Yesterday was a bad day for Joe and Joanne Citizen.  Kevin Rudd’s cabinet, aka Team Jellyback, knocked on the head the idea that Australians should be able to keep their government accountable. A proposed Human Rights Act, championed by Attorney-General Robert McClelland, is not on the Rudd government’s agenda it seems.

The real losers out of this are not simply those charged under draconian anti-terror laws that criminalise speech and thought, or young children who can be held in migration detention centres indefinitely, but the so called ordinary mums and dads.

As experience in the UK, Victoria and the ACT, all of which have their own human rights laws, shows, it is these people who most benefit out of having a law that enables them to assert their rights against government in areas such as health, housing and disabilities.

Perhaps this is why the Rudd government is so hostile to the idea.

The Human Rights Law Resource Centre in Melbourne regularly compiles lists of examples where individuals and their families are able improve their every day lives in Victoria because Attorney-General Rob Hulls introduced a human rights law in 2006.

One case involved the mother of a 13-year-old boy with Asperger Syndrome, who couldn’t access disability assistance because the Department of Human Services did not recognise that condition as a “disability”.  The mother used the Victorian human rights law to force a change in policy and access that important support.

Another involves a middle-aged woman with an acquired brain injury who required urgent therapy to treat severe contractures of her left hand.

Because she was not over 50, treatment for the woman was not considered a priority by the public health system, even though the longer she waited the more likely it was her hand would be amputated.  The woman and her supporters used the human rights law to gain access to one off funding for her surgery.

Then there is the case of a 19-year-old house-bound woman with cerebral palsy. She was finding it difficult to obtain important services to enable her to improve her quality of life.  Her advocate wrote to the relevant Government department citing the women’s right not to be treated in a cruel, inhuman or degrading way and her right to privacy, and fortunately this plea and the threat of enforcing her rights under the human rights law put the desired rocket under the bureaucrats.

In the UK, human rights laws have been utilised by the aged-care sector to prevent, for example, government departments from splitting up elderly couples who have been together for 50 years.  And after a court ruling highlighted that nursing homes run by charities and the private sector were not covered by human rights laws, the UK Parliament passed an amendment to ensure they were.  Millions of people living in aged-care facilities in the UK now have protection against elder abuse, poor living conditions and neglect.

These cases are the tip of the iceberg, literally.  In those jurisdictions where a human rights law exists, each day thousands of citizens are able to ensure they get better treatment from government.  Perhaps this is why the Rudd government is so scared of a Human Rights Act?  It would, after all, arm the average citizen with some power in their dealings with government — perish the thought!