3. A Human Rights Act for Australia Australia has a patchwork legal framework of human rights protection. The rights that are protected are located in scattered pieces of legislation, the Constitution and the common law. It is incomplete and piecemeal. The Australian Constitution offers only limited protection for a small number of discrete human rights. This includes the implied right to freedom of political communication; and a prohibition on making federal laws that establish a religion, impose a religious observance or prohibit the free exercise of any religion. The High Court has rejected suggestions that other basic rights, like the right to equality, are implied by the text of the Constitution. Moreover, the protection of the Constitution operates only as a limitation on the power of the Commonwealth Parliament to make laws, not as conferring rights on individuals. The common law recognises a number of rights and freedoms. It protects human rights indirectly through statutory interpretation principles such as the ‘principle of legality’, which presumes that Parliament ‘does not intend to interfere with common law rights and freedoms except by clear and unequivocal language’. However, common law protections are fragile as Parliament can pass a law that overrides them at any time. While Parliamentary scrutiny measures enable some consideration of human rights during the law-making process, these measures alone have not resulted in an embedded human rights culture within Parliament. Parliament routinely passes laws that are not human rights compliant. While discrimination laws implement key aspects of the international treaties Australia has ratified, they are only a partial implementation of them, with many key international rights finding no corresponding federal protections. UN Treaty bodies have repeatedly concluded that core treaties have not been adequately incorporated into Australia’s legal system.5 Many of Australia’s commitments to human rights lack domestic protection. In addition to this limited protection, the current rights framework in Australia is not easily explainable, or readily comprehensible to all people in Australia, whose rights are meant to be protected. Not only should the law afford appropriate protection to the people of Australia, but it should be capable of being understood by all. (b) A Human Rights Act for Australia is an evolution not a revolution It is notable that Human Rights Acts have been passed in 3 states and territories in Australia and been in operation since 2004. The Commission’s Position Paper, A Human Rights Act for Australia contains multiple case studies of how a Human Rights Act has made a positive difference to the protection of human rights in the ACT, Victoria and Queensland, as well as in the multiple countries that have introduced such legislation over the past 20 years. The Commission’s proposed model for a federal Human Rights Act does 3 things: • It builds on the success and lessons from the tried and tested existing Human Rights Act models in Australia and overseas. • It remedies the shortcomings of these models. • It tailors the provisions of the proposed national Human Rights Act to the specific constitutional requirements of Australia. The proposed model for a Human Rights Act also builds on the lessons from the Commission, having administered for almost 40 years a complaints-handling stream under the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 (Cth) (AHRC Act) for breaches of human rights referable to the international instruments scheduled to the AHRC Act, and discrimination in emploment, under the Internal Labour Organization Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention (ILO 111), 1958. FREE & EQUAL: Revitalising Australia’s Commitment to Human Rights 51