Disability Rights
I follow this custom wherever I go to speak in public. I think recognising Australia ' s indigenous peoples and their prior ownership of this land in this way is more than just good manners. It is an important part of recognising our diversity as a nation.
Commission – General
Since the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001, Governments around the world have created a raft of new counter-terrorism laws. In Australia alone, over 40 new laws have created new criminal offences, new detention and questioning powers for police and security apparatus, new powers for the Attorney-General to proscribe terrorist organisations, new ways to control people’s movement and activities without criminal convictions, and new investigative powers for police and security agencies.
Sex Discrimination
After the Barbecue. Thank you for the opportunity to address your Work Life Balance Conference about, of course, work life balance. How quickly those words have become familiar to us, how rich they are in meaning, how endless the possibilities. Synonymous with the Prime Minister’s phrase “the barbecue stopper”, work life balance is a fashionable topic. It has been fashionable for a long time. Even a poor student of history must appreciate that industrialisation, in particular the separation of work from home, is the genesis of this particular question of balance.
Rights and Freedoms
Diversity in Health is a conference about health. Multicultural Mental Health Australia is a multicultural health service. Vision Australia deals with issues and needs of people with print disability. What have these services and issues got to do with human rights, and why am I launching them? I'd like to reflect on these questions, and strongly argue that there is a fundamental connection between health and human rights.
Rights and Freedoms
In the contemporary world, and particularly amongst developed economies, many of us believed that the culture of civil liberties, freedoms and non-discrimination are reasonably well established and these precepts have clear links to innovation, creativity and the broader concepts of economic productivity and a well functioning civil society. Indeed, I believe that many of us had come to accept and expect this to be the situation, and that conferences like the one we attend here today could be built on this very premise.
Commission – General
Good morning. I would like to acknowledge the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of the land upon which we meet, and pay my respect to their elders past and present.
Commission – General
In the second century AD, Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, thanked one of his brothers for teaching him to value "the conception of the state with one law for all, based upon individual equality and freedom of speech, and of a sovereignty which prizes above all things the liberty of the subject."1
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