Why Should You Care About Human Rights? [S2-06]

Show Notes

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Music: “Insurrection”
Written by Pierre Chrétien
Performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra
Courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Transcript

link to podcast

11 June 2026

Luke
Welcome to another episode of Why Can’t They Just, looking at politics, policy and getting stuff done. I’m Luke Robertson, I’m a conservation biology and environmental policy student in Sydney, as well as a member of the Labor Party and LEAN.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. I’m a former diplomat and a climate, environment and anti-racism activist.

Before we start, I would like to acknowledge that Luke and I are both recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia, recognising that sovereignty was never ceded, we extend our respects to their Elders, past and present, and to any First Nations listeners that we have today.

Luke
So today we are talking about human rights. Currently in Australia, Angus Taylor, the Leader of the Opposition, is talking about making continued citizenship conditional on continued adherence to Australian values, talking also about the notion of ‘bad countries’, implying that people from those countries are inherently bad. And that’s only one half of the new right wing pie, with Pauline Hanson also labelling entire religions as inherently bad, showing that she has not changed since her maiden speech in 1996. With both of these people threatening to destroy the notion of citizenship, why is it so important that we uphold it?

Janaline
So what citizenship really means is that your country is going to do certain things to protect you. That your country, represented by your government, sees a responsibility for your welfare. Now that is most evident overseas, where if you get into trouble you can go to your embassy and usually they will give you some advice or assistance. But also at home it entitles you to things like social welfare. In a democracy, you can vote, you can stand for office. In some countries, like Australia, you get access to public health care, public education.

So citizenship has a long history. In Roman times, being a Roman citizen meant that you could not be enslaved. It meant that you could not be imprisoned without due process. It meant you were exempt from certain forms of torture. That was one of the reasons that exile was one of the worst punishments that could be delivered, because it actually stripped those protections from you.

One of the most fundamental rights of an Australian citizen is being able to come back to Australia and to live and work in Australia. During COVID that was temporarily suspended for public health reasons, and I think we’ve said on a previous episode that one of the reasons that so many people came into Australia during the two years after COVID was because a lot of them were Australian citizens who had not been able to come home for a couple of years.

There’s been a debate in Australia where the Opposition has said the government shouldn’t allow the families of Islamic State fighters in Syria to come back to Australia, even though they are Australian citizens. The Australian government has no power to stop citizens from coming back to Australia, and, in fact, almost all of those families are now back. There is a strong national security case for bringing them back because, at some point, the children, when they grow up, could come back to Australia. Surely it is better for Australia’s national security and community safety to have them brought up in Australia, to have them put through an Australian education system, to be accepted into the Australian community, to go through deradicalisation programs.

If their mothers are found to have committed crimes, then they should go through the Australian criminal justice system. And that is a much better way of ensuring we can actually exercise some influence over their actions, their decision making. And hopefully, welcome back into a society so that they actually want to contribute to the society and not harm it.

The worst terrorist attack on Australian soil occurred in Bondi in December 2025, when fifteen people were killed by two gunmen. That was an absolutely shocking and tragic event. The worst terrorist attack committed against Australians was in Bali in 2012, when over 200 people were killed when a nightclub was bombed. That was a deliberate attack against Australians. So stopping people from coming to Australia doesn’t necessarily stop them from hurting Australians.

So aside from the national security case, I also have a lot of issues with this idea of conditional citizenship, that somehow you can only remain a citizen if you behave in a certain way. I think that fundamentally flies in the face of what it means to be a citizen, and there is also a very clear double standard that is being applied here. So after the Bondi terrorist attacks, and I think we’ve discussed this on an earlier episode, one of the really unfortunate things about the narrative around it was that it immediately went to the citizenship status of the alleged perpetrators. Now one of them was an Australian citizen, born in Australia, has only ever been Australian. The other one was a migrant.

But I would contrast that narrative with the Christchurch terrorist attacks in New Zealand in 2019, which in some ways were quite similar. A gunman went to a couple of places of worship in this case, gunned down 51 people at prayer, and nobody questioned that person’s citizenship. That person is an Australian, went to New Zealand, committed this terrible act of violence, and I’ve never heard anybody suggest that that person should have their citizenship stripped from them. I mean, as it happens, it is highly unlikely they will have the opportunity to come back to Australia, because they are currently serving a life sentence in New Zealand. But I find it troubling that there does seem to be a double standard applied to people depending on where they, or their ancestors, came from, as to whether them committing some horrible crime generates this debate about their right to hold Australian citizenship.

I think it is very reasonable for the Australian government, as it does, to require people wanting to come to Australia on visas to agree to uphold Australian values, which are listed on the Department of Home Affairs website and which talk about things like compassion, and non-discrimination and supporting democratic values. But, once you become an Australian citizen, you are an Australian citizen. It doesn’t matter where you come from. It doesn’t matter what your ethnic background is. And it doesn’t matter what anybody else who shares that ethnic background, language, history, or cultural background or religion ever does. That should not affect your right to be an Australian citizen.

So I do recall, a few years ago, Peter Dutton, who was then Home Affairs Minister, talking about ‘second generation Lebanese’, because there had been a couple of people of that description who had been charged with terrorism offences. Bill Shorten, who was then the Labor leader of the opposition, stood up and said ‘Hmm, second generation Lebanese. You know, mate, in the Labor Party, we have a word for those people. We call them Australians.’

That was a really good statement of exactly what it should mean to be Australian. And I would note that at the same time that Peter Dutton was making these calls about second generation Lebanese, there was a raft of convictions of Catholic priests from Ireland for horrendous child sex offences.

Now nobody suggested at that time that there should be restrictions on people from Ireland, or men from Ireland, or Catholic priests from Ireland. And nor should there be. People from Ireland should not be held accountable for the actions of individual compatriots, any more than people from Lebanon should be held accountable for the actions of their compatriots.

Luke
Yeah, so much of this is built on the rocky foundations of alternative history, you know, like the Southern Cross flag and the Eureka stockade. In the heads of people who fly these flags at, you know, the March for Australia anti-migrant protest, forget - in their heads, to them, it was all white people sticking it to the government. But of course it wasn’t, it was an incredibly diverse migrant coalition.

Australia has a migrant history, of course, and the framing of migration by these groups, in terms of ‘bad countries’ and ‘bad religions’ turns it into a disgusting social debate that deliberately erases history. Who do these people think the Snowy was built by, or why the Ghan railway is called the Ghan? This alternative history and the alternative ‘facts’ around it, erase the history of this country into an idealised version that fits their own ideology.

So Janaline, you’ve talked about the history of human rights. But living in Australia, it feels as if one of those rights is the right to participate in democracy and elections. But of course, many nations do not have that same privilege. So how do the concepts of democracy and human rights interact?

Janaline
Democracy is obviously very important. Democratic systems are definitely better historically at delivering rights to their people. But democracy is not enough to protect human rights. Democracy is essentially a way of organising yourself politically so that the wishes and the priorities of the majority can be reflected in the policies and decisions of their government. Now that is really important to do in terms of things like budget allocations, in terms of the relative weight given to social services, or national defence. It’s not enough to protect human rights. Why is that? Because it doesn’t necessarily protect unpopular minorities.

During the 2010s, in Myanmar, where there was a concerted, government-endorsed campaign of persecution against the Rohingya Muslim minority, that was supported by around 80% of the population. The persecution was horrendous. People were killed, tortured, raped, and millions of them fled.

And that’s just one example of where majorities of people in democracies have supported some pretty appalling atrocities. I mean, Nazi Germany in the 1930s was a democracy and people were generally ok with the persecution of Jews. The treatment of Roma in a number of democratic countries in central Europe is pretty awful and has the acquiescence of a majority of people. There are lots and lots of examples of where democracy in itself has not protected unpopular minorities.

And this the reason that countries like the US, that came into being through rebellion against a colonial power, have tended to create constitutions embedding some pretty robust human rights protections that are then the preserve of the courts, and not the majority elected government, to implement and to enforce. And the reason for that, I think, is a recognition that democratic systems are not going to protect everyone.

And we see now the rise of populist leaders who are literally making their political careers off demonising unpopular minorities, or trying to make certain groups in society unpopular, so that they can then demonise them, blame them for stuff and use that to generate political support. I feel like One Nation is doing exactly that in Australia, and it troubles me that the Liberal and National Parties, far from pushing back robustly, seem to be buying into the narrative.

Luke
Yes I certainly don’t think democracy inherently protects minorities, particularly, as you said, many who are deemed unpopular by the majority. I think that certainly exists throughout history, with the treatment of First Nations peoples here, in Canada, in the US, and of course the treatment of black Americans in the United States were justified with the notion of democracy. I think we’re still seeing that in the modern day, such as in India, with greater persecution of the Muslim minority and of course in the Middle East with the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Janaline
The history of individual human rights and the history of democracy have developed kind of in parallel, but also kind of independently.

In Western Europe, the Magna Carta in 1215 established that a free man could not be imprisoned without due process and the judgement of his peers. During the 18th century, during the French and American Revolutions, things like the Declaration of the Rights of Man established rights such as freedom of speech and assembly.

The internationalisation of human rights was strongly related to armed conflict. The horrors of the Crimean War in the mid-19th century led to the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross which then developed some rules which eventually came enshrined into the Geneva Conventions, particularly famously dealing with the treatment of prisoners of war and the treatment of civilians in a conflict zone.

After the Second World War, the Australian Foreign Minister, Doc Evatt, and the United States First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, essentially created between them the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And this was a response to the Holocaust, it was a response to basically a lot of the atrocities that had occurred and been witnessed in those two devastating wars.

And the most important thing about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, in my view, not necessarily the articulation of what those rights are, but the really fundamental concepts that human rights are, firstly, universal, which means everybody has them. If you are a human, you have these rights.

Secondly, they are individual, which means they are not contingent on what group you come from, on what religion you are, on which country you were born in. They belong to you, individually, regardless of the actions of any other member of any group that you might be associated with. And this is really important because, in authoritarian states, you know China frequently says ‘well, the Chinese people have the right to a stable society, and this means that we, the Chinese Communist Party, should be allowed to suppress dissent, because that destroys stability. And if in the process, some individuals have their rights compromised, then, well, that is for the good of the rest of society.’

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights fundamentally rejects that premise. It says every single individual human has these rights, and holds the right as an individual. So you cannot collectively punish someone because of some action of a member of their family or a member of their community, or a member of their religion.

The last really important concept is that human rights are inalienable. And this is important because what it means is that, regardless of what you may have done, you still have these human rights. And that means, not that you can’t be punished, but it means that you should be punished after a due process has established that you were guilty of whatever you’re accused of, and the punishment fits the crime for the specific individual.

There have been discussions over the years, particularly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, famously, a number of people in the Bush Administration were talking about the sort of ‘ticking time bomb’, where if you could torture this information out of a terrorist, you could stop an imminent attack. There has never been any evidence that that has been successful. In fact, in cases where people are tortured, they tell their torturers what they think the torturers want to hear, and it doesn’t necessarily correlate with anything in real life.

And this is in fact one of the reasons that the US Field Manual for military operations has basically always said that torture is not an effective interrogation tool, because the information that comes from it is not reliable.

But why would it matter, I mean, if someone’s a terrorist, maybe they have forfeited their rights? But how do you know that this individual that you have in your custody is actually a terrorist? You can only know that if you’ve done a proper investigation and after a proper due process. And there are multiple examples of people swept up in the US War on Terror, and sent to Guantanamo, and subjected to some pretty awful conditions, who were later found not to have anything at all to do with terrorism.

So the genius of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is that it cuts through all of this by stating simply and clearly that human rights are universal, individual and inalienable. And what that means, the consequence of that, is that everybody is entitled to due process, and everybody is entitled to be judged as an individual for their own individual actions and decisions and not collectively punished for anybody else’s.

Luke
So it’s clear just how vital it is to have inalienable rights that apply to everyone and that nation states actually respect them. But right now, both globally and here in Australia, we’re watching far right populism gain ground as mainstream conservatism gets hollowed out. And the central focus for all of these movements? Migration.

You see it in the UK with Reform pledging to deport refugees. In Germany, the AfD is talking about ‘remigrating’ people they decide haven’t assimilated. In France, the National Rally wants to cut migrants off from social programs, and of course in the US, Donald Trump is carrying out mass deportations.

Those same themes are ringing true in the rhetoric of both the Coalition and One Nation. Given all of this, how do the foundational concepts of human rights that we’ve talked about apply to the political debates happening in Australia today?

Janaline
So I think in terms of Australia, and the political debates, I think it is deeply worrying that we have, not just One Nation basically saying that an entire religion should be banned from Australia, but we also have the Leader of the Opposition, the leader of the so-called mainstream major party, the Liberal Party, which has governed Australia for more than half of the last 80 years, I really think it is worrying that they are talking about judging people from where they come from. I mean it is barely disguised racist dog-whistling. For Angus Taylor to say ‘well, I think we should discriminate on the basis of adherence to Australian values, and I think we can assume that people who come from liberal democracies are more likely to adhere to those values than people who don’t’, than people who come from so-called ‘bad countries’, and he actually name-checked Iran.

Now, most Iranian Australians that I know are deeply committed to democracy and, in fact, the experience of their compatriots in Iran has only reinforced their commitment to democracy and human rights, because they have seen and they have deep knowledge of what happens when those rights are violated.

And that’s just people from Iran. I mean, honestly, I feel like people who have lived under authoritarian regimes, and particularly people who still have families and loved ones who still live under those authoritarian regimes, have a much much greater appreciation of democratic values, and the value of having a government and a system that respects and upholds human rights, than people who come from liberal democracies, where I feel like, they really do take that kind of stuff for granted. I think in Australia, a lot of people really take for granted the fact that every single Australian citizen has the right to vote; has the right to have a say in who governs them, who represents them in Parliament. I mean this is a really valuable thing that people have literally laid down their lives to achieve in their own countries.

The conflation of democratic values with living under a liberal democracy is entirely misplaced. But honestly, I come back to the sense that it is a bit of racist dog-whistling. Because who are the democratic countries that we’re talking about, and who are the authoritarian regimes that we are talking about? I feel like this is pretty thinly disguised racism and I think we should call it out.

I also feel like, talking about people in that very collectivist way actually seriously does violate this idea that human rights are individual. If you have someone who is now, apparently, the most popular politician in Australia, saying ‘there are no good Muslims’, that is a pretty big violation of the Australian values that are on the Department of Home Affairs website, that explicitly says that we do not discriminate on the basis of ethnic origin or religion.

So I really would like some of those political leaders who are saying these things, who are demonising whole sections of the Australian community, and who, at the same time, are saying we should be withdrawing the citizenship of people who don’t subscribe to Australian values - I wish they would look very closely at the Australian values articulated on the Department of Home Affairs website and genuinely interrogate whether they themselves are adhering to those values.

Luke
As the rhetoric around the world becomes worse, history begins to rhyme. Where could all of this take us in its most radical form?

Janaline
I mean it terrifies me to think about what the consequences might be because history rhyming is not taking us to a good place. The fundamental issue is that dehumanisation of other human beings, subscribing to the idea that some people should not have rights, and some people are less human than other people has led to literal genocide, right? So the Rwanda genocide. One of the, one of the big pieces of propaganda through that was labelling people as cockroaches. And that was a way in which you could remove yourself from the idea that what you were doing was to another human being. Because fundamentally, I think there is a kind of natural moral inhibition in humans against harming other humans. So how do we deal this? We pretend that the people we are harming are not actually people, that they’re not actually humans.

You know, in the Vietnam War, US troops called the enemy Viet Cong ‘goons’ to dehumanise them, to essentially justify terrible acts against them. So this is kind of the slippery slope that we can end with. The Jews in Nazi Germany were constantly dehumanised. They were considered - you know, they were put into cattle trucks. They were - there was a huge propaganda effort to strip them of their humanity within the minds of ordinary people. So it’s a really terrible, terrible potential outcome here. I don’t think it ends anywhere good.

Luke
Yeah, there’s a good episode of Black Mirror, I’m not sure if you’ve seen it, called Men Against Fire, where the premise is that the army, I think the American army is in a war and they’re wearing these glasses that make them see the people they’re killing as aliens. They refer to them as roaches. And then when one of their glasses breaks and they take them off and see that they’re just humans and they, they physically stop themselves from, you know, going out and killing those people.

Janaline
Yeah, it is pretty terrifying what can happen when people stop seeing other people as human. And again, I mean, without you know wishing to be too boring about coming back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I mean the whole point of ‘human rights are individual’ is that it really pushes back against this quite human tendency to see other people as part of a group, and particularly if it’s an ‘other’ group, as in, a group that you don’t identify with. It makes it much easier to do that demonisation, dehumanisation, and therefore justify pretty awful acts against those people. Whereas, if you really internalise the idea that human rights are individual, then it means that every single person has to be seen as an individual, as a human, and that really affects the way in which you can deal with them.

Because it stops being ‘I’m dealing with this unit that belongs to this “other” group that I don’t identify with’, and it becomes ‘I am dealing with another person who is human like me’, who has hopes and aspirations, who has people they love, who has people who love them, who had a mum and dad, and was a child. And I think once you start looking at people as individuals and not as members of some ‘other’ group, it becomes very very difficult to treat them really badly. And that’s one of the really important innovations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the universality and individuality of human rights.

And again at the risk of being really boring about this, it just really underlines that you can become an unpopular minority at any time. There may be some characteristic of yours, you may be accused of doing something that you may or may not have actually done, that leads to you having your rights taken away from you. It is really really important that human rights are applied to everybody because that is the only way that we can stop them from being withdrawn from everybody.

One of the things that the Chinese Communist Party does when it sentences people to death for serious crimes - so they have gone through a court process, they have been convicted of whatever it is. Death penalty cases usually apply to very serious drug offences, or murder, or treason, or crimes against the State, which are obviously a bit more contentious. But one of the really awful parts of the punishment is what they call the withdrawal of the defendant’s civil and political rights. Now if you’re being sentenced to death and you’re about to be killed by the State, then maybe it doesn’t really matter if you’ve had your civil and political rights withdrawn, but it really kind of underlines the importance of those rights in entitling you to things like due process, to entitling you to things like freedom from torture. It also means that you no longer have any property, so presumably whatever you own cannot then be passed to whomever in your family survives you. It’s a pretty brutal punishment, really, and kind of one step worse than actually being sentenced to death. You are not only being deprived of your life by the State, but the State is also in some ways also erasing your humanity.

And I feel like that is just a really really important thing that we, in a liberal democracy like Australia, need to uphold. We need to uphold the humanity of every single person.

Luke
That does segue to a good poem, by Martin Niemoeller, who was himself a clergyman during WW2, and is condemning himself and other German intellectuals and clergymen in allowing and being complicit in the Nazi’s rise to power.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no-one left to speak out for me.

Janaline
Yeah, this poem appears on Holocaust Museums all over the world. It’s tremendously famous. And what it basically says is, fundamentally, if one group of people does not have rights, then no group of people is going to have rights. Because eventually, you are going to end up being one of those people who doesn’t have rights. So essentially I think human rights have to be universal or they are nowhere, they are nothing. If they don’t apply to everybody, by virtue of being human, how do you determine who has rights and who doesn’t? It will depend. Who decides? Is it just people who have power? Is it just people who have good weapons who decide who has rights and who doesn’t have rights?

So I think that was one of the most important developments in that whole creation of that international human rights architecture, was the idea that human rights are universal and individual. That you cannot be punished for the actions of someone else in your group, but also that, it doesn’t matter what group you belong to, you still have human rights. Those are really really important concepts.

You know, because I was a diplomat for a long time, one of the issues that I did take some interest in was the concept of diplomatic immunity. Now, diplomatic immunity is not a thing that has always been recognised. Being an ambassador in earlier times was a pretty perilous profession. It was pretty common for monarchs to take other countries’ ambassadors hostage, to imprison them, to torture them and to kill them in pretty horrible ways. The concept of diplomatic immunity came up because it became impossible for countries to actually conduct diplomacy while ambassadors were being kidnapped, tortured and murdered. And finally I think rulers understood that this was actually against their interests because it closed off opportunities for dialogue and closed off opportunities not to engage in incredibly costly wars. So the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations gives diplomats basically blanket immunity.

Now, that can be waived, if a diplomat comes into your country and murders someone, or steals something or commits some other crime, it is possible for their country to waive their diplomatic immunity and that has happened on numerous occasions where diplomats have done bad things. But it really has to be respected by the host country because otherwise everybody is at risk. So, you know, oh but shouldn’t diplomatic immunity just be automatically cancelled if a diplomat is involved in terrorism? Well, certainly if a diplomat is involved in terrorism, they should probably have their immunity waived, and they should be punished. But, if you unilaterally waive that as a host government, well what’s to stop another host government from randomly accusing one of your diplomats of terrorism? Because once you waive immunity you remove that due process requirement.

So it’s really important that even people accused of the worst possible crimes actually have these rights. Because you need to be sure that you’re punishing the right person. And that’s not to say they shouldn’t be punished. They absolutely should. There is a criminal justice system for a reason. And when I say that I should have the right as an Australian citizen to be a psychopath or to commit horrible crimes and still be an Australian citizen, I’m not saying that that means that being a psychopath or committing horrible crimes is a thing that is ok and that I shouldn’t be punished for it. I absolutely should. But I should be punished through the criminal justice system. I should not be punished by having my fundamental human rights withdrawn.

Because fundamental human rights doesn’t mean that you can’t be punished for doing stuff, it just means that you have to have been put through some kind of process that establishes that it was actually you. It also means that punishment needs to be reasonable, and to fit the crime. Also within the concept of due process are things like freedom from torture. Things like not being coerced into saying things that you may not want to say, or you may not mean, or may not even be true.

So, I mean, due process sounds really boring but it’s actually tremendously important to ensure that government agencies, and government actors, and police forces and other people who enforce the law pay attention to, not only the needs of justice, but that the needs of justice include the rights of the person being accused. And the needs of justice also mean that that person needs to be treated with dignity and respect.

And again, it doesn’t mean they’re not punished: many of them deserve to be punished. But it means that the process towards deciding on that punishment and implementing that punishment preserves their basic rights as human beings.

Luke
Well I think all we’ve discussed today is incredibly important, particularly given the historical context around which these concepts are built. I think it’s important that we treat these discussions for what they are, and do not allow the sort of dog-whistling and racist rhetoric that comes from a lot of these people so that we do not fall down that same slope that has seen the persecution of so many minorities around the world.

Janaline
Yeah, obviously I feel this pretty intensely, as one of the targets of some of those dog-whistles. I’ve got to say though, it is so important that people remember that, if human rights don’t apply to some people, at some point, they are going to be one of those ‘some people’. If human rights don’t apply to some people, then they don’t - eventually, they don’t apply to anyone. And I just feel that is so, so, so important. And we cannot rely on majorities to protect minorities. We really need to have a robust system that actually looks at people as individuals, judges them as individuals for their actions, and not for who they are, whom they’re related to, or who shares their religion, or who shares their ethnic origin.

I think these are just some very fundamental concepts that people kind of pay lip service to, they kind of acknowledge. They see them in these value statements issued by the Department of Home Affairs. But I think it is really important for everyone in this country to deeply internalise that and deeply understand that this matters to you, it matters to every single person in this country, and it applies to every single person in this country.

Luke
Well that wraps up another episode of Why Can’t They Just? Our theme music for this program is a piece called Insurrection by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Inc. I’m Luke Robertson.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?