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