How Australians can take back their rights
Dear National Human Rights Consultation Committee,
I would like to submit to the Committee Geoffrey Robertson's Statute of Liberty: How Australians can Take Back their Rights (Vintage, Sydney 2009) in its entirety. I hope he has done so already. I'm sure you have it.
I work in human rights, and I thought I had heard all the arguments. But I read his new book in deference to a great thinker and writer. And it was a revelation.
In an era of slaves, Australia's first colonial law was a prohibition on slavery! I had no idea.
He also questions our foreign head of state and the very foundations of our constitution, but not for the jingoistic reasons usually put forward; he offers compelling, rights-based historical and legal analysis. Britain's monarchy, closed to Roman Catholics and inherited by primogeniture, is quite simply a violation of our Sex Discrimination Act and a violation of freedom of religion.
