What do you think?
Rate this book
Human Rights in History
Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Australia
This groundbreaking study understands the 'long history' of human rights in Australia from the moment of their supposed invention in the 1940s to official incorporation into the Australian government bureaucracy in the 1980s. To do so, a wide cast of individuals, institutions and publics from across the political spectrum are surveyed, who translated global ideas into local settings and made meaning of a foreign discourse to suit local concerns and predilections. These individuals created new organisations to spread the message of human rights or found older institutions amenable to their newfound concerns, adopting rights language with a mixture of enthusiasm and opportunism. Governments, on the other hand, engaged with or ignored human rights as its shifting meanings, international currency and domestic reception ebbed and flowed. Finally, individuals understood and (re)translated human rights ideas throughout this writing letters, books or poems and sympathising in new, global ways.
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
15 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 6, 2022
Human Rights in Twentieth Century Australia chronicles the increasing frequency and varying uses of ‘rights talk’, principally from the 1940s to 1990s. The legal details of rights protection are covered largely incidentally; the focus in on how political actors talked about rights.
The idea that individuals have moral and legal rights is a long-standing part of Australian political culture, but before reading this book my perception was that the ‘human rights’ variant of this idea was recent, from the 1970s onwards.
Human rights vary the pre-existing rights culture in two ways. The ‘human’ part makes universal claims; that the right is not tied to a particular group or time but applies generally regardless of local circumstances. This displaces other arguments that might lead to similar conclusions, limiting scope for the compromises and trade-offs that might otherwise emerge as ways of reconciling competing perspectives and interests.
This displacement in turn makes democratic politics, a particular method of managing competing perspectives and interests, less relevant. The question becomes one of interpretation, whether the universal principles of human rights apply to a particular fact situation. Interpretation of texts is a key role of the judiciary in Australia, and so human rights arguments often lead to calls for disputes involving rights to be resolved through the courts rather than the parliament.
After reading the book I still see the 1970s as a turning point towards human rights in Australian politics, especially in the creation of legal human rights bodies. Piccini’s book did, however, substantially increase my knowledge of how human rights based arguments developed in the preceding decades.
Human Rights in Twentieth Century Australia provides some statistics on the frequency of human rights-related language in media (and identifies some early uses going back as far as 1858), but mainly the analysis proceeds via description of rights language in debates including around deportation, attempts to suppress the Communist Party, the treatment of Indigenous people, conscription, women, homosexuality and unborn babies.
In contemporary human rights talk rights for unborn babies are mostly put well below rights for women to contraception and abortion, but one interesting aspect of Piccini’s book is tracking rights language across the political spectrum, from conservative Catholics to the Communist Party of Australia.
These groups weren’t usually signing up to a full human rights agenda. Rights-based claims appeared alongside and in tension with other arguments. Causes were more specific than human rights in general. But over time the tactical value of human rights increased, with activist groups making rhetorical appeals to international human rights documents and using the legal avenues created by partial legislation of human rights.
Despite this, as Piccini argues, human rights have not become a dominant influence on Australian politics, that what might at one point seemed like the start of a ‘human rights cascade’ turned out to be ‘only a trickle’. No bill of rights has been inserted into the Constitution. In some areas – Piccini points to refugee policy – things have gone backwards over the last 30 years.
Readers may have differing views on the progress of human rights politics. I would put myself in the category of people with some parallel policy beliefs with ‘human rights activists’, while believing a wider range of values and considerations should be brought to the issues and resisting their anti-democratic tendencies.
Human Rights in Twentieth Century Australia is based on extensive archival research, with frequent quotations from original texts showing how language was used in the past. While necessary to the argument the constant changes of voice, along with the sometimes dull detail of long-forgotten debates, made this book harder to read than other history books I have rated on this site. This is not necessarily a criticism – it is an academic book – but a warning to recreational readers.
The idea that individuals have moral and legal rights is a long-standing part of Australian political culture, but before reading this book my perception was that the ‘human rights’ variant of this idea was recent, from the 1970s onwards.
Human rights vary the pre-existing rights culture in two ways. The ‘human’ part makes universal claims; that the right is not tied to a particular group or time but applies generally regardless of local circumstances. This displaces other arguments that might lead to similar conclusions, limiting scope for the compromises and trade-offs that might otherwise emerge as ways of reconciling competing perspectives and interests.
This displacement in turn makes democratic politics, a particular method of managing competing perspectives and interests, less relevant. The question becomes one of interpretation, whether the universal principles of human rights apply to a particular fact situation. Interpretation of texts is a key role of the judiciary in Australia, and so human rights arguments often lead to calls for disputes involving rights to be resolved through the courts rather than the parliament.
After reading the book I still see the 1970s as a turning point towards human rights in Australian politics, especially in the creation of legal human rights bodies. Piccini’s book did, however, substantially increase my knowledge of how human rights based arguments developed in the preceding decades.
Human Rights in Twentieth Century Australia provides some statistics on the frequency of human rights-related language in media (and identifies some early uses going back as far as 1858), but mainly the analysis proceeds via description of rights language in debates including around deportation, attempts to suppress the Communist Party, the treatment of Indigenous people, conscription, women, homosexuality and unborn babies.
In contemporary human rights talk rights for unborn babies are mostly put well below rights for women to contraception and abortion, but one interesting aspect of Piccini’s book is tracking rights language across the political spectrum, from conservative Catholics to the Communist Party of Australia.
These groups weren’t usually signing up to a full human rights agenda. Rights-based claims appeared alongside and in tension with other arguments. Causes were more specific than human rights in general. But over time the tactical value of human rights increased, with activist groups making rhetorical appeals to international human rights documents and using the legal avenues created by partial legislation of human rights.
Despite this, as Piccini argues, human rights have not become a dominant influence on Australian politics, that what might at one point seemed like the start of a ‘human rights cascade’ turned out to be ‘only a trickle’. No bill of rights has been inserted into the Constitution. In some areas – Piccini points to refugee policy – things have gone backwards over the last 30 years.
Readers may have differing views on the progress of human rights politics. I would put myself in the category of people with some parallel policy beliefs with ‘human rights activists’, while believing a wider range of values and considerations should be brought to the issues and resisting their anti-democratic tendencies.
Human Rights in Twentieth Century Australia is based on extensive archival research, with frequent quotations from original texts showing how language was used in the past. While necessary to the argument the constant changes of voice, along with the sometimes dull detail of long-forgotten debates, made this book harder to read than other history books I have rated on this site. This is not necessarily a criticism – it is an academic book – but a warning to recreational readers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review