Australia needs a Bill of Rights Act

Australia is one of the few western democracies not to have legal protection for fundamental human rights. The closest they come is recognising an implied right to freedom of political communication (but not other forms of freedom of expression) from the "representative government" clauses of their constitution. But some of the LNP's newly-appointed conservative judges don't think even that exists:

Freedom of speech may not be guaranteed by the Australian constitution, according to a conservative judge newly appointed to the high court.

In his judgment of a challenge to Australia’s foreign influence transparency scheme, Justice Simon Steward said freedom of political communication implied in the constitution may not exist and was not “settled law”.

The opinion could be seen as a shift towards more conservative legal interpretations after the former attorney general Christian Porter was lobbied to appoint more restrained, “black letter” judges to the court.

While the decision of one justice is unlikely to prompt more than 25 years of legal thinking to be overturned, it marks Steward as the most conservative high court judge since Dyson Heydon, who declared in 2013 that the implied freedom of speech was a “noble and idealistic enterprise which has failed, is failing, and will go on failing”.

This is one opinion of five in a case which ultimately upheld the government's foreign influence transparency law, but its still troubling. And with the LNP's continued American-style attempts at court-stacking, and the tendency of both parties to enact ever-more tyrannical legislation, Australians may wake up one day to learn that the only human right actually (weakly) legally recognised has been removed by judicial fiat.

The answer of course is formal recognition. Australia needs a proper Bill of Rights Act, to affirm and protect human rights. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be on either major political party's agenda.