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...history of human rights in Australia.
But in this matter as on others we will reach only a partial answer if our aim becomes the discovery of what was distinctively or peculiarly Australian, for this society was for most of its history a dependent society, as much British as Australian.
If, following Hancock, we say that Australians had a pragmatic, utilitarian, remarkably unsuspicious attitude to the state, this is only in part true. Australians were certainly creative in finding new purposes for the state, but it was still a British state in a British society and Australians fully shared in the stock understandings of what that meant. They knew the history and peculiar virtues of the British state, a grand narrative that encompassed tyranny, liberty and rights. It was because they were so certain that their British rights were protected that the Australians expanded the activities of the state so unconcernedly.
To gain an idea of the strength of this British tradition in Australia, listen first to Robert Menzies as Commonwealth Attorney-General speaking in Westminster Hall, London, to a gathering of the Empire Parliamentary Association in 1935:
I am confident that our parliamentary system is going to see it through. And why? Because its roots are deeply set in the history and character of the British people. In those countries where it has fallen, a parliament was adopted as the embodiment of an attractive theory. As a fully-grown tree it was carefully transplanted and watered and cared for. And at the first real blast of the storm it fell.
Will our parliaments survive? I believe that they will. The growth of parliament is in truth the growth of the British people; self-government here is no academic theory, but the dynamic power moving through 800 years of national history.
We are told today that the parliamentary system is antiquated, that it is slow, inefficient, illogical, emotional. In the presence of each charge, it may admit to some degree of guilt. But with all its faults, it retains a great virtue, alas! in these days, a rare virtue. Its virtue is that it is the one system yet devised which ensures the liberty of the subject by promoting the rule of law which subjects themselves make, and to which everyone, Prime Minister or tramp, must render allegiance.
We British people still believe that men are born free, and that the function of government is to limit that freedom only by the consent of the governed.
It might be objected that Menzies was a notable Anglophile. So listen now to Dr H.V. Evatt, the chief opponent of Prime Minister Menzies' attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1950-51. As chair of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 Evatt had proclaimed the Declaration of Human Rights, but it was not to that document that he referred in denouncing Menzies' proposal:
This represents a direct frontal...
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