EPISODE ONE - Free and equal in dignity and rights: The Jurists

Our podcast deals with distressing topics. It may not be suitable for everyone. If you need to talk to someone, support is available. Call Lifeline on 131114 anytime for confidential telephone crisis support. This podcast is about my search for answers. We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come. We started pushing children behind barbed wire. All persons are free and equal in dignity and rights. Women and children first. Episode 1. Free and equal in dignity and rights. The jurists. Hello, I'm Alex Rousseau and I am your host and you are listening to women and children first. I guess you could say I'm an average Australian. I'm middle aged and middle class and like almost half of all Australians, my parents were born overseas. They migrated to Australia in the 1950s. Almost 10 years ago, I decided that I wanted a change in career. I went and studied law and majored in public policy. It was during this study that I learnt about the law and about our rights and obligations as citizens. I may be naive, but I've always thought of Australia as the land of the fair go, a land of mateship, a place that favours the underdog and sticks up for the downtrodden. Well, the more I found out about our policies in relation to asylum, the more I had difficulty reconciling this image with the reality. Look, I'm not some idealist advocating for an unrealistic utopian society, but at the same time, I think we as Australians need to know the whole story when it comes to our asylum-seeker policies. We've got the right to know what our government's doing on our behalf. It's one of our fundamental constitutional rights, the right to political communication, the freedom to examine and review these policies, is vital to our democratic society. I'd like to know what's going on and I'd like to know whether we can justify it or whether there's an alternative approach. Now, why have I named this podcast Women and Children First? The name alludes to a couple of things. Firstly, many of the early successful cases involved women and children, and that might be because people are more sympathetic to their applied. The phrase 'women and children first' is also fitting because it's generally used in an emergency. The way we treat asylum seekers, particularly those languishing in offshore detention, is nothing short of an emergency. And lastly, I'd like the name to inspire hope. The hope that women and children are the first to escape the indignity and uncertainty of life in offshore detention. And I would hope that everyone left behind will follow. Over the past few months, I've been on a journey to find these answers. And along the way, I've spoken with a pretty diverse bunch of experts, lawyers, politicians, jurists, advocates and academics. I'm under no illusions. This issue is massive and there are many avenues that can be explored. I want to take you along with me on this search for answers. In this episode, we're going to be exploring Australia's history when it comes to human rights. It's probably a good idea that we define some of the terms before we kick off. And I spoke with Dr. Daniel Gezelbash, associate professor at McQuarry Law School, where he runs the Social Justice Clinic, which gives students hands-on experience working mostly in the refugee space, and he's also the special council at the National Justice Project, where he helps with strategic litigation and is the only migration agent on staff. He's also a board member of refugee advice and case work services, the biggest free migration advice provider in Australia. I asked Daniel to define some of the common terms we'll be using when discussing asylum seekers and refugees. I think it's important to distinguish between the, particularly when we talk about the term refugee, between its term in a legal sense, as a term of art under international law, and also the way you would use it in common parlance. So I think when people talk about refugees, they're generally referred to anyone who's fleeing any sort of harm, where as a term of art under international law and also domestic law, it actually only applies to a very small subset of people who are fleeing harm. And asylum seekers refers to in common language, we use asylum seekers and refugee interchangeably for people, so basically fleeing any sort of harm. But in a legal sense, when we use the term asylum seeker, it's someone who's seeking to be recognised as a refugee, but hasn't had their claim determined yet, as opposed to a refugee who's been determined, has gone through the process and has been found to be a refugee. So it's clear the terms refugee in a asylum seeker are used interchangeably in everyday language. But in a legal sense, an asylum seeker is a person whose refugee status is as yet undetermined. Now language is a very powerful thing and often language can be used to present an issue in a way that almost forces the listener to interpret it in a particular way. For example, when politicians use a term like tax relief, it tells us that tax is something negative, something to be avoided. In the same way, we hear terms like "cue jumpers", "illegals" and economic refugees being used to influence how we feel about people seeking asylum. Dr. Gezelbash, is there a right way to seek asylum? In terms of the right and wrong way of seeking protection or seeking asylum, that sort of language of that sort of thinking or that sort of rhetoric is quite new. I think it's important to note that the refugee convention, which is the main international instrument in this area, is specifically designed to protect people who move on their own volition and seek protection elsewhere. Those are the ones that we see today, particularly in Australia, but now increasingly in other countries being identified as somehow undeserving a protection or "cue jumpers". But they're doing what the system was designed to protect. In Australia, we've come down very hard on people who try and access protection of their own volition and their government rhetoric is that we have a very generous resettlement program and that basically involves people waiting in their home countries or in transit countries until they're given a visa to come to Australia. That's the right way to seek protection. I guess there's a couple of issues with that. The first being that resettlement has absolutely nothing to do with the refugee convention. The refugee convention are international obligations only kick in when someone reaches our territory or we come into contact with them in a way where we exercise jurisdiction. So say at sea when we intercept someone, we have no legal obligations to people in camps in other countries or people still in their home countries. It's also in crisis, like the international resettlement regime, they're just not nearly enough places. They never were nearly enough places to go around and recent years have seen those very small numbers slashed. The US was the biggest provider of resettlement spots and they've almost gone from 100,000 more than 100,000 to cost a zero now. The numbers just don't stack up. There's the UNHCR as identified. I think it cost two million people in need of immediate resettlement worldwide. I think the number of spots we have hovering below 50,000. There's no queue. It's more akin to a lottery, but not even a lottery. It's really a rigged lottery because states the reason they lack the resettlement program is that they have free reign to pick and choose characteristics of the refugees they want to take. There's two things. One is there's a triage system. People that most need generally women and children, particularly women with male guardians or male protectors who really prepare their situations. But then beyond that, there was a while there, in any Thursday morning, you're choosing to peter that on very hadly. He'd be very openly boasting about how he has reduced the number of Muslims coming through our resettlement program and get our program towards Christians. That's why states like it because they get that level of discretion to pick and choose who they want. In an immigration context, your discretion is often euphemism for discrimination. Thanks Dr. Gezelbash. Racism is a factor when it comes to human rights. Understanding this is something I'd like to explore in this episode. A good place to start is to look to the past. Let's begin with Australia's history when it comes to human rights. I spoke with Mr. Jeffrey Robertson QC. Mr. Robertson was born in Sydney and graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts in 1966 and a Bachelor of Laws with First-class honours in 1970. He later went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship and study at the University of Oxford. Mr. Robertson is a human rights advocate who's defended Salman Rushdie, Mike Tyson and Julian Assange. He was president of the United Nations special court in Sierra Leone. He's a distinguished juror on the UN's internal justice council. and one of my favourite authors, having penned amongst other books, crimes against humanity, the tyrannoside brief and the case of the Pope. I asked Mr Robertson to provide some background on our founding fathers. I'm afraid all but one of our founding fathers, the people who produced our constitution, fought like Pauline Hanson. They were racists. What they particularly wanted to do was to kick out the conacres from Queensland and send them back to the islands in the Pacific and to stop the Chinese. They hated the Chinese. They wanted them out of Australia. They didn't want them to come in, which was why they spent so much time fashioning what was called the right or straight policy. Which was really our first law. The only guy who was a far-sighted human rights lawyer was the Tasmanian, a turni general of all things, Andrew English Clark. He was a remarkable man for his time. He'd been to America. He'd seen the American constitution. He wanted the Australian constitution to be something like Jefferson's constitution. We owe these truths to be self-evident with all Meaghan and creative equal. That was what he wanted. And of course he was a pain in the neck for the other racists founding fathers, people like Deacon and the state premieres of the time. And when they went to approve a final draft of the constitution, they went on board a Moefer yacht in Sydney, however, called Lucinda. They left Andrew English Clark over the shore. So he didn't. It wouldn't disturb the hit, but completely the lack of human rights in the Australian constitution. So we ended up with a constitution that actually excluded Aboriginalism from counting as Australians. When I was a legionist student, I read the constitution debates that my god there is disgusting the way they talked about originals as though they were kangaroos threatened the crops. They were subhuman. They were sub-usperianists. This is the mentality of our founding fathers with one exception. It didn't have to be. We really find very little by way of human rights in the Australian constitution driven by racism. We still name our parts, our streets, after these racist founding fathers go to Canberra, their statues of Deacon and all the white Australia policy people. But there it is that that is lamentably our foundation document and gives of course the government all the power that it needs to keep people out of Australia for whatever reason. Jeffrey Robertson explaining the constitutional factors that set the foundation for the legal ability to exclude people from Australia based on their race. I spoke with a man who's been recognised as an Australian living treasure by the National Trust. Former High Court justice Mr. Michael Kirby. Mr. Kirby continues the story of Australia's checkered relationship with human rights starting at a point in time just after World War I. In the Versailles Treaty in 1919 which had ended the First World War, Japan was the power. It was then an ally of Australia and Great Britain and the United States at the end of the First World War insisted that the League of Nations should be founded on a principle of no racism. The Japanese greatly objected to the racist laws that had been applied against Japanese nationals including by Australia both in colonial times and in the times when the Federation had been established and they objected to Australia and they objected to Australia's white Australia policy but that was given short shrift by the Australian delegate to the Versailles Treaty who was William Morris Hughes the Prime Minister of Australia who was a strong supporter of the white Australia policy and he insisted that the League of Nations should have an exclusion from internal affairs of the member countries that would protect Australia's white Australia policy. One of the principles of politics in Australia which have always been fought hard was the common ground of all the politicians upholding the right of the Australian nation to be based on the same ethnicity as the founders and excluding people of different race and color. All of this has a local and recent resonance of course with Black Lives Matter but these things lie deep in the human psyche, hobgoblins and hatreds are down there and they were present in their psi in the First World War at the end of the First World War and they were present in San Francisco at the end of the Second World War. The Second World War began as we all know in September 1939 and when it began it began over territorial disputes substantially of Germany's continued claim for territory and it's then claimed for territory in Poland and at that position there wasn't much discussion about human rights and there wasn't much talk about the Nazi policies of the Hitler regime against minorities and particularly the Jewish minority and so it was at the start something of a conventional territorial war. However by the time that the United States entered the war as a result of the attack by Japan on Terhalla it became necessary in the United States for President F. D. Roosevelt to find essentially a moral principle around which he could secure the energy of the people of the United States and he therefore in an address to Congress referred to four great freedoms and those four freedoms then led to a meeting of Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt in Canadian waters and the proclamation of the Atlantic Charter and the Atlantic Charter repeated the idea of the four freedoms and that was then referred to the meeting for the beginning of the work of drafting the proposed Charter of the United Nations. They tried to get agreement but at San Francisco and before San Francisco the representative of the Republic of China opposed the draft on the basis that there should be included in the Charter a universal commitment to no racism and that created a problem for the United States which then still had segregation in the southern states of the United States and that segregation was a difficulty for the Democratic President Roosevelt first and Truman subsequently to get the majority that was necessary to be elected President of the United States so that was a difficulty for the Americans but it was also a difficulty for Australia our representative was Dr. Everett. Dr. Herbert Beer Everett had been a justice of the high court of Australia in the 1930s he was a very brilliant man and he was a man who was personally committed to universal human rights but his problem was that in Australia even in 1945 at the end of the Second World War white Australia was a common principle of the political parties in Australia and therefore Everett had to move with care Everett and the United kingdom suggested that there should be an exclusion from any bill of rights in the charter of the United Nations from the internal affairs of countries. That was very difficult because the very point of human rights is to attach to human beings and human beings are everywhere, they're not just divided into particular countries. And so the attempt was made by the Republic of China to insist upon a no racial discrimination provision. This in turn led to the discussions of this at Dumbart nooks that led to the delay in the adoption of the human rights provisions. A general statement of human rights went into the charter but the details of the human rights that they were referring to was not then inserted in the charter. It was referred to a committee of experts that committee was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. That was itself an unusual thing. These were meetings, were totally meetings of men. But Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman, was elected the chair of the committee that would draft the universal declaration of human rights a very great woman and a great champion of human rights. And so she and her committee, including the Chinese delegate and delegates from Australia and France, worked on the draft of what became the universal declaration of human rights. That universal declaration was adopted on the 10th of December 1948. So the charter was in late 1945, after the end of the Second World War, the universal declaration was at the end of 1948. And in those few years, the delegates basically led by Eleanor Roosevelt and by a great French jurist, René Kasar, and inspired by the contributions of the Chinese expert and by other experts settled on the language of the universal declaration. And as it happened, Dr Everett, who was very busy in all of these things, had been elected the third president of the General Assembly. Whenever he died, he only had one thing on his gravestone. It wasn't that he'd been a justice of the High Court of Australia. It wasn't that he'd been a strait as far as ministering attorney general. It wasn't any of his other great achievements. It was that he'd been president of the General Assembly of the United Nations. And so ever it was in the chair, the United Nations building hadn't then been built in New York. And the consequence was that they were meeting in Paris. And so this meeting on the 10th of December 1948 adopted the universal declaration of human rights. There were no contrary votes. It was, there were two abstentions. One abstention was from Saudi Arabia. They didn't like the notion that women were to be given rights. And therefore they had great discomfort from this. Partly from the point of view of their understanding of religious texts. But the other abstain was South Africa. South Africa had the beginnings of the laws ultimately became the laws of apartheid. And therefore it abstained. It didn't vote against. Saudi Arabia didn't vote against. It was adopted as we used to say, Nemconn, no one against it. And the universal declaration has a marvellous collection of the statements of universal human rights. But it's basically summed up in the first article. It makes me emotional just to put this in context to understand the dispute, to understand the difficulties politically for the Americans and for the Australians, for the Saudi Arabians, for the South Africans, and for many other people who had difficulties they didn't like to admit. But it was stated. And that became the core of the universal declaration. And Dr. Everett said, "This will be a Magna Carta for all mankind. During on the English legal tradition, it would be a Magna Carta for everybody everywhere." So it has proved. It's the most translated document in the world. It's been translated into every language. It's not divided by redidions or other bases of moral belief. It is a great set of principles. And the main draft of the person who actually put pen to paper, as you did in those days before the computer, was an academic lawyer named John Humphrey. He was a professor of law at McGill University in Quebec, in Canada. And later, I was to get to know him because I was serving on the International Commission of Juris and John Humphrey was the Canadian Commissioner. I was the Australian Commissioner. So I am now giving you this history. This is a history with a link to the people who are actually involved. It's a link to my own early life because in 1949, along with all students in public schools in Australia, I don't know what happened in private schools, but I know all public schools, students got a copy of the universal declaration of human rights. Dr. Everett arranged that that should be available to all students and we were taught about it. And my teacher Mr. Gaurinj said, unless we can accent and respect these principles, particularly after the explosion of the atomic bombs that ended the Second World War, we will just go on killing each other. And that remains a lesson from my teacher, Mr. Gaurinj, that is still true today, unless we abide by the principles of universal human rights. There's a flawed in human nature and we will not respect that all persons are free and equal in dignity and rights. We'll just go on killing each other. That's why this is a very important conversation and very important principle for all people, for all Australians because we were an opponent of some of the principles, but it's particularly important for young Australians and young lawyers, young people to understand this principle and how it came about in the United Nations 75 years ago. In the run up to the Second World War, the international community became very concerned about the rumours that were leaking out of Germany concerning the discrimination against particular groups on the basis of their race or religion. Those groups included, most essentially, the Jewish people. And even before the war had begun, the crystal marked the tack on Jewish property and on Jewish lives had shocked people around the world and the consequence of that was that a big meeting was summoned to take place in AVI in France with a view to working out a solution that could relieve Germany of its unwanted Jewish minority. They were about one or two percent of the population of Germany and thereby move them to other countries who would accept them. That conference in AVI was not successful in working out an international scheme and the result of that was that German First proposed the solution of expelling the Jewish people in Germany to Madagascar. But when that fell through, the German regime simply invented other solutions to remove Jewish people from the third Reich to transplant them in Poland and other nearby countries and eventually in what became the final solution to kill them. And one of the great forces that was at work at the end of the Second World War was the force that was led loose by the photographs, the films, the newsreels of the Allied military and leaders going to the concentration camps after the Second World War. And that galvanized the international community into working on an international convention for the protection of refugees so that never again would we simply turn away from protecting people who were being stigmatized on defined grounds. The result of that was the adoption of the refugees convention of which Australia is a party and the adoption also of the New York protocol to that convention. A protocol, an extension of the convention was adopted in New York in 1951 which extended the refugee convention to all continents so long as you could establish that the person who was claiming to be a refugee was a person who by reason of a well-founded fear of persecution on defined grounds of race, religion, culture, political belief was being persecuted and would be persecuted if they were returned to the country of their nationality. And so that became the refugees convention and the reason for adopting it was the shocking disclosures after the Second World War of what goes wrong when people are not protected from the situations that are defined in the refugee convention. And in Australia we joined the original refugees convention, we joined the protocol, the New York protocol, we have generally been a compliant country until relatively recently. And then as a result again of racial feelings that lie very deeply in the Australian psyche right back to the beginning of white settlement in Australia, our political parties on both sides of the aisle have adopted policies which are really impossible to reconcile with the language of the refugee convention and protocol. They say that if a person is coming out Australia and particularly on boats, there's something about the imagery of persons coming to Australia on boats. That imagery also disturbed the Aboriginal people when the original white settlers arrived on boats. They said go away and that is essentially what Australia has said. But there is no exception in the refugee's convention and protocol to the mode of transport or to people arriving on boats. And the question remains are they a person who on the grounds that are specified in the refugee's convention have a well-founded fear of persecution if they're put on a boat or put on a plane and sent home to their country of nationality. If they are, Australia has legal obligations which it has accepted to give them to process them to consider their claim and if they're found to have a well-founded fear of persecution to give them asylum, to give them protection and that is our duty in international law. And unfortunately our parliament with no bill of rights or other provision to correct or stimulate it has enacted laws that carve out an exception and that exception is serious at all times but it's especially serious at the moment because of the coronavirus, the COVID-19 virus which has meant that people who are sent to offshore establishments may not get the protections that they would and should have received in Australia and children and others will be denied access to our medical health care system even though they are living lawfully in Australia on a visa system pending determination of their case. So this is a serious matter and it's a matter in respect of which Australia is not complying with that basic rule all persons are born free and equal indignity and rights and all persons who come to Australia who claim refugee status are entitled to be processed, considered, determined but in fact they are automatically detained and now increasingly they are automatically transferred to offshore establishments and detention and in those detention facilities they suffer many disadvantages and often are kept there for many years which is contrary to the idea and terms of the refugees convention and protocol. It's important to note that the refugee convention predates the more modern notion of human rights that has emerged since the 1960s. It sits aside from subsequent treaties that came into force and are framed in a very different way. They have different oversight mechanisms such as governing bodies that audit compliance with treaties and ensure accountability and subsequent treaties also have the ability for people to make complaints when their rights have been violated but you don't find any of these features in the earlier refugee convention. We're going to continue our exploration of Australia's relationship with human rights. I asked Jeffrey Robertson what impact our treatment of asylum seekers and refugees has on our international reputation and legitimacy when it comes to working with other countries in our region to formulate a regional response. We divert any refugee boats to Christmas Island or the river to these off-view places. We pretend that the river is not Australian territory. Of course it is an old but name and we brought it as a dumping ground for refugees and we've faced them for years, indefinitely in this intolerable situation where they can't work there in effect in a violent prison and the treatment courts have held amounts to torture and we've had to pay 53 million a couple of years ago when the decree that it was torture was made and this is how does it look? Australia is deliberately inflicting torture and people who are or could be entitled to live by international law we have prison guards in effect. I think the fact that we have this dark area of our families and violence in fact not stories influence without doubt and if we didn't have it if we accepted refugees or it disorted out people claiming refugee status and sent back those who were just economic immigrants. I have no doubt that our influence would be greater but it's not that because this one problem the problem with Indigenous Peacook is another but otherwise we have a good human rights record and would have more influence if we were able to show that we didn't have this tragic floor which is our tendency to be cruel to refugees why do Australians have this cruel streak? That is not the other peoples of democratic countries do not have and that may be I think an aspect of history and I aspect of our failure to make human rights a living and meaningful part of our education and our life. We have the extraordinary turnaround of the Vangilor Merkel, who he, the head of the very country, who tried to exterminate the Jews once, turned around on leading acceptance of refugees who were very much economic migrants, but they and were too many of them really thought, well, you're still welcoming them. So there you have comparative tenderness of other countries, of other peoples. I discussed with Dr. Ghezelbach earlier in this episode the legality of seeking asylum and how it's been framed in Australia using terms like illegals, which gives the impression that it's not legal to seek asylum. What is the way forward? How can we correct this mistaken perspective about the legality of seeking asylum? Why is it that Australians do not realize that those who are seeking asylum are entitled to seek asylum? Why don't they understand that these people are not criminals and should not be tortured and treated, put in prison and not allowed to work and so on? Now, look, I think it comes back to education and history and we are a country in which we get at Federation with a commitment to racism. We committed ourselves to keep the blacks, the tinted off-white out of this country and that's a terrible heritage. Now was he reversed when we committed to human rights after the Second World War? Well, the problem was that other countries which committed showed that commitment by having a Bill of Rights and in the 60s, 70s, 80s, most countries in the world, most democratic countries, and in their own constitutions, a Bill of Rights, a charter of rights and their children were educated into an understanding of what that meant. You had in America, of course, the great constitution, the great amendments, all men are created equal, right there, in front of you of the statute of liberty, statute of liberty, give me your tired, your poor, your heart of masses, you're earning to be free. You know, this is a commitment to taking refugees. I think America and Americans can understand from their school days what an important commitment that how important that commitment has been to their growth as a nation. I don't remember anything of that sort from my schooling and we don't have a charter, we don't have anything to inspire an understanding of human rights. We have nothing to set against this old historical fear of the foreigner and so I've been inclined to see it in those toughs and one of the reasons I think this part of the movement for an Australian Bill of Rights was to try to have education in schools about what human rights mean. You know, you begin with the gas chambers and you explain how the world decided to consign that kind of cruelty to history and part of the story is acknowledging the right of persecuted peoples to find home elsewhere since they were being treated so barbarically in their own place. Mr Robertson mentions the idea of an Australian Bill of Rights and it is true that we're one of the last Western democratic nations with no Bill of Rights. It seems like it would be quite an important instrument for our country. I asked Mr. Michael Kirby about his thoughts on whether there's a need for an Australian Bill of Rights. When I was at law school a long while ago we were taught that lesser people need Bill of Rights. People who have gone through a revolution like the Americans or people in dependent colonies and people of different races and cultures, they need a Bill of Rights. We don't need it in Australia because we have a democratic parliament and we've always had a democratic parliament. Even in colonial times, not long after the British established the colonies in Australia, they set up councils to advise the governor and then subsequently in New South Wales in 1856, they set up an elected parliament. So the argument was you don't need a Bill of Rights because parliament will always correct fundamental breaches of human rights. Anything that breaches the dignity and rights will be fixed up if problems emerge, leave it to parliament. And there are still many people in Australia who assert that fact, you don't need it, you could never enumerate all of the rights of human beings. Therefore you shouldn't try and rights do not need to be fixed up in courts, they need to be fixed up in parliament. So that was the argument. Unfortunately, that argument works reasonably well in relation to majorities because if a government doesn't respect the rights of a majority, then they'll make that known and they will get rid of the government and they will politically ensure that they get their rights. But the basic problem is that human rights don't just belong to majorities, they belong to all people and therefore the problem that exists in the parliamentary solution is that sometimes parliaments do not correct the fundamental rights of minorities. This has been shown in Australia really from the beginning of settlement in Australia. They didn't respect the fundamental rights of the indigenous people, they didn't respect their land rights, they didn't respect their culture and their dignity, they didn't respect the rights of women, they didn't respect the equality of women. Now women are not of a minority, they're actually the majority but they were disrespected and at the time of federation only two states of Australia, Western Australia and South Australia, committed women to vote. New Zealand had decided in that way, in the 1890s, they were the first. It's a pretty good country, you know New Zealand, they often get there before we do. But the Australians ambled along and we got it pretty soon but women were disrespected and the law was often very unequal to women. As well as that, the law disrespected minority that I knew gays, the gays were not only disrespected, they were criminalised and they were liable to be locked up and it disrespected people on the basis of their race. This was the white Australian policy and that was very popular. It was so popular that Mr William Morris Hughes, our Prime Minister, made a tremendous fuss and completely disrupted the Versailles Treaty negotiations for the establishment of the League of Nations insisting that Australia should be allowed to have its racial exclusiveness. So these are the major answers to the suggestion that Parliament will fix it up. Parliament doesn't fix it up and you need instruments such as a statement, a charter or Bill of Rights and you need institutions such as commissions and courts to give enforcement where Parliament has failed. That's why Australia now is, I think, the only modern democratic Western country that doesn't have a charter or a statement of rights. There are statutes expressing rights in Victoria, in Queensland and in the Australian capital territory, but in other parts of Australia there is no charter of rights and proposals that one should be drafted have been rejected by governments of both major political persuasions. The coalition has opposed it and the Labour government of Kevin Rudd said, "Well, that may be done one day, but not just yet." So this is where we stand. We are one of the few countries in the world and probably the only Western developed country in the world that doesn't have a bill of rights and it's the state of charter of rights. So we've covered a fair bit today. We've discussed the constitutional influences that remain to this day. How we've sought to protect our interests from a perceived threat of foreigners and used legislative measures built upon the bedrock of our constitution. We've learned about the nuance between the meaning of the term asylum seeker and refugee and how they apply in both general language and legal terminology. We heard about why the terms "cue jumpers" and "illegals" are totally misplaced. We've also heard about the pride we can take in Australia's part in the creation of the modern international human rights framework. We explored the arguments for and against an Australian bill of rights. Thank you to our guests, Dr Daniel Gezelbash, Mr Michael Kirby and Mr Jeffrey Robertson. Thanks to the National Justice Project for supporting the production of this podcast. If you would like to know more about the work of the National Justice Project, please visit their website, justice.org.au. In coming episodes, we'll be talking with a range of stakeholders to unpack the various issues related to our asylum seeker policy. In our next episode, we'll speak with two experienced baristas who've been involved in some of the most formative asylum seeker and refugee cases. Women and Children First is an integral co-production in association with the National Justice Project, produced and mixed by Alex and Gal Rousseau's, artwork by Kerry Hardy from Black Sheep Studio, original music by Tim Hall and Alex Rousseau's. Visit the Women and Children First Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, WACF podcast.