Emeritus Professor Rosalind Croucher AM FAAL President Australian Human Rights Commission President’s foreword This Position Paper offers a model for an Australian Human Rights Act and associated reforms. It seeks to complete the central, missing piece of our domestic legislative framework for the promotion and protection of human rights in Australia – by bringing rights home. In doing so, it proposes how to belatedly meet the intended design of the Australian Human Rights Commission itself. When established on a permanent footing in 1986, the Commission was intended to have a complaint handling jurisdiction for human rights complaints through an Australian Bill of Rights Act. While every other country in the Commonwealth of Nations has moved forward by introducing comprehensive human rights protections in domestic legislation, Australia stands alone in not having introduced a Human Rights Act. But just because ‘everyone else’ has one, does that necessarily mean that we need one too? That is a fair question to ask. There is a strong sense of rights and freedoms in Australia and some argue that our rights and freedoms are protected well enough without one. Our experience with COVID-19 responses challenges that assertion. That indefinite administrative detention is not unlawful under our existing laws suggests why our current protections, including the rule of statutory construction, known as the principle of legality, are just not enough. The Commission has been handling human rights complaints since 1981, through the lens of the international treaties, and we seek to resolve matters through conciliation. However, this process is without any recourse to enforceable remedies through the courts. This stands in contrast to complaints brought under federal discrimination laws that the Commission also administers. FREE AND EQUAL A Human Rights Act for Australia 2022 7