Many delegates attending this week’s ALP National Conference no doubt feel the motto of this Government is: “Do nothing for as long as possible and then do as little as possible that you think you can get away with.”
That was certainly the case with tackling pervasive and destructive gambling advertising. It has also been true of dealing with the hopelessly inadequate returns Australians get from their gas resources.
It is also true in another area which has not got the attention it deserves: a human-rights act.
At least with gambling and gas, people can understand the Government’s reluctance because to act it would have to take on very powerful corporate interests who only have to throw a relatively small amount of money into the media ecosystem to raise merry hell for the government.
Human-rights inaction is less excusable.
First to some history. As in the US, when Australia’s Constitution was framed, the founders deliberately left out a Bill of Rights. The US corrected that within five years when the fist 10 constitutional amendments were ratified. The correction did not happen in Australia. An early attempt at an Australian human rights act was attempted by Samuel Griffiths, the man who drafted the first version of the Constitution for the 1891 convention and Australia’s first Chief Justice. As a member of the Queensland Parliament he introduced a private members Bill in 1890 to protect human rights, but it failed.
Since 1945 there have been 10 attempts at a human-rights Act but all came to nothing. It is not so much a case of the idea being firmly rejected by the people, but rather a failure of political impetus.
In 2009-10, lawyer and Jesuit priest Father Frank Brennan was chosen by the federal Labor Government to lead a quality committee to hold 64 public meetings throughout Australia. It recommended a Human Rights Act but all that was adopted was a “framework” which included a review of draft federal laws and a Joint Committee of Parliament to scrutinise draft laws, sometimes before they passed, sometimes not.
In 2017, Coalition Attorney-General Senator George Brandis appointed Professor Rosalind Croucher as President of the Australian Human Rights Commission.
She in turn advocated a Human Rights Act and the commission produced a 194-page report, Revitalising Australia’s Commitment to Human Rights, which included a draft Act.
It was pushed by Labor MP the late Peta Murphy, who as it happened later chaired the committee that inquired into gambling advertising.
Shortly after the election of the Albanese Government, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus formally commissioned the federal parliament’s Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights to review the earlier work.
It reported in May 2024. And more than two years later, the Government has not reponed, let alone done anything.
So, the latest attempt looks like suffering the same fate as previous ones, unless the National Conference does something about it.
At the conference the Australian Council for Civil Liberties will be pushing for a change in ALP policy. Instead of: “The ALP will consider a Human Rights Act for Australia”, they want the platform to read: “The ALP will implement a Human Rights Act for Australia”.
Why does it matter? In recent years, there has been a growing sense of powerlessness among voters – a sense that big corporations and billionaires have so much power that they can tell governments what to do, not the other way around, and that they can trample over the rights and reasonable expectations of individuals.
Further, there is a sense that Governments, too, are paying less attention to the rights and expectations of individuals. Anti-terrorism and national-security measures are increasingly riding roughshod over freedoms of speech and assembly.
There has also been a lot of pushback against hard-won rights and acceptance by people who had hitherto been discriminated against on grounds of race and sexuality.
A Human Rights Act would be a first step to getting a Bill of Rights in the Constitution.
Since the Covid pandemic, the political mood seems to have changed quite dramatically. The Reagan mantra that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” no longer applies. The response to Covid proved that government could provide solutions and could easily find the money to do so.
Since Covid, there has been a growing expectation that government should do more to improve things for people, and not get out of the way and abdicate running things to the private sector.
This change of mood is an important one for Prime Minister Anthonny Albanese to note. If he does not do more to address it, the disaffected will head to One Nation. Since Covid voters are more aware that money can be found to do more. Getting a greater return for our gas is just one way of doing that.
The other thing he and the ALP conference should look to is legacy.
Since World War II, Labor has done the big-ticket reforms that make people’s lives better, starting with the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and widows’ pensions in 1946, then Medibank/Medicare under Whitlam and Hawke; superannuation and Native Title under Keating; NDIS under Gillard.
As yet, the Albanese Government does not have an historically monumental policy under its belt, its recent move to make the housing-tax system fairer is something of a start. That could be built upon by making the gas corporations pay a fair return and using the proceeds to do something that is of historic moment.
The conservatives usually take the position of opposing these reforms on the ground that they cannot be afforded and that people should look after themselves, or that they involve wasteful bureaucracy. That view is becoming increasingly untenable as people look to government to do more for them and do more to protect them more against the power of corporations.
The ALP National Conference is a great opportunity to adopt policies that corporate Australia opposes because most of the delegates are not beholden to corporate donations. It should be a good re-booting point for the Government to turn around’s the electorate’s obvious dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 21 July 2026.
Crispin, congratulations on your excellent and timely article. Repeated Amnesty International surveys showing overwhelming public support across the political spectrum, sustained advocacy from 168 community organisations, and clear assurances from social progressives that such legislation would pass both houses of the current Parliament.
A federal HRA would embody a strong response to the populist Hansen attack, ensuring a fair go for everybody, not sections of our community. It would improve social cohesion and trust in government. Let’s just DO IT!