Professor Lucas Lixinski
Every four and a half years, the UN Human Rights Council holds a mirror up to its 193 member states, asking them to account for how they're upholding their human rights obligations – and inviting every other country to weigh in. This is the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), and it's the closest thing the world has to a universal human rights report card.
Australia's most recent review has just delivered its verdict – and the government's response has raised eyebrows. Of the recommendations it received, Australia rejected every single one relating to LGBTIQ+ rights.
There were eight recommendations specifically directed to the rights of LGBTIQ+ people (the only marginalised group for which the government refused to accept any recommendations). It accepted 38% of the overall recommendations, which is about half the average of acceptance by other countries comparable to Australia.
That statistic alone should give us pause. A country as wealthy as Australia, with a government that proclaims to be as pro-human rights as the current administration, surely can do better.
Here, as in many other areas of human rights work, LGBTIQ+ persons are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. These are the rights that tend to receive less attention overall and are prone to being hijacked by culture warriors. It is often easy for governments to put these rights in the ‘too hard’ basket, rather than risk a fight or campaign by opponents of reform.
On the surface, it may seem as though the rejected recommendations do not affect people outside the LGBTIQ+ community, but lack of attention to the rights of these populations often impacts broader society.
The government rejected, for instance, recommendations to ban harmful practices like conversion therapy and surgical intervention on intersex children (often infants or even newborns). It also rejected calls to improve systems that allows trans and gender-diverse people to change their names without extensive legal requirements. It even rejected calls for public education campaigns against stigma and discrimination, which would only reinforce basic educational mandates around forming well-rounded citizens.
In rejecting these recommendations, the government sends a signal to young people that they are not important unless they fit a unified vision of what children ought to look like and want (a vision formed generally without asking children themselves).
One could argue that the government did so because these are matters that still fall within state and territory competence, so it would be inappropriate for the federal government to intervene. That argument makes sense if the federal government is trying to court favour with state and territory governments, but it is clear that, on the basis of its foreign affairs competence and only enhanced by the UPR calls, the government would have the powers to act in this space, should it choose to.
That the government chooses not to rock the proverbial federalism boat here means that it is unwilling to fight for better federal human rights protections. It means that it is unlikely to make the push for an Australian federal bill of rights, and Australia will remain one of the few countries in the world where there are no national human rights protections, outside discrete pieces of legislation that do not speak to each other, creating much confusion in practice.
The current Australian government likes to posture as an ally of the LGBTQI+ community, showing up at pride parades and saying the right things in many contexts. But this activity has not translated into real action; whether it is the UPR, the controversy over counting the LGBTQI+ community in the census, or refusals to extend hate speech protections to LGBTIQ+ groups.
Ignoring advice – and an arguable mandate – from the United Nations shows a lack of political will to make relatively small legislative changes that would have significant impacts on peoples’ lives and enjoyment of their human rights. It signals that the government takes LGBTIQ+ voters for granted.
But these failures do not just affect the LGBTQI+ community, they also signal that the fight for human rights is one the government thinks is not worth having.
Lucas Lixinski is Professor and Associate Dean (International) at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney, and an Associate at the Australian Human Rights Institute.
