Went to this with a few others from MS - Leana, Nicolette, Tamara and Rachel, plus a couple of others and a bunch of summer clerks including Steph - and stretched it out to a three-hour lunch break (including the oration itself)...am definitely winding down for the year. So anyway, there were a couple of EOC speakers, and then Rob Hulls got up and gave a vintage Hulls performance, bringing the dynamism and really talking up the Charter and the importance of formal rights instruments generally as well as giving Ruddock and Howard a good kicking re David Hicks and general inhumanity. It took me a while, but somewhere in the last couple of years I became a fan of the man, and I enjoyed today's effort.
As Burnside began by saying, it was a hard act to follow (even though he was obviously the main act), but as one would expect he did a good job. Leana said afterwards that she thought he'd pitched his 'oration' at exactly the right level, and I think that's right given that the audience probably didn't predominantly have a legal background. He stepped us through some of the more egregious of the recent counter-terrorism laws, expressed his appalledness about the federal government's immigration policy and attitude towards Hicks, and ran through (at a very high level) some of the threats to rights - ineffectual opposition party, unengaged or compliant media, and the existence of a prevailing climate of fear - considering the first two conditions to have been met for the last 10 years and the third to have been gifted to national western governments worldwide by September 11, and generally showed why he's carved such a formidable reputation for himself as a human rights and social justice advocate.
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Also, I don't usually bother mentioning presentations that take place at MS, but there've been a couple of noteworthy ones lately. We'd arranged for President Maxwell of the Court of Appeal to speak to us about the Charter in honour of Human Rights Day last Friday, and he was very good - very passionate and inspiring, and more willing to express opinions on certain matters than we're accustomed to seeing from the Australian judiciary. We always talk about his judgment in the Royal Women's Hospital case but it became evident that that judgment reflects a real commitment on his part. And the climate change and clean energy folks scored Ziggy Switkowski to come in and talk about the conclusions of the uranium mining/nuclear energy taskforce that he's heading up at the moment (apparently, before he was Telstra's CEO, he did substantially research into the area - post-doctoral, I think) - that was interesting, and I thought that he was very impressive, though I'm not so sure that some of the stuff that he considered to be uncontroversial (re safety, etc) is as scientifically widely-accepted as he suggested...
