidity, how I suspect she is not really stupid, just lazy, arrogant, ignorant, mean, divisive, and generally a very nasty piece of work. The most important news is that she is becoming more and more irrelevant. The less attention we all pay to Janet the better.

That said, I’m inclined to agree with the reactionaries on a Bill of Rights. A non-justiciable charter of rights would be pointless, but a constitutional bill would be a devil’s playground of interpretation for judges. It was bad enough when the High Court conjured an implied right to free expression in order to thwart the Hawke Government’s perfectly appropriate ban on political advertising. That would be nothing compared to the mischief judges could get up to with constitutionally-protected rights.

Albrechtsen, in contrast, is a carbon copy of Ann Coulter. A complete intellectual light-weight getting her talking points faxed directly from the AEI, The Weekly Standard, Fox and the Corner. She’s a creation of the cocoon, with not a single original thought in her head.

Henderson isn’t like that - and he at least has a sense of history and pedantry closer to William Buckley Jr’s than the hacks at News.

I did love Will Fettes description of her as Australias very own Ann Coulter, a view I fully share. While both ladies are good for an occasional laugh, neither of them should ever be mistaken for professional journalists and taken seriously.

Re Bills of Rights I’d respectfully suggest Bernard Keane examine the experience in other jurisdictions, eg the UK, before so glibly dismissing statutory bills as worthless and then proceeding to flog the activist judges line in respect of a constitutional bill.

Personally I’d rather entrust my civil liberties to the courts than to politicians like our former federal attorney general or, for that matter, his present NSW counterpart.

In any case, as Graham points out, no-one is seriously suggesting a contitiutional bill for Australia. Given Australias dismal record when it comes to constitutional change, this option is a sure non-starter and is only ever introduced into the human rights debate by opponents such as Ms Albrechtsen.