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A Bill of Natural Rights for Australia

By Vinay Kolhatkar

April 20, 2025

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With the Australian federal election (May 3, 2025) now just round the corner, let’s look at a crucial aspect of Australia, which just about never gets a mention from the major parties.

The Law Council of Australia (LCA) says that:

Australia is the only western democracy without a Charter or Bill of Human Rights. All countries with legal and political systems similar to Australia have a Bill or Charter of Human Rights. For example, Canada, the United States and South Africa all have a Bill of Rights in their Constitutions and the United Kingdom and New Zealand have Human Rights Acts.

But then the LCA adds:

Your right to free speech is not protected, nor is your right to liberty and security of person, or your right to access quality health care.

[Emphasis mine]

Those of who are familiar with the concept of natural rights know that we cannot have rights that compel other humans to provide someone with “quality health care,” or, for that matter, education, roads, or contraceptives. No one should be compelled to grant you permission to air your views on their privately-owned property or media. You have the right to seek a job, seek healthcare, and so on.

Despite their philosophical error, the primary sentiment of the LCA is correct.

The LCA’s 2020 Human Rights Charter unfortunately interprets rights from a UN (positive rights) perspective. Despite their philosophical error, the primary sentiment of the LCA charter (“more effective legal protection of human rights in Australia at the Commonwealth level is urgently needed”) is correct.

 

Can the Best Constitution Be Improved Upon?

The United States was the only country birthed specifically for the protection of natural rights (which are sometimes termed “negative rights” in philosophy, see here for why). No surprise then, that the US is the only major nation able to resist the avalanche of “hate-speech” laws, the so-called war on fake news, and other such movements that undermine the right of free speech.

The framers of the US Constitution, despite their remarkable insight and foresight, were human.

The framers of the US Constitution, despite their remarkable insight and foresight, were human. They could not possibly have foreseen a neo-Marxist revolution within “civil society”—the long march through the institutions that has resulted in an informal Global Deep State using some media and intellectuals as their well-funded cronies.

By standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants that preceded us (such as the framers of the US Constitution, and subsequent thinkers such as Ayn Rand), and by heeding the lessons of the past 250 years, we can see further.

Nation-states can and do exist without written constitutions. For instance, the UK does not possess a single constitutional document. The elements that make up their constitution are spread over multiple Acts of Parliament and court rulings. That makes it hard for most citizens to know what their rights are.

A rights-respecting constitution ought to be:

  1. all in a single place, written in straightforward English.
  2. well known to every high school student.
  3. able to be invoked by any citizen at any time.
  4. most critically, a fierce protector of natural rights but only natural rights, not the so-called “positive rights” (which really are not rights at all).

Let me now borrow from the best so far and demonstrate how far we can go with just two amendments. The word “Administration” assumes that a referendum to adopt a Bill of Rights also separates executive power to a president and their administration (the “Administration”) but this part is not critical.

Crucially, with this Bill of Natural Rights, we want to limit the government’s role to preventing crime—including violence, the threat of violence, and fraud, and  delivering justice if crime is committed.

 

The First Two Amendments

  1. Neither Parliament nor the Administration shall seek to influence, by law, regulation, or any other means (including financial means), the freedom of speech or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Parliamentarians and public officials will also hold these rights qua citizens.

Notice the wider scope of “law, regulation, or by any other means,” over the “Congress shall make no law” language of the US First Amendment, i.e., “the how,” as well as “the who” (we are including the Administration, which, in the US under President Biden, pressured Facebook to adopt policing and censoring of opinions, without explicitly violating the “Congress shall make no law” clause).

The second amendment I propose is a towering expansion upon the religious freedom clause of the US First Amendment.

The second amendment I propose is a towering expansion upon the religious freedom clause of the US First Amendment. As George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both expressed in their letters, this amendment effectively builds a wall between Church and State. My proposed amendment broadens this protection by putting an impregnable wall between Economy and State, between Education and State, and between Science and State. In one blow, we shatter both the Marxists and the neo-Marxists.

  1. Neither Parliament nor the Administration shall influence, by law, regulation, ownership, or any other means (including financial means): a) the freedom of economic action by economic actors; b) the teaching of any of the humanities, medicine and allied health fields, and the sciences associated with climate; and c) the conduct of research in any field of science.

For the avoidance of doubt:

  1. The term “economic actors” includes media, so there can be no government-owned or subsidized media.
  2. The time-limited exceptions to 2a are to be enumerated, e.g., Medicare and PBS are to be stopped within say, 20 years. The central bank (the RBA) is to be dissolved within three years, during which time, it must act solely to negate inflation to zero.
  3. 2b shall apply from primary school through to the post-doctoral level. The humanities include, but are not limited to, philosophy, economics, psychology, history, anthropology, gender studies, demographic studies, and sociology.
  4. 2c shall apply to both the social and the natural sciences. Effectively, the government is forbidden to undertake absolutely anything in the field of research. The CSIRO and like institutions are to be privatized.

For the further avoidance of doubt, please note the implications:

  1. All subsidies, tariffs, and arbitrary economic penalties like price caps or export volume caps are to end instantly.
  2. The competition (antitrust) regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (the ACCC) shall immediately become only the ACC, i.e., there shall be no regulation of competition by the Commission, but only a service of informing consumers as to whether a producer has misled them, e.g., by false advertising. There is no such thing as price gouging or super profits in a free market.

 

Do Constitutions Work?

In 1978, the US judiciary awarded the US Nazi Party (the NSPA) the right to march in public in a village full of Jews and Holocaust survivors. The Free Speech Center of Middle Tennessee State University (FSCMTSU) reports:

Skokie was home to some 70,000 people, of whom 40,500 were Jews, and of those 5,000–7,000 were survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Because of the high population of Jews, village leaders sought to enjoin the demonstration, but the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the NSPA had a First Amendment right to demonstrate in Skokie.

Most critically, FSCMTSU says: “[The] Court said feelings of the listener are not valid reasons for prohibiting speech.”

In the US, even the Ku Klux Klan survived numerous attempts to make them illegal due to the US First Amendment.

In the US, even the Ku Klux Klan survived numerous attempts to make them illegal due to the US First Amendment.

More recently, in 2011, Ethics Unwrapped, University of Texas reported on the case of Snyder v Phelps:

Matthew Snyder was a Marine Lance Corporal from Maryland who died in Iraq on March 2, 2006, at the age of 20. The Westboro Baptist Church, led by Fred Phelps, announced in advance that they would picket his funeral. Westboro contends that American military deaths are a direct result of God’s vengeance for the tolerance of homosexuality in the United States.

And that:

Westboro Baptist Church maintained that they followed all local ordinances and were compliant with all police instructions. They were allowed to picket in an area designated by police about 1,000 feet from the church. [Note: What the signs said was not visible for funeral goers].

And that the Court ruling stated:

Westboro Baptist Church was within their free speech rights set forth in the First Amendment. The primary message of their signs dealt with their broad public message and not one specific individual, even if it was hurtful.

Clear and objective law works to limit activist judges. Both liberal (left-leaning) and conservative judges have vigorously upheld the US First Amendment.

 

Is a Bill of Natural Rights Feasible?

The Second Amendment we discussed above is impossible in the current climate.  But the proposed First Amendment may have a slim chance of being in a referendum in the next decade whether or not the Australian Republic Movement gathers momentum again, because this freedom does not depend on whether the head of state is a monarch or a president.

And only with free speech protected can we hope to educate and awaken the people. It’s a battle worth fighting.

 

 

This essay was first published by Spectator Australia on 2 April, 2025.

 

 

 

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