Re-orientating Human Rights Meanings and Understandings? Reviving and Revisiting Australian Human Rights Exceptionalism Through a Liberal Democratic Rights Agenda

The announcement by the Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis and the Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Mr Tim Wilson, of two separate, but related, inquiries into aspects of human rights, provides significant insights into the likely re-orientation of the meaning and application of human rights in the laws, policies and practices of the Coalition government. The subject matter of the two reviews may loosely be described as relating to traditional liberal democratic rights and freedoms within the Australian legal system and polity. These developments are also properly seen as located within a continuing Australian paradigm of exceptionalism in human rights. In particular, that exceptionalism is now evolving to include philosophical foundations grounded in liberal democratic principles, providing an illusory protection of human rights that is prominently rhetorical whilst substantively at odds with contemporary, common understandings of what constitutes human rights, based on obligations arising under international conventions.