President speech: Settlement services through the looking glass of human rights

Settlement services through the looking glass of human rights

The Hon Catherine Branson QC

President, Australian Human Rights Commission

Settlement
Council of Australia First National Conference

Canberra, 29 May 2009

Introduction

I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on
which we meet, the Ngunnawal peoples, and pay my respect to their elders past
and present.

I would also like to acknowledge:

• Mr Andrew Metcalfe, Secretary, Department of Immigration and
  Citizenship
• Ms Elleni Bereded-Samuel, Australian Social Inclusion Board
• Mr Goy Leek, President, Sudanese Australian National Youth Council
• Ms Ricci Bartels, Chairperson, Settlement Council of
  Australia

May I also thank Ms Eugenia Tsoulis OAM and Mr Andrew
Cummings for organising this most impressive inaugural conference of the
Settlement Council of Australia and for inviting me to be a part of it.

Australia is a great country in which to live – for most of us most of
the time. We have a well-functioning democracy in which the rule of law is
valued. We are a vibrant multi-ethnic, multi-faith nation, enriched by the
diversity of our population which includes not only Australia’s first
peoples but also the now many waves of more recent settlers in this country.

Although we champion the notion of ‘a fair go’ and pride
ourselves on being generally tolerant of difference, we are a country that,
generally speaking, fails to understand the centrality of culture to identity
and belonging. Australians generally lack a real understanding of human rights
and their relevance to our everyday lives. These failures are impediments in the
way of the inclusive settlement of new migrants. I suspect that they result in
many opportunities for Australians to share in the social, cultural and
political lives of other Australians being missed.

Today, I would like to explain, first, how and why human rights are important
for all Australians, and particularly for those of you who provide settlement
services, and for your clients. I will share with you some of the projects which
the Australian Human Rights Commission is undertaking to advance inclusive
settlement consistent with the government’s social inclusion agenda. Most
importantly, I hope to leave you with one key message: our work, yours and that
of the Australian Human Rights Commission, have more in common than one might
think.

Human Rights

At the outset I would like to explain a little about human rights.

Human rights are a set of values or ideals about how humans should be treated
and how they should treat others; they are minimum conditions under which people
should live to be able to realise their potential as human beings.

Human rights can be, and often are, reflected in legal instruments.

In Australia, laws such the Race Discrimination Act, the Sex
Discrimination Act and the Disability Discrimination Act are legal
instruments of this character. The Commonwealth Parliament passed these laws to
meet its state-party obligations under international human rights conventions to
which Australia has agreed.

The Australian Human Rights Commission, of which I am President, administers
these laws, handles complaints that arise under them, and makes submissions to
court on their interpretation.

When made part of national law in this way, human rights can be seen as legal
norms with which we in Australia should comply and also invoke when we feel that
we are being discriminated against.

The notion of human rights is often associated with the work of the United
Nations and its complex operations. As a result, human rights are often,
mistakenly, seen as a highly specialist area and only really accessible to
international law experts.

While international human rights law can be complex, the general principles
are not. The founding document of human rights – the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights – outlines rights associated with, amongst
others, rights to life, health, justice, education, housing, leisure, cultural
practice, religious or political belief. In fact, there are human rights
dimensions to most aspects of human activity.

In truth, human rights are not lofty ideals confined to parliamentary debates
or legal arguments in the courtroom. Rather, they are basic standards designed
to protect, first, the inherent dignity of all humans and, secondly, the ability
of everyone to participate in society. Human rights are much more about how we
are treated and how we treat others every day than they are about court room
arguments. They are about ensuring that we recognise the dignity of all those
with whom we come into contact and treat them with respect. As we say at the
Australian Human Rights Commission: human rights are for every one, every where,
every day.

Culture

Human rights are indivisible and inalienable, and there is a subset of human
rights described as ‘cultural rights’. These were first set out in
general terms in the International Convention on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights and later treaties, such as the UNESCO cultural conventions,
set them out in greater detail. ‘Cultural rights are those of individuals
or groups to preserve heritage, religion and spiritual beliefs, language,
rituals, social practices and the like, which denote their specific cultural
identities and add value and meaning to their
lives.’^[1]

Culture is ingrained into our being. It determines the way we understand and
negotiate the world around us, how we define ourselves and our place in the
world; it shapes our very identity. It is therefore important to recognise that
culture is not something we can shed or discard, nor can anyone readily, if
ever, take on a completely new cultural identity.

Take, for example, a person who has recently come to Australia under the
Humanitarian Program – someone who was born and bred in a traditional,
rural farming community in Somalia, and later experienced years of trauma,
torture and dispossession before he or she arrived in Australia.

While this person, over an extended period of time, may be able to change
certain aspects of their external culture (for example, what clothes they wear,
what food they eat), and may grow to enjoy aspects of Australian cultural life,
somebody from such a background cannot be expected ever to shed the cultural
context of their upbringing. They cannot be expected to unlearn the lessons and
experience of a life uprooted and traumatised. Culture and its related life
experiences are too deeply embedded into structures of belief, behaviour and
thinking to be so easily discarded or out-grown.

Therefore, anything which encourages a person to assimilate into a culture
other than their own has the potential to lead to social exclusion of that
person, and conversely, the exclusion of those who are different can shame them
into trying to assimilate. Therefore, the key to social inclusion is acceptance
of difference and equal treatment of those who are different. These are the very
principles which human rights promote because they safeguard against
discrimination; human rights are the rights of all human beings, no
matter their race, religion, ethnicity, political views or sexual
orientation.

The Commission’s role in advancing social inclusion

As you know, the Australian Government has developed and implemented a new
whole-of-government policy which it has called ‘social
inclusion’.

Social inclusion is about providing opportunities for members of all groups
to participate in and benefit from Australia’s social, economic and
political life. Social inclusion is about providing the minimum conditions of
access to housing, healthcare, education and employment for everyone. For
Indigenous Australians, it is particularly about closing the gap of Indigenous
disadvantage; for new migrants, it is particularly about the provision of
settlement services and the promotion of cultural diversity. Social inclusion is
about human rights.

That is why the work of the Australian Human Rights Commission plays, and
will continue to play, a vital role in fulfilling the government’s social
inclusion agenda.

While all our projects advance social inclusion in one way or another, I
would like to share with you two of our most recent projects in the area of
settlement services – projects which will ultimately assist new migrants
to participate as soon and as fully as possible in Australia’s society and
economy.

By way of background, you may recall that in 2006, all Australian
governments, through the Ministerial Council on Immigration and Multicultural
Affairs, endorsed the National Action Plan to Build on Social Cohesion, Harmony
and Security (NAP). As Australia’s independent human rights agency, the
Commission has been funded to undertake a range of projects as part of the NAP.
To deliver these projects, the Commission established the Community
Partnerships for Human Rights (CPHR) program. Its overall goal is to
increase social inclusion and counteract discriminatory views and intolerance of
Muslim Australian communities. The program comprises eight projects, in a range
of areas, including research, education, community participation and resource
development.

One of the projects in this program is a report on human rights and social
inclusion issues faced by African Australians. The project will explore the
issues relating to the settlement of African Australians into the Australian
community from a human rights perspective. The result will be a report which we
hope will be an accurate documentation of the experience of African Australians,
while highlighting the multi-dimensional nature of those experiences. Moreover,
the Commission will suggest solutions to issues raised and make recommendations
to stakeholders to inform future policy, program and service design as well as
public debate and education. We hope to release this report in late 2009.

A second project which the Commission has undertaken, in partnership with the
Adult Multicultural Education Services, is the development and provision of
English-language curriculum resources for new migrants from non-English speaking
backgrounds. These resources are called ‘It’s your right!’ and
they were launched just yesterday at this very conference by the
Attorney-General, the Hon Robert McClelland MP. They are aimed at raising
awareness of human rights and various types of discrimination in a relevant and
culturally appropriate way, and informing new migrants, humanitarian entrants
and refugees of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s role in
investigating and resolving complaints of discrimination and harassment. Aspects
of these projects were informed by the Commission’s 2004 report,
Ismaع (or ‘Listen’ in Arabic), which found that many Muslim
Australians say that they are either unaware of, or hesitant about using,
existing services to resolve complaints of discrimination or harassment.

As the ABS Census figures from 2006 reveal that 39% of Australia’s
Muslim population has arrived in the last six years, the education of new
arrivals about human rights issues is an effective way of reaching a significant
proportion of the Muslim community.

Human rights enable the social cohesion in which multiculturalism can
thrive

So far I have sought to highlight the ways in which human rights and social
inclusion share a common purpose. Seen in this way, one might say that the two
approaches travel alongside one another.

But, at the same time, there is a different sort of interaction between, on
the one hand, human rights and their universality, and on the other, cultural
diversity, which would be a hollow notion without accepting to some degree
cultural relativism. One might describe this interaction as a pull in
opposing directions but one which is necessary and which, one hopes in a country
like Australia, achieves a happy equilibrium. In other words, human rights
enable a degree of social cohesion while at the same time celebrating
multiculturalism.

As Conrad Gershevitch, Director of Education and Partnerships in the Race
Discrimination Unit of the Australian Human Rights Commission, has written:

‘To be included, one...must be included into something. If this
[something] is [a] multicultural, civil society,...[a] definition of this
multicultural civil society, and the principles...behind it...form ... the bonds
that hold a plural community together and can be the rallying point in times of
crisis [and conflict].’^[2]

Similarly, the British Muslim scholar Tariq Modood has argued that civil
societies must be allowed to be plural and diverse – this is a strength
– but there must also be some kind of glue that holds societies together
– something that makes them
cohesive.^[3] One key element of this
‘glue’ is human rights.^[4]

It was this ‘glue’ of human rights which we sought to apply in
our Unlocking Doors Project. Throughout 2006, the Commission conducted a
series of workshops and consultations, bringing together Muslim communities and
police in New South Wales and Victoria. The aim of the project, as the name
suggests, was to unlock and open the doors to communication between Muslim
peoples and police, and with that, a shared understanding of their common goals.

The Ismaع Report of 2004 drew attention to a pressing need for ways to
build trust between Muslim communities and law enforcement agencies, to reduce
the risk of further marginalisation of Arab and Muslim communities, and
particularly their young people and women. During the Unlocking Doors consultations, many Muslim participants said that they were reluctant to
report incidents of racial or religious hatred and, in the end, would do
nothing. This was either because they felt that police would not take their
complaints seriously or they had a fear of authority. For some, the police in
their country of origin were consistent violators of human rights, often acting
with impunity. In other words, there was, if you will, a lack of cohesion
between the law enforcement agencies and a group of people they are meant to
protect.

The project sought to remove cultural barriers and encourage a realisation
among all those involved that they agreed on at least one fundamental point:
racial vilification was undesirable as it diminished both the victim and society
as a whole. Their common ground was founded upon a human rights principle of
upholding the inherent dignity of every one, no matter their ethnic
background.

Closing

It was while Mr Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister of Australia that
multicultural policy burgeoned into much of what we see today; at that time the
recommendations of the Galbally inquiry were implemented and specialist agencies
including SBS, the Multicultural Education Program and the English as a Second
Language program were established. Mr Fraser rightly said:

‘No society can long retain the commitment and involvement of groups
that are denied [human] rights. If particular groups feel that they or their
children are condemned, whether through legal or other arrangements, to occupy
the worst jobs, the worst housing and to suffer the poorest health and
education, then the society in which they live will pay a high price for that
division.’^[5]

In providing settlement services, you are – perhaps unconsciously
– human rights advocates as well as service providers. Seen in this light,
I hope that you will see that your work and the work we do at the Australian
Human Rights Commission is interconnected; we can, and should, support one
another in our joint pursuit of an inclusive Australia.

^[1] Australian Human Rights
Commission, Navigating Realities: an issues paper, 5^th draft
(13 March 2009), p 12.

^[2] Australian Human Rights Commission, Navigating Realities: an issues
paper, 5^th draft (13 March 2009), p
70.

^[3] T Modood, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (2007) pp
146-154.

^[4] Respect for human
rights was identified as one of five common ethical values in UNESCO’s
1995 report, Our Creative
Diversity.

^[5] The Rt Hon M
Fraser AC CH, Western Australian Chancellor’s Harmony Day Oration, Perth,
21 March 2001.