The major problem with listing a set of rights that reflect our values is that it potentially limits those rights. As an example, the right to freedom of speech does not give the right to silence.

Our current system is based on English/British common law tennants. Articles such as the Magna Carta and the British Bill of Rights. These allowed certain rights to "Free" men or Elites. Many of those rights are now redundant - the right of Protestants to bear arms for example is clearly out-of-date.

Of more concern are other common law rights which are slowly being erroded. The "War on Terror" gave the Commonwealth leverage over the States to remove the right of habius corpus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habius_corpus) for certain classes of crime. It would not take much to now extend these classes of terror related crimes to say Hold Ups or Assualt.

The Constitution provides that the Monarch (Governor General in Council) is the sole arbiter of these common law rights. It should also be remembered that what a parliament grants, a parliament can also take away.

Narcissist,
Just a little pedantic point about your comment.
You, like many, don't spell or use a word which is a synonym for "belief - doctrine - principle," etc. correctly.
It is TENET, not "tennant", or "tenant".
Whist I concur with the points you made, be aware that the use of a mis-spelt word may detract from your credibilty.
Good luck in future and become a tenant of the house of tenets.

I thought this article could have some merit but as I read beyond the headline it was another exercise diversity politics. The type espoused by those living in ivory towers screaming like spoilt children at those who don't share the diversity agenda.

There are excellent models in the western liberal democracies from which Australia can put together a very effective Bill of Rights.

The US uses a constitutional Bill of Rights. This is the highest level of rights of rights protection as it removes the possibility of legislative or executive control over rights. This approach elevates the judiciary to the highest plane in the rights universe as it alone may interpret a constitutional bill of rights. This approach, whilst attractive on the surface because of this high level of rights protection; does, however, separate rights from democratic processes because the elected legislature cannot amend such a bill and an unelected judiciary is holder of the keys.

The Canadian approach is worthy of consideration. Here the Bill is statutory, not constitutional. This allows the legislature, which is representative of the people, an ongoing input in rights development and overcomes the problem of setting rights in stone, as alluded to by in the first comment above. The Canadian Charter of Rights empowers the judiciary to invalidate any Act of parliament that, in the court's view, infringes the rights in the Charter. This seems a good balance of democratic input (and thus flexibility) and executive / legislative / judicial checks and balances.

In the UK the Human Rights Act (another statutory bill of rights) codifies the European Union's notions of human rights into British law. The HR Act is similar to the Canadian Charter in that it empowers the judiciary, in this case to declare, but not invalidate, any laws that infringe rights in the Act. Such laws declared to violate rights are then referred back to parliament to amend or justify. This whole process raises the debate in the media about the law and any infringed rights thus forcing the parliament (which is dominated by the executive, of course) to explain itself or abandon / amend its law.

The Canadian and UK approaches are to be preferred for Australia to emulate because they retain some semblance of parliamentary sovereignty and an important recognition that ultimate sovereignty rests in the people, excerised through their parliament.