Human rights problems in Australia? Strewth, mate, no worries. In this egalitarian society, founded on the working man and a gritty respect for his peers, human rights should never have been an issue, should it?
Prime Minister John Howard reaffirmed Australia's commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in March. He said the 50th anniversary created "an opportunity for all of us to reinvigorate efforts to ensure that human rights are being enjoyed by all people in all countries".
One might argue that a country whose first modern settlers were largely unwilling and totally oppressed, transported for stealing a loaf of bread as much as for cutting another's throat, has a human rights image from day one. And it is to day one that the running sore of rights abuses in Australia dates: when Captain Arthur Phillip's forces overwhelmed the aboriginal tribes-people who stood in fear and watched these strange creatures take over in 1788.
Two hundred years later a grassroots movement swelled up in protest at the lavish bicentennial celebrations, fundamentally subscribing to the idea that the Australian nation was 200 years old, and looking away from the native Australians who could rightly claim the bicentennial was a sorrowful commemoration for them.
Aboriginals did not have the right to vote, nor were they counted in censuses until after 1967, when a referendum question asked their 10 million white compatriots if this democratic right should be extended to them.
Aboriginal health was, and is to an extent, a scandal. White men's diseases as well as white men's weapons (and law), decimated the aboriginals. Even now, in Queensland jails, 25 per cent of the inmates are "black" - Aboriginals or Torres Strait Islanders - yet they comprise only 2 per cent of the population.
Last year a commission of inquiry reported into the erstwhile process of taking aboriginal children away from their families and having them grow up in white Australian households as a "cleansing measure".
"That was a terrific report," says Father Wally Dethlefs, a Queensland priest currently studying in Ireland. Father Dethlefs has worked extensively with communities in Australia which could be termed oppressed, such as prisoners, aboriginals and young people who are homeless or living in poverty. He served on a commission into homeless youth in the late 1980s, which he says contributed in some part to subsequent federal commissions.
Mr Howard has just launched a campaign to win back friends of all colours he lost when he referred disparagingly to the "black armband" view of history. He has, consistently refused to apologise to aboriginal people for the treatment meted out to them over the past two centuries.
A network of pressure groups organised a national "sorry" day in support of racial reconciliation earlier this year but the Liberal-National Government largely snubbed it, arguing that this generation should not have to carry the can for past injustices. The October election threatened to become embroiled in racism after the Government passed its so-called 10-point plan, which substantially weakened aboriginal land rights gained in the landmark Mabo legal victory in 1993. Subsequently, Mr Howard has met the Aboriginal Reconciliation Council in an attempt to patch things up, promising a formal document on inter-communal relations for 2001.
Australia also does its bit for human rights through the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (which has just proposed legislation for a national religious freedom law, with particular concern to stop discrimination in the workplace).
External human rights have often caused more passion. The human rights of the 200,000 Timorese killed, and many others who have suffered as a result of Indonesia's "annexation" of the province in 1975, are a blot on the Australian conscience. Australia stands alone among Western nations in recognising Indonesia's claim on the former Portuguese colony.