Can't Belconnen be more like Belarus?

Sturt Krygsman

ONE of the few comforting messages from Christmas Island is that Australia, whatever its faults, is a net importer of human misery. People come here to escape persecution and, leaving aside the strange case of Julian Assange, there are few documented cases of anguished citizens fleeing the other way.

That is of little comfort to Helen Watchirs and her 23 colleagues at the ACT Human Rights Commission, who depend on locally produced injustice to fill their working day. It is, to put it mildly, a challenge in a jurisdiction of just 360,000 people where more than a quarter of employees work for the federal government and the average household weekly income is 55 per cent above the national average.

Imagine being appointed Human Rights and Discrimination Commissioner in a jurisdiction when the five largest ethnic groups are Australian, English, Irish, Scottish and German, in that order. The difficulty for the human rights industry is that ethnic minorities form, by definition, a small market, especially in Canberra. They are growing a little: the 2011 census found more than 12,000 ACT residents were born in India or China but Canberra's problem is that it is so infuriatingly open-minded.

The stabbing of an Indian student in Melbourne three years ago appeared to open a door of opportunity; in November 2009, Watchirs issued a press release: "While the commission is yet to receive reports of any race-based violence or discrimination against international students, I would encourage any student concerned about such issues to also contact the commission."

Nothing doing. The commissioner received 28 race discrimination complaints in the past financial year, but once the wheat has been separated from the chaff, it is just as we suspected: Tuggeranong is not Tehran and Belconnen is no Belarus. Of the four cases of alleged racial discrimination decided last year by the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal, two were deemed to be frivolous or vexatious. The others, a complaint of workplace taunting and an Aboriginal man's claim he had been refused entry to a Canberra nightclub because he was black, were deemed unproven.

The commission continues to search for untapped reserves of human torment; from January its remit will be expanded to include the educationally deprived, and Watchirs continues to lobby for the inclusion of economic, social and cultural rights in her brief. It wanted to open a shop in Civic, in the hope of capturing passing trade, but the idea was knocked back by the ACT government.

To be fair, the commission's staff are hardly twiddling their thumbs, although perhaps they should be, since six of the 21 administrative staff have complained of occupational overuse injuries in the past year and two have lodged workers compensation claims. They know their rights.

Of the 602 complaints the commission received last year, 46 came from the Alexander Maconochie Centre, an institution that in less enlightened jurisdictions would be known as a prison. Thanks in part to the commission's intervention, detainees will soon be able to shoot up in safety with the introduction of a needle exchange problem. Prison guards are strongly opposed, but the commission says the government has a duty to protect the right to life of all in its care, even junkies. "Drugs and syringes do inevitably find their way into the correctional facilities," the commission's submission to the ACT Health Directorate says breezily. "Harm minimisation is a rational response to the problem."

But what, apart from helping prisoners hit up without contracting hepatitis C, is the ACT Human Rights Commission actually achieving? What wrongs are being righted? How many perpetrators of prejudice are being held to account? Could Watchirs show us the torn parts of the social fabric she had mended, or the bits of human tapestry she has embroidered since she was appointed in 2004? Because if there is racism lurking in the ACT, her commission is rubbish at finding it.

The case studies cited in the annual report, presumably the worst of the worst of the worst, give some idea at the shallow pool of suffering in which the commission paddles.

An 84-year-old woman got her fingers caught in the door of a community transport service vehicle, the report tells us. The driver had taken her to the emergency department for treatment, but without the intervention of the Health Commissioner she would not have known where to lodge an insurance claim.

The commission stepped in to advise a man who complained a hospital had been slow to X-ray his injured wrist; it helped a woman who wanted access to her mother's health records from an aged-care facility; a supermarket chain was rapped over the knuckles because of a shortage of wheelchair-compatible shopping trolleys. The complainant was given $1500 in compensation and store managers were sent to disability awareness training.

Don't laugh; we are all paying for this, since Canberra's budget comes from the federal Treasury. It cost us $3.6 million last year. The ACT has 12 times more human rights officials bureaucrats per capita than NSW. The ACT body receives 25 per cent more complaints than its equivalent in Queensland, which serves 12 times the population.

The trouble with human rights is that while we instinctively want to be for them it is hard to locate the dark stain on the Australian soul that we are trying to expunge. When Gough Whitlam proclaimed the Racial Discrimination Act in his final weeks of government, he seemed to be telling his audience not to take it personally. "I hope it will not be thought that by enacting this law we imply any low opinion of the tolerance and good nature of Australians," he said. "We are, on the whole an exceptionally generous and understanding people, it is remarkable how smooth and harmonious this great experiment has been."

Yet then, as now, anybody who suggested that we might not actually need human rights legislation was considered a moral outcast. National Party senator Glen Sheil predicted in 1975 the legislation would give birth to "an official race relations industry with a staff of dedicated anti-racists earning their living by making the most of every complaint".

His arguments were mocked as "Neanderthal grunts" by Labor's Jim McClelland.

Perhaps, as Donald Horne suggested in The Lucky Country, the principle of the fair go is so embedded in the Australian character that human rights commissions are superfluous.

"The whole thing costs no lives and is ingrained in the texture of Australian life," he wrote in 1964. "If the outside world will allow it, it seems to be there to stay."

Nick Cater speaks at Shaken and Stirred tomorrow night on "human rights or the fair go?" www.thoughtbroker.com.au/upcoming-events