Daveliberts: Hey, you are talking to someone who has watched Kevin Rudd break every promise he ever made to get into power, and I live in the State of Victoria, whose guiding light, is crooked premier, John Brumby, so I’m not totally ignorant of how Oz politicians don’t work-infrequently.

Having failed to convince you of the need for a BOR, I will fold my tent and escape with as much dignity as possible. Which is not a lot.

DAVID: The author, Mark Blumer, was introducing this exchange as a peg to hang his hypothesis on. A BOR cannot fight the fear that lives in so many people. But it can stop crooked politicians from manipulating that fear. (You don’t go to Jesuit school without learning a lot about instilling fear into other people.)

The real reason we need a BOR is to make our system stronger in the face of the world drift-there has to be a stronger word- to the far right. If every other democratic country on the planet has seen fit to have a BOR perhaps they have seen something we apathetic Oz dwellers have failed to see.

I think you are missing the point

I do not think the author is suggesting that a Human Rights Act would prevent Abbott from saying what he did, or for Thoughtcrime, but rather that it might hinder him, if in office, from introducing immigration legislation that differentiated by race or religion because he thinks that muslims are not ‘the right people’

‘There is no logical argument for a Bill of Rights in this country’. I would prefer to read somewhere-I’m not meaning you-a logical argument AGAINST having a BOR. Anyone weighing in on the old chestnut that it would only be giving more money to the legal profession is fudging the issue.

But if one more media person equates border security and refugee protection I will personally gut them.

Find one reference to border security in the refugee convention, just one.

Go on.

As for human rights, if anyone here thinks they have any protections they are dreaming.

We have ratified human rights treaties galore but the only one that is enshrined in domestic law is studiously ignored by all and sundry.

Yep, the refugee convention is enshrined in the migration act - it forbids punishment for method of arrival or lack of documents but we lock ‘em up anyway, it enforces the right to legal aid, the right to work, the right to health care and strictly forbids detention except if war crimes are proven.

Yet from 1954 we called it refugee protection, in 1999 it became border security by Howard dog whistling.

Thomas Jefferson

I thought I would cut and paste just one ‘logical argument’ in favour of a human rights act

I could find some Locke, Paine, Rousseau, if you want a pasting fight, but I fear you have little time for people such as these, who participated in an Enlightenment that seems to have passed you by.

you have not offered an facts about how FGM, and now honour killings, would be defensible under any Human Rights Act currently tabled.

A logical argument for a Human Rights Act was presented in each of the 35,000 submissions to the Brennan Report. Why don’t you cut and paste a bit of that? Or maybe just read it.

“…concentrate on the argument rather than the invective….”

Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital says it is seeing between 600 and 700 women each year who have experienced it in some form.

Dr Ted Weaver (from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists) agrees and he says ordering people against the practice would be inappropriate. [Even though it is illegal]

“If we try and dictate and pontificate about this and not provide culturally appropriate care, we’ll further disenfranchise those women,” he said.

FGM and honour killings are the tip of the iceberg for defensible “cultural tradition” under a BoR.

There is no logical argument for a Bill of Rights in this country.

There is some relevance to your example, though. At the school I attended, the teachers had no problems allowing students to get away with any discriminatory comments they wanted to make about Aborigines. The school’s Aboriginal population was zero. Many students graduated with some extraordinary prejudices. A bill of rights would do squat about that.

This article, from the title onwards, insists that the discourse between the voter and Tony Abbott is precisely the sort of conduct which would not occur if the proposed act was enacted as the author wants. I say that there is not a single word of the conversation in question that would be prevented by a human rights act unless thought-crime was fair game, and I’m pretty sure that the proponants of a bill of rights would not intend it to be literally Orwellian. Perhaps a better example is needed for me to grasp the need for such an act. Logically, it makes sense to me that such an act would need to provide genuinely restorative justice for Aborigines who have been displaced from their land, deprived of royalties and exposed to massive institutional racism. I can tell you for free that such an act would be intolerable to a good 80% of the Australian population.

the fact that FGM is happening behind closed doors does not mean that it should happen, or the fact that it is illegal. Nor does it validate your spurious suggestion that it might be recognized as legitimate cultural tradition by a Human Rights Act.

you pretty much just shoot from the hip, don’t you? concentrate on the argument rather than the invective.

On my first point it appears that Premier Colin Barnett is back-pedalling on arbitrary stop and search powers, and may let it die in committee, such is the public backlash.

maybe there are some libertarians still surviving in the Liberal Party

Do you have to resort to the use of the ‘Have you stopped beating your wife yet?’ type questions? They do nothing to aid your case.

DAVELIBERTS: You are being specious and cute. Tony Abbott is a bully. With a Bill of Rights in place he would have to control his personal prejudices rather than flaunt them. Who knows we may even get a chance to reduce the unspeakable right of all religion to brain-wash their kids into patterns of inherited hatred.

Israeli children are brought up to believe that it is acceptable to treat Palestinians as being semi-human, that is fine to take their land and to treat them the way the Jewish people were treated during WWII. A test group of Israeli children were asked whether it was alright to seize the land of the Palestinians. To persecute them, to reduce their quality of life and to deny them their basic human rights. The brain-washed children answered in the affirmative.

A year later the same children were told the story of a Chinese warlord of the Yüan dynasty who took the land of neighbouring countries, who was brutal and helped himself to their women. That he allowed their husbands to be tortured and humiliated. And who deprived them of the will to live. Because the scene had now been set in ancient China the children saw this warlord’s actions as despicable and branded him as a tyrant. A Bill of Rights could help to proscribe such manipulation of our children’s lives.

What we would also have is protection against those people who are happy to go along with a dictatorship as long as the dictator is of their own personal religion.

You’re as bad as the wingnuts on Bolt”s blog.

Surprise me by saying something intelligent.

“…FGM is subject to mandatory reporting in most states and territories and anyone guilty of performing or procuring FGM faces seven years jail…”

Really.

Then why is so much of it going unreported.

“Female circumcision happening in Australia”

abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/06/2812147.htm?section=justin

The more things change for some , the more they stay the same hey Captain Catholic?

Be careful what you wish for is the saying that comes to mind.