Providing a pathway to enforceable remedies in a Human Rights Act would substantially improve access to justice and accountability for government decision making. As it stands, our Constitution protects some rights, expressly or impliedly, the principle of legality acts as a handbrake of a limited kind on encroachment of rights, and the parliamentary scrutiny of legislation plays a role. In this Position Paper, the Commission concludes that this is insufficient and does not provide the human rights protection that all people in Australia are entitled to. The Commission has long supported the introduction of a federal Human Rights Act as the best way to anchor the promotion and protection of human rights in Australia and this Position Paper offers a viable and actionable set of proposals to achieve this. The model for a Human Rights Act put forward here builds on the excellent work of the National Human Rights Consultation Committee, chaired by Fr Frank Brennan SJ, and its report of 2009, and the research and advocacy of the Human Rights Law Centre, Law Council of Australia and many other community partners, for bringing rights home. It is a model that retains and emphasises the supremacy of the parliament – an entirely different approach to rights protection from jurisdictions such as the United States of America. The beauty of a Human Rights Act, and other measures that frontload rights-mindedness, is that they are expressed in the positive – and they are embedded in decision making and ahead of any dispute. A Human Rights Act names rights; it provides an obligation to consider them and a process by which to do it – together supporting a cultural shift towards rights-mindedness, becoming part of the national psyche, not just an afterthought. The purpose of such an Act is to change the culture of decision making and embed transparent, human rights-based decisions as part of public culture. The outcome needs to be that laws, policies and decisions are made through a human rights lens and it is the upstream aspect that is so crucial to change. In leading this Australian Conversation on Human Rights, the Commission, as Australia’s National Human Rights Institution, is taking seriously – and aspirationally – the statutory mandate given to us by parliaments since 1981. I commend the proposals in this Position Paper as the second major contribution in this conversation and look forward to an open and rigorous discussion of its merits. Emeritus Professor Rosalind Croucher AM FAAL President 8