David,

Same sex relationships between adults are always on the same par because adults have adult cognitive abilities. Children do not.

Amazingly they can make their own decisions about what they can do with their own body with competence. They do not need the Church or State to tell them this. Although if they do wish to use the sexual mores expressed in a supposed 'revealed' book, bully for them.

Is it so amazing to consider the possibility that the formation of adult biological conditions also includes neurological capabilities as well?

That is the core reason for a difference between adult-adult relationship and adult-child relationships.

I do worry about people who can't tell the difference.

With regards your comments concerning a bill of rights, I believe you are mistaken. Legal systems deal with apparent contradictions. Sometimes they have to show priority or precedence one way or another. Sometimes they can come to conclusions that satisfy competing claims.

Let me show you how through a trivial example.

Sikhs must carry a kirpan as per the edict by Guru Gobind Singh. But it's supposed to be a ceremonial dagger. It actually symbolically represents "Ahimsa", or non-violence.

So to satisfy both the rights of freedom of religious expression and the right of public safety, one can wear the dagger in an ornamental fashion, with the blade dulled, sheathed and sewn into one's garments.

e.g., http://www.sikhcoalition.org/LegalUS6.asp

All very interesting.

Graeme Innes: "I often hear the argument against a federal Charter of Rights that human rights are already adequately protected in Australia. As I have illustrated, people who can't see the gaps in rights protection just aren't looking."

I really don't think that's the problem — most people can see the human rights gaps in Australia. To me, what we need to ask is whether a bill of rights — which will presumably be an expensive exercise — will help people enjoy those rights.

I know a ward of the state. In Australia, he should have been able to expect that he would not be sexually abused by a government employee while in the government's care, and he should been able to expect he would be supported in going to school. He should have been able to expect these things because they are enshrined in law. Yet he was sexually abused, and he was not supported to go to school.

If he had also had a bill of rights to underscore those expectations, would the abuse never have happened? Would he had stayed at school until he was sixteen?

I haven't yet decided where I stand on the issue — I want to hear more. I have no doubt I'd probably approve of most of the rights that a likely bill of rights would document. But to convince me, I'd need someone to explain how would the bill actually help deliver those rights.

Lev, why do you say constitutional protection is preferable to a bill of rights? Forgive my ignorance.

Boazy, your ravings are even nuttier than usual. Just thought you'd like to know.

Any Australian citizen can be dragged off the streets by DIAC and thrown into immigration detention without being told why, denied lawyers and they can have their children deported on false documents while they are in that jail. Ask Tony Tran or Vivian Alvarez.

Or the other 247 we don't know the names of yet and whom I am convinced are not the only ones. There is no point in saying they had legal recourse after the fact because their human rights were grossly violated in the first place and people simply do not recover from that.

IN the case of Al Kateb 4 of our high court judges deemed it legal and constitutional for "non-citizens" without a visa to spend their entire lives in detention knowing very well they would never be charged with a crime. At the time there were 11 Palestinian children in Baxter concentration camp who were legally stateless. You imagine the consequences for those kids if the ALP, Democrats, Greens and some members of the Liberals hadn't screamed about it.

In the case of s276 children can be legally jailed for life, in B & B all welfare and duty of care was stripped from refugee children.

How could this happen? Because our constitution is explicitly racist.

Vanilla>"Lev, why do you say constitutional protection is preferable to a bill of rights? Forgive my ignorance. "

I'm not sure why he said that either. But I do know that if the bill of rights is written by our current leaders with their prevailing mentality, rather than extremely intelligent, objective human beings who do *not* have authoritarian agendas (like our current pollies), it is likely to be a flawed document. Still I honestly can't see how it could ever be bad, more that it could quite easily be deficient if written by politicians or our bureacracy. You really need independent, objective thought going into the document by scholars and mavericks. It should really be seen as a sacred document, rather than a document produced by a stupid committees of idiots.

Do all Australians have rights? What about Indigenous Australians, and others on the margins of our society?

Laws, the Constitution, and our very foundation for governance is based on a lie. "Terra nullius" legitimated the appropriation of land that did not belong to "no one", since it was and still is cared for by people who paradoxically fall inside and outside the law.

How can white man's law apply to a diverse group of people who have not succeeded sovereignty? It can not, but it somehow problematically does.

For Vanilla & Steel,

I did provide the reasons why I prefer constitutional protection rather than a bill of rights but nevertheless I'll provide an additional summary (they really are two sides of the same coin).

1) The Constitution is the founding document of a State, of which there is no higher recall within civil law. Thus it is preferable to provide human rights the highest possible degree of universality and permanence.

2) Bills of Parliament are subject to the vagaries of popular opinion and even worse still, the opinion of politicians who are almost invariably prepared to sacrifice the rights of a minority in favour of election by the majority. Or, to quote Wikipedia on the subject: "Since it may be changed, an unentrenched bill of rights is a poor defense against a corrupt or tyrannical legislature."