Introduction
Australia does not currently have a federally legislated Human Rights Act. The Human Rights Act campaign coalition of over 150 organisations is reinvigorating a push to embed our human rights into Australian law, intending to enshrine our rights to dignity, respect, and compassion, whilst ensuring the existence of strong tools to challenge injustice and rights violations.
This panel discussion facilitated by Paul Yiallouros of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, features Daney Faddoul from the Human Rights Law Centre, Sophie Cusworth from Women With Disabilities Australia, and Nikita White from Amnesty International. The following article summarises the conversation between these four at Progress 2026, as well as external resources to summarize what it might take for an Australian Human Rights Act to become a reality.
The Progress 2026 conference was hosted by Australian Progress on March 24-25 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in Narrm/Melbourne. This article was produced by The Commons Library to enable ongoing learning.
What will a Human Rights Act do?
Creating an Australian Human Rights Act will benefit the whole community. It will help prevent human rights violations, provide a powerful tool for challenging injustices, and foster a culture of understanding and respecting human rights. – Human Rights Act campaign website
There is immense power in having human rights embedded in Australian law. The Human Rights Law Centre is currently writing an Australian Human Rights Act that would protect in law all of the fundamental human rights set out in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
According to the website for the campaign, a federal Human Rights Act would
- 1. Consolidate Rights Protections
- 2. Empower Individuals
- 3. Hold Governments Accountable
- 4. Promote Equality and Non-Discrimination
- 5. Enhance Legal Clarity
- 6. Educate and Raise Awareness
- 7. Align with International Standards
It would enable two main outcomes:
- Governments must consider people’s human rights when creating new laws and policies and also when delivering services – like aged care, Medicare, disability services, and education funding.
- People can take action and seek justice if their rights are violated.
As well as this, having this legislation will clearly articulate our human rights and freedoms so that every person in Australia knows their rights and understands what we value and prioritise as a community.
Currently, only three Australian states have a Human Rights Charter: The ACT, Victoria, and Queensland. Daney opened the panel by sharing several concrete examples of how the existence of these laws have ensured more ethical policy creation, and also allowed people an instrument to seek justice if their rights were being violated. The Human Rights Law Centre has released Charters of Human Rights Make Our Lives Better, a report detailing 101 examples of these laws improving livelihoods across the three jurisdictions.
A Human Rights Act is not a silver bullet for every issue we face, but nothing is. What it does is give you something to argue around. It provides transparency and accountability for the community to make decisions, and a way to hold politicians accountable. A Human Rights Act will mean better decisions at the outset. – Daney Faddoul
If you need a law degree to understand your rights, that is a problem. It means that governments and corporations can get away with bad things because no one is holding them accountable. This campaign is working to not only legislate these rights, but also to educate us, encouraging citizens to advocate for themselves and others. Many people right now don’t know what their rights are, and polling done by Amnesty International shows that most people think we already have a federal Human Rights Act.
The Human Rights Law Centre has already drafted the legislation. It is ready to go, and now the alliance is working to build support and momentum to get it legislated.
The Intersection of Human Rights and Disability Rights
The intersections between disability rights and human rights legislation were stressed as incredibly significant by all panellists. For people with disabilities, Human Rights standards are critically important.
The 2019-2023 Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability unearthed profound human rights violations, which were largely found to be structural and systemic.
The Royal Commission received over eight thousand submissions from people with disabilities, and highlighted gaps in legal systems where rights slip, and also places where harm is supported. This included examples of forcing disabled people into segregation, subjecting people to medical procedures without consent, and people being paid $3 an hour. All of these serious rights violations are allowed under Australian law.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has not been legislated, and these rights aren’t properly protected by our current legislative framework. The panel focused on the interrelationship between specific disability rights and broader human rights, suggesting that we can consider how human rights apply in a disability context, rather than thinking about disability rights as an entirely different thing. This approach emphasises the interconnection between different areas of our rights.
In the same vein, it is crucial to note the intersectional discrimination faced by disabled people who are also marginalised in different ways. A single unified Human Rights Act could see people with disabilities as intersectional, complex people, not defined by one form of oppression or marginalisation.
However, while this Act will contain this intersectionality as well as specificity, there is still a strong movement for a separate set of laws focused solely on disability rights. The following sections detail some of the conversation had by the panel that delved into these nuances.
Disability Rights Act
A Human Rights Act can work as a foundation for other legislation and further specificity. It is a starting point, and can work as a broad catch-all Act. It will include disability rights amongst a swathe of other things. Once this first piece of federal Rights legislation exists, there will be a pathway to build more. From this point we could then create a tailored Disability Rights Act, or specific laws around privacy rights. But a Human Rights Act will already contain these things too.
Human rights are mutually reinforcing. – Sophie Cusworth
The panel was prompted with several questions about the intersections between disability and human rights law, with some audience members suggesting the value of having both. Sophie, a representative of Women With Disabilities Australia, spoke to the immense value of a Disability Rights Act.
Women With Disabilities Australia are campaigning for a Disability Rights Act. This specificity, however, isn’t discounted by the existence of overarching human rights legislation. In fact, because human rights are so overlapping and mutually reinforcing, these two Acts can work together to ensure our rights are respected and legislated.
Anti-Discrimination Law
Laws against discrimination work a little differently to a Rights Act. Right now, these sets of laws are being relied upon to enforce our human rights, but they aren’t designed to do this. You need both.
Discrimination works in the negative, whilst Rights work in the positive. Our anti-discrimination laws are valuable tools, but they don’t give us freedom from discrimination—they give us a pathway, accessible only to some, to take legal action when harm has already occurred. They also aren’t a catch-all. You can still have a ‘non-discriminatory’ denial of health rights.
A Human Rights Act would mean that these rights were considered from the outset, and embedded in other law and policy making. Not having a Human Rights Act means there are a lot of benefits our communities are missing out on.
Joint Statement from Disability Representative Organisations
A coalition of Disability Representative Organisations have released a joint statement in support of a federal Human Rights Act, emphasising the value of an overarching Act that is able to encompass human intersectionality and overlapping forms of discrimination and disadvantage, whilst also containing targeted protections for people with disabilities.
The Statement reads:
The human rights of people with disability must be protected in Australian law. We support a national HRA that integrates specific provisions for disability rights, which ensures both comprehensive coverage and targeted protections.
It speaks directly to the relationship between Human Rights and Disability Rights Acts:
“Our organisations believe that the protection of the rights of people with disabilities will best be achieved through a comprehensive national HRA – rather than a standalone DRA.
Our collective vision is to support a national HRA that applies specific provisions for disability rights within a broader framework of human rights protection. This comprehensive approach balances the importance of addressing the unique rights violations people with disability face, with the need to provide inclusive protection for ALL, aligning with the CRPD.
By embedding targeted protections for people with disability within a national HRA, their rights are upheld alongside those of other marginalised groups, fostering a cohesive and unified legal framework. This approach not only guarantees broad human rights coverage, but also offers the focused protections specific to the experiences of people with disability.
Our goal is to create an inclusive national HRA that affirms the dignity, equality, and rights of every person, while specifically addressing the needs of people with disability, thereby promoting a just and equitable society for all.”
For the full statement see: Strengthening protection of the rights of people with disability through a national Human Rights Act (HRA).
The Campaign Story
In 2022, the Australian Labor Party were elected, and had made a campaign promise to investigate the federal human rights framework they had developed when they were last in government.
After a lot of advocacy from the coalition, an inquiry began in March 2023, and ran for over a year. There was a huge amount of work across the campaign coalition to get submissions made to the Inquiry, and this work started early, to ensure we had the right stories and examples once the Inquiry began. Organisations in support of a Human Rights Act held expert panels, public hearings, did extensive outreach, and made sure that people across the coalition’s network were talking to each other and sharing resources.
The Inquiry into Australia’s Human Rights Framework report was released by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in March of 2024. It set out 17 recommendations, including that the government introduce legislation to establish an Australian Human Rights Act. Crucially, 87.2% of the 335 submissions received by the Committee support the adoption of a federal Human Rights Act.
A press conference at Parliament happened shortly after, with different civil society organisations standing together to escalate the campaign, and pressure politicians to enact the recommendations of the report.
Across this period, the Human Rights Law Centre worked to draft the Act itself, in order to make it that much easier to legislate it. This draft is finished and ready, but we’ve now been waiting two years for a response to the report from Government. The coalition for a Human Rights Act is continuing to advocate for the recommendation to be accepted and HRA to be legislated
Reflections
If we work together to show our politicians that communities all over the country want values like fairness, compassion and equality properly protected, then we can transform Australia’s human rights landscape. We can give people the power to take action when their human rights are violated. – Human Rights Act website
The campaign for a federal Human Rights Act is ongoing and strong. Here are some learnings and reflections that the panel shared from these stages of the campaign.
Clarity
It is crucial that Human Rights standards are widely understood by people across the community. People need to be empowered to step up and use their rights, to ensure they are upheld. This means that we need to keep talking about Human Rights and the benefits a federal Act would have.
Messaging
It is so valuable to have a clear campaign message. A massive percentage of submissions used the phrase “legislate a Human Rights Act”—this consistency is due to a clear and well defined call-to-actoin and objective for advoacy.
Keep it simple. Instead of sharing a complicated, technocratic message, share stories. Make them simple and relatable, embedded in everyday lives. Both people and politicians want to hear from everyday people, not expert advocates or lawyers.
Talk about how a Human Rights Act will benefit everyone, and speak to the concrete things people care about: housing, education, healthcare.
Preparation
Doing the work to prepare before launching the campaign is extremely valuable. Know what you need to get done, and why it might have failed in the past. You can launch a strong and united campaign if you do the right preparation.
Take the time to hear people’s stories and gather case studies.
Polling is incredibly helpful political advocacy. Politicians love this.
Coalition work
A coalition of aligned organisations is a powerful thing. Take the time to strengthen this coalition, and also provide opportunities to discuss, debate, and disagree, in order to form true alliances and a stronger coalition in the long term.
About the Speakers
Daney Faddoul (Human Rights Law Centre)
Daney Faddoul (he/him) joined the Human Rights Law Centre in March 2020 and focuses on the campaign to create an Australian Human Rights Act. Daney has a wealth of campaigning experience from his time within the union movement, and at GetUp where he was a Senior Campaigner and then their Political Director. At GetUp he developed and led campaigns on economic justice and oversaw all of their political engagement activities, and assisted with a wide range of high-profile campaigning, messaging, media, fundraising and policy work. Before his time at GetUp he was negotiating enterprise agreements as an Industrial Officer within the trade union movement, and coordinating national industrial plans and campaigns. Daney studied law at Western Sydney University.
Sophie Cusworth (Women With Disabilities Australia)
Sophie Cusworth (she/her) is the Chief Executive Officer of Women With Disabilities Australia, the national Disability Representative Organisation and National Women’s Alliance for women, girls and gender-diverse people with disabilities. Sophie has a background in systemic advocacy and as a lawyer specialising in employment, safety and discrimination. Her work is grounded in an intersectional feminist and human rights framework, and is informed by her lived experience of disability as an Autistic person with chronic pain.
Nikita White (Amnesty International Australia)
Nikita is a strategic campaigner at Amnesty International Australia with extensive experience designing and delivering campaigns to promote and protect human rights. With degrees in law and international relations, and a demonstrated understanding of international human rights law, she is Amnesty’s campaign and government relations lead on their Human Rights Act and climate justice campaigns.
Paul Yiallouros (Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation) (Moderator)
Paul Yiallouros is an Industrial Officer at the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, which is the nation’s largest trade union with 356,000 members. He has previously held similar roles at the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance and the Australian Services Union. Paul has a background in law, music, and languages.