Don’t trust politicians with your human rights
Dr. Lesley Cannold, Sun Herald, 13 July 2008.
YOU might think I am the sort of person who has always favoured a charter of human rights, but it isn’t so.
Having come of age in America, I had seen first-hand the social ructions caused by the Supreme Court’s invalidation of laws that violated the bill of rights. I watched my country struggle to come to terms with that court’s banning of unconstitutional racially segregated schools, its upholding of the separation of church and state and its striking down of laws banning abortion.
In principle I agreed with each one of these decisions, yet as a new migrant to Australia in the early 1990s I thought this nation’s more incrementalist approach to social change had much to commend it …. Don’t trust politicians with your human rights