Your honour, it was an honour: My courtroom victory
Outside the courtroom, I kneel on the floor, wracked with tension. Anxiety puts me close to the ground, nearing foetal position, while on the other side of a door, a policeman views bodycam footage of the incident, my fate swinging on the variable scales of justice.
Earlier, I'd sat among other defendants as a magistrate heard an array of misdemeanours, each one met with a corresponding punishment. A young Indian student, studying AI by day and delivering pizzas at night, nabbed driving while his licence was suspended after an earlier speeding breach. A woman caught drink-driving (she blew .113). A man with family in tow, facing the music after riding his black BMW motorbike at 90km/h in a 60km/h zone: three-month loss of licence and $500 fine.
Here, on a Monday morning, is the everyday drama of the courts, all of us finding ourselves on the wrong side of the law, for one reason or another, and processed now as a job lot. Some dress up for the occasion. A mum sits with a daughter who bats flamboyant false eyelashes; three young men, perhaps footballers, wearing blue suits that pull too tight across the shoulders, sip water as lawyers with product in their hair lean into them, looking as though they're hatching a conspiracy. Most of us accused come as we are.
A bloke seated beside me says he's been here before; lost his licence a while back, but is now trying to repeal an old intervention order: 'I was a dick 10 years ago. But I'm not a dick now.'
Around a campfire in the mountains, my eldest boy once asked: 'Dad, have you ever been to prison?' Children are intuitive. My boys know I'm wary of authority, ask questions, am unafraid to make a stand against what I think is unjust. And fair cop; often enough I do look a bit jailbirdy.
I tell him a truth: I have been locked up inside a prison van, at a protest in the city. It's still unclear if I was accused of 'obstructing the police' or 'obstructing the peace' (both hogwash). I joined a schoolteacher dressed as a bumblebee, among other detainees. My only crime was to be wearing a bright orange roadworker's shirt. All of us were released later in parkland, like relocating possums.
And I've had plenty of days in court. One case heard in Sydney was dismissed after my opening line: 'The day after the AFL Grand Final last year, I caught a plane to Delhi.' Sydney had won the game; lawyers on the door out surmised the judge was a Swans supporter. It was the pettiest of traffic infringements.
One school holiday I took my two boys and a friend's son to the Melbourne Magistrates' Court – as evidence, of sorts. While my restless assistants crawled under the seats, a court clerk approached, asked my name, expedited the case. The matter was a parking fine, incurred outside my boys' primary school while delivering a six-metre length of slotted PVC pipe for a mint 'drip garden' I was building beneath the drinking taps. Penalty waived.
I've written a letter to a council contesting a fine, outlining the differences between a barrier kerb and a semi-mountable kerb, and never heard back. And I've jogged the breadth of a CBD, bursting through the court doors as my case was about to be heard, out of breath before one of our best-known magistrates. We had a chat, and your honour, it was an honour. I was let off.
Three cans from the back of my ute had fallen onto the freeway, allegedly. That morning I was carrying 3639 other cans, 736 PET bottles and 17 liquid paperboard boxes, all trussed in large plastic bags. Children at various schools had collected them – along with glass bottles – and I'd helped with the sorting and counting, encouraging them to find ways to understand numbers. We'd had fun, and each week I'd documented the activity for their newsletters. Our goal was to raise $5000 for an Afghan refugee family, 10 cents at a time, through a container deposit scheme. The highway patrolman was wholly uninterested in our enterprise.
Loading
Before the court, I suggest an error in the police account: my payload was indeed 'tied down properly', but in tightening a winch strap, I may have pinched a hole in a bag. Bodycam footage was observed; the source of the alleged three loose cans is inconclusive. Shown the footage, my first thought: 'Geez, I looked trim last winter.' Then I see myself scouring the roadside, picking up more cans, straight after the senior constable pulled me over to write out a $288 ticket. I collected litter as he watched, gun on hip.
Wording on the preliminary brief – a statement of alleged facts – is amended, and back in the court, the judge seems to warm to my plight. A conversation is started, there is to-and-fro, and she suggests I plead guilty and the court could use its power of discretion.
In a suburban courtroom on a Monday morning, I am the only defendant to be let off the hook. I've had my say and, turning to leave, all are smiling, including the magistrate. Here is kindness, an understanding, and I tell her I could hug her, but that would be inappropriate. Yes, it would, she says.
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This story is part of the July 19 edition of Good Weekend. See all 16 stories. Outside the courtroom, I kneel on the floor, wracked with tension. Anxiety puts me close to the ground, nearing foetal position, while on the other side of a door, a policeman views bodycam footage of the incident, my fate swinging on the variable scales of justice. Earlier, I'd sat among other defendants as a magistrate heard an array of misdemeanours, each one met with a corresponding punishment. A young Indian student, studying AI by day and delivering pizzas at night, nabbed driving while his licence was suspended after an earlier speeding breach. A woman caught drink-driving (she blew .113). A man with family in tow, facing the music after riding his black BMW motorbike at 90km/h in a 60km/h zone: three-month loss of licence and $500 fine. Here, on a Monday morning, is the everyday drama of the courts, all of us finding ourselves on the wrong side of the law, for one reason or another, and processed now as a job lot. Some dress up for the occasion. A mum sits with a daughter who bats flamboyant false eyelashes; three young men, perhaps footballers, wearing blue suits that pull too tight across the shoulders, sip water as lawyers with product in their hair lean into them, looking as though they're hatching a conspiracy. Most of us accused come as we are. A bloke seated beside me says he's been here before; lost his licence a while back, but is now trying to repeal an old intervention order: 'I was a dick 10 years ago. But I'm not a dick now.' Around a campfire in the mountains, my eldest boy once asked: 'Dad, have you ever been to prison?' Children are intuitive. My boys know I'm wary of authority, ask questions, am unafraid to make a stand against what I think is unjust. And fair cop; often enough I do look a bit jailbirdy. I tell him a truth: I have been locked up inside a prison van, at a protest in the city. It's still unclear if I was accused of 'obstructing the police' or 'obstructing the peace' (both hogwash). I joined a schoolteacher dressed as a bumblebee, among other detainees. My only crime was to be wearing a bright orange roadworker's shirt. All of us were released later in parkland, like relocating possums. And I've had plenty of days in court. One case heard in Sydney was dismissed after my opening line: 'The day after the AFL Grand Final last year, I caught a plane to Delhi.' Sydney had won the game; lawyers on the door out surmised the judge was a Swans supporter. It was the pettiest of traffic infringements. One school holiday I took my two boys and a friend's son to the Melbourne Magistrates' Court – as evidence, of sorts. While my restless assistants crawled under the seats, a court clerk approached, asked my name, expedited the case. The matter was a parking fine, incurred outside my boys' primary school while delivering a six-metre length of slotted PVC pipe for a mint 'drip garden' I was building beneath the drinking taps. Penalty waived. I've written a letter to a council contesting a fine, outlining the differences between a barrier kerb and a semi-mountable kerb, and never heard back. And I've jogged the breadth of a CBD, bursting through the court doors as my case was about to be heard, out of breath before one of our best-known magistrates. We had a chat, and your honour, it was an honour. I was let off. Three cans from the back of my ute had fallen onto the freeway, allegedly. That morning I was carrying 3639 other cans, 736 PET bottles and 17 liquid paperboard boxes, all trussed in large plastic bags. Children at various schools had collected them – along with glass bottles – and I'd helped with the sorting and counting, encouraging them to find ways to understand numbers. We'd had fun, and each week I'd documented the activity for their newsletters. Our goal was to raise $5000 for an Afghan refugee family, 10 cents at a time, through a container deposit scheme. The highway patrolman was wholly uninterested in our enterprise. Loading Before the court, I suggest an error in the police account: my payload was indeed 'tied down properly', but in tightening a winch strap, I may have pinched a hole in a bag. Bodycam footage was observed; the source of the alleged three loose cans is inconclusive. Shown the footage, my first thought: 'Geez, I looked trim last winter.' Then I see myself scouring the roadside, picking up more cans, straight after the senior constable pulled me over to write out a $288 ticket. I collected litter as he watched, gun on hip. Wording on the preliminary brief – a statement of alleged facts – is amended, and back in the court, the judge seems to warm to my plight. A conversation is started, there is to-and-fro, and she suggests I plead guilty and the court could use its power of discretion. In a suburban courtroom on a Monday morning, I am the only defendant to be let off the hook. I've had my say and, turning to leave, all are smiling, including the magistrate. Here is kindness, an understanding, and I tell her I could hug her, but that would be inappropriate. Yes, it would, she says.
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‘We need to find common ground': Hugh de Kretser's human rights challenge
This story is part of the July 19 edition of Good Weekend. See all 16 stories. One morning in 2003, a young man knocked on the door of a humble weatherboard house in the northern Melbourne suburb of Reservoir. A man with a long, unruly beard directed him to a living room piled high with legal files. Over a cup of tea, as 3CR community radio blared from the kitchen, Charandev Singh spoke to his guest for two hours, giving the young man a steely message that he never forgot: 'You have to use your privilege for good.' Hugh de Kretser had come down from the 30th floor of a Collins Street tower, where the then 29-year-old worked for Mallesons Stephen Jaques, a top commercial law firm, to take a secondment at Brimbank Community Legal Centre. At that time the centre was a demountable shed in the western suburbs, with a vegie patch out the back and a dog living under a desk. A framed wall poster declared: 'The community legal centre most likely to be stolen off the back of a truck.' Both de Kretser and Singh were tall, brown-skinned, with South Asian backgrounds. They were born a day apart in 1974, but there the likeness ended. De Kretser came from a strong, happy family in Melbourne's 'lovely, leafy and boring' Surrey Hills; his father, David, a globally renowned endocrinologist, would become governor of Victoria in 2006. Singh's family migrated from Malaysia when he was six years old, settling in the suburbs around Dandenong, a tough part of Melbourne, where he experienced abuse and persistent racism. De Kretser played double bass in the Camberwell Grammar School orchestra, acted in plays and became basketball captain and a house captain before studying law and arts at the University of Melbourne. Singh dropped out of high school, was struck on the head by a police baton at a demonstration and lived day to day in St Kilda. De Kretser went to the United Nations on a student internship and watched Nelson Mandela address the General Assembly. Singh was institutionalised for three years, including at Larundel Mental Hospital. When Singh was discharged in 1991, Brimbank legal centre manager Amanda George, seeing that he had a brilliant mind, hired him as a researcher to work on behalf of prisoners. She says the centre won cases through Singh's freakish ability to absorb the details of files and his forensic knowledge of the law. That day in Reservoir, Singh sized up the man he had summoned to his home. How would this $100,000-a-year corporate lawyer, who'd never had to do photocopying or make the coffee, talk to people whose children or fathers had died in police custody? 'I could see that many hands had held him, while I had fallen through the cracks through my own brokenness,' Singh says. 'But there was a kindness to him. I could see he was going somewhere.' Singh needn't have worried: 'Hugh fitted in from day one,' recalls Amanda George. De Kretser worked on cases of childhood sexual assault, of five men beaten by prison wardens and a handcuffed prisoner shot dead by a security guard in a hospital. He saw so much damage he'd sometimes go and sit in Brimbank Shopping Centre just to watch people pass by and reassure himself the world was all right. But, he says, 'I learnt more about human rights in my first six months than in all my time in law school and corporate law.' His life course was set. When George's job came up a few months later, at half his corporate salary, he took it. Human rights in trouble De Kretser, now 51, rose to be head of the Victorian Federation of Community Legal Centres, then the Human Rights Law Centre, then CEO of Victoria's Yoorrook Justice Commission, Australia's first truth-telling inquiry into massacres and injustices suffered by Aboriginal people. Last year, the then attorney-general Mark Dreyfus appointed him president of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC). The decision did not figure much in the news, but it matters. The ideal of human rights, a foundation of global politics since the end of World War II, is in trouble. Behind this anodyne term – who could not be for human rights? – lies a story of our times: seismic shifts on the political left and right, a retreat to tribes, deep threats to democracy. These changes, so obviously roiling the United States and European countries, are quietly reshaping our politics, too. They will determine what de Kretser might achieve as holder of the highest human rights job in the country. Since its establishment as a permanent body in 1986, the AHRC has played a significant role in Australian life. It received 2700 discrimination complaints based on race, sex, age, disability, employment or human rights breaches in 2023-24. In voluntary meetings run by a skilled conciliator, the parties try to sort out their differences. If they fail, complainants can go to court, but few do. AHRC reports from the 1980s show that this process enabled Indigenous people, for the first time, to register formal complaints against employers who denied them jobs, hoteliers who barred them entry, estate agents who saw their faces and told them the house had been taken, and to gain some small measure of justice. The AHRC also writes reports exposing human rights breaches and calls on governments to address them. Some of these reports – into homeless children, mental illness, children in immigration detention, and sexual harassment in the armed forces, among others – have been ground-breaking. The commission initiated the Close the Gap framework that seeks to produce the same life outcomes for Indigenous as for non-Indigenous Australians. Most famously, in 1997 it published the Bringing Them Home report into the stolen generations of Indigenous children. But in recent years, the AHRC has faded from view. Its reports rarely land with the same impact. Some human rights advocates blame inadequate funding (though the Albanese Government gave it $50 million in 2022) and the fierce hostility of prior Coalition governments; others say it has become bureaucratic, demoralised and timid. Its problems are bigger than that, though. Loading As president, de Kretser represents seven commissioners: for race, sex, age, disability, children, Indigenous Australians and human rights. Each is independent, answerable to parliament and can be removed only by the governor-general. This is an odd structure, developed over time as commissioners were gradually added, and creates silos, competition for limited funds and a lack of one organisational voice. Yet, in recent years, its broad political leanings have been clear. Today the AHRC champions positions that reflect much of the progressive left's turn to identity politics. On transgender rights, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody has supported people under the age of 18 having access to the medical interventions that form part of gender-affirming healthcare as a 'fundamental human right'. Yet the medical evidence for such care for minors is 'remarkably weak', according to Britain's 2024 Cass Review. A review commissioned this year by Health Minister Mark Butler will test these arguments. High tension over Gaza Last year the commission published a National Anti-Racism Framework, backed by a $7.5 million grant over four years from the Albanese government. The framework defines racism as not chiefly a matter of individual bigotry but as 'entrenched' in Australian 'systems and institutions', which were built to ensure 'white privilege', even – Race Discrimination Commissioner Giri Sivaraman said in a launch speech – 'white supremacy'. To 'eliminate' racism, the framework proposes media regulation and anti-racism curricula in all education institutions. Employers would have to provide 'mandatory cultural safety and anti-racism training for all workers' or risk being taken to court. Critics of the framework see its summation of Australian society as deeply racist as too bleak, and its remedies too sweeping. They argue the framework does not provide evidence and examples that ordinary people can understand of how racism is entrenched in our systems, and how racism affects different groups, notably Indigenous people and migrants, in different ways. The AHRC has a more fundamental challenge: as an issue, human rights now appears to be the preoccupation of the left and progressive left, with the centre right and ultra-conservatives largely abandoning it as a major concern. So how can the organisation speak to all Australians, minorities or not? The tension has come to a head over the war in Gaza. In February last year, The Guardian reported that at least 24 AHRC employees wrote anonymously to its then president, Rosalind Croucher. The letter, a breach of public servants' ethical requirement to be impartial, denounced the commission's 'failure to fulfil its mandate' as a human rights body 'in regard to Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity'. It called on the commission to acknowledge Israel's 'occupation of Palestine as the source of the violence'. At least four employees resigned in protest. Loading At the same time, Jewish leaders said the commission had failed to make a single unqualified statement against antisemitism in the early months after the October 7 massacre; instead, a statement it issued six days after the massacre merely expressed concern that the right to peaceful protest should be upheld. Lynda Ben-Menashe, president of the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia, tells Good Weekend, 'Jewish Australians have had little faith in the human rights commission's ability or willingness to protect them. I believe Hugh is a good person, and we want to have faith in his intention to reform the commission, but there is a very long way to go.' Everyone I spoke to expressed respect for de Kretser. But such endorsements give him a good start, nothing more. I spent many hours with him, trying to understand the meaning of human rights today. Perhaps a person as committed as he is to the ideal of human rights is best placed to help reinvent it. Calm under pressure A kelpie bounds and barks around my legs when I visit de Kretser's home in the southern Melbourne suburb of Caulfield South. 'That's Taco – born on Human Rights Day,' he tells me. It's December and he and his wife, Kim, an arts organisation CEO, and their two children are about to move to Sydney, where the commission has its head office. He's 195 centimetres tall, and I find myself looking up a lot as we walk to a café. The de Kretsers are Burghers, Sri Lankans with Dutch, Portuguese, Sinhalese and Tamil roots. David de Kretser migrated to Australia in 1949, at the age of nine, and later married Jan, an occupational therapist. Hugh, the youngest of four sons, experienced little racism as a boy, yet 'grew up feeling different from the mainstream, and that is a blessing for my new job'. 'He's not especially political, not an ideologue,' says his friend, Fiona Forsyth, a senior barrister who studied at the University of Melbourne with de Kretser. 'He performed in the [university] law revue, he likes to surf, hike, play guitar. There's a lightness to Hugh; he's funny. If you had asked me back then where he'd end up, I wouldn't have picked president of the human rights commission.' But Forsyth identifies qualities that might help de Kretser in the role. 'Hugh has strong beliefs and principles but he sees that change needs to come slowly and carefully. He's got friends across the political spectrum; he listens to them, understands the reasonableness of their positions, even when he doesn't agree.' 'There's a lightness to Hugh; he's funny. If you had asked me back then where he'd end up, I wouldn't have picked president of the human rights commission.' Fiona Forsyth, senior barrister and friend Friends and colleagues all speak of de Kretser's calm. In conversation he is very still, looking you straight in the eye across the table and occasionally resetting the spectacles on his nose. But talking about human rights gets him excited. If he were religious, he might name the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as his holy text. 'I love its simple principles and language,' he says. What are human rights? 'They're globally agreed standards that provide the blueprint for a good life for everyone,' de Kretser writes via email. 'They belong to all of us, no matter who or where we are. They reflect values like equality, freedom, respect, dignity, kindness and thinking of others.' I found this a bit vague, until de Kretser pointed me to a talk given in 2023 by Canadian political scientist Michael Ignatieff to mark the 75th anniversary of its adoption. Ignatieff defined human rights as 'a thought experiment'. They ask us to consider other people not through the differences between us but our common humanity. In other words, in the decades after World War II, women and disadvantaged minorities forced Western societies to widen their frame, to see all people as fully human. But the struggle to see others is never over, Ignatieff said. We have always been taught to regard difference as primary. That's why the post-World War II pillars of the international order 'are shaking. Something inside us … is deeply resistant to the moral demands human rights makes of us.' I could see why this definition inspires de Kretser. In our talks, he often describes encounters with lives unlike his own and what they taught him. At Brimbank, he watched George and Singh sit with families of deaths-in-custody victims 'and find just the right words for the pain they were going through'. At Yoorrook – 'the hardest job I've ever done, and the most fulfilling' – de Kretser listened to Aboriginal testimony of almost unbearable loss but also stories of struggle, courage and occasional triumph against the odds. He hopes that as AHRC president he can 'help to convey Aboriginal experiences to the rest of the country'. Yet the challenges he faces are much more complex than the stark class and racial injustices he witnessed at Brimbank and Yoorrook respectively. That's because few now agree on what the term, human rights, means. The Great left-right switch In 1948, standing in the ruins of history's most murderous war, with six million Jews and tens of millions of others dead, the new United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration did not lean left or right, rather seeking to establish principles all people could embrace. Eleanor Roosevelt, a passionate advocate for civil rights, led the writing of it, but Catholic ideas of social justice, with their strong conservative element, were also influential. In 1957, President Eisenhower, a Republican, urged all Americans to read the declaration. In Australia it was a Coalition government that established the first, temporary human rights commission in 1981. But in the 1970s, a focus on human rights replaced the Western left's attacks on class injustice as a way to achieve a more equal society, political scientist Samuel Moyn argues in his 2012 book, The Last Utopia. At the same time, as French economist Thomas Piketty has written, people with tertiary degrees began a historic shift from right to left. People without degrees, fearing that globalisation was taking their jobs and destroying their way of life, began moving from left to right. By the turn of this century, unions had lost much of their power, the left's link to working people was largely broken and universities became the main source of left-wing ideas. Activists turned their focus away from economic inequality and towards inequities based on gender, sexuality and, above all, race – different forms of identity. Change on the left turbocharged change already happening on the right. Conservatives said the left's 'long march through the institutions' shut them out of universities and the kinds of workplaces where graduates get jobs. Having embraced human rights during the Cold War as a way to expose lack of freedom in the Soviet Union, conservatives now branded human rights as left-wing, while continuing to argue for rights, especially related to property and religious belief. Collapse under Trump This polarisation, exacerbated by the vengefulness and autocratic leanings of Trump's administration, has collapsed the middle ground where human rights can best be advanced. Trump's savage cuts to funding of the UN, which received more than a quarter of its budget from the US in 2023, has put the whole international architecture in peril. Nowhere is that ground more destroyed than in the global conflict over the Middle East war. Palestinians and their supporters cite findings by UN bodies such as its human rights council to argue that Israel is committing genocide. Supporters of Israel say the council and NGOs such as Amnesty have, long before the current war, weaponised the ideal of human rights to underpin their endemic bias against Israel. Loading That divide, long in the making, establishes the context for a report that race discrimination commissioner Giri Sivaraman will publish in October. Racism@Uni will be the first comprehensive examination of racism on Australian campuses, based in part on a large survey of students and staff. The Australia Universities Accord panel that proposed the report was initially keen to examine how racism was affecting Indigenous students, whose numbers doubled to 24,000 in the decade to 2021. But last year's eruption of campus protest against the war in Gaza changed the picture. Racism@Uni will now be an omnibus investigation of 'antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism', as well as racism against students from Asian, African, Pasifika and First Nations backgrounds. How the report defines racism will be crucial. The National Anti-Racism Framework seems to draw strongly on critical race theory, a set of ideas from American universities that sees racism as a form of power embedded in institutions and systems that exist to maintain 'white privilege'. Harassment of Jews on campus How, then, will Racism@Uni deal with the experience of Jewish students? The interim report is clear: they have experienced racism on campus. Yet critical race theory typically labels Jews as white and privileged, holding cultural power. Whiteness is a theme of the interim report, which documents non-white students' 'pervasive experience of being excluded from systems that maintain white privilege'. It quotes academics saying black people suffer the worst racism because they are 'furthest from the 'line of whiteness'.' In March, the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A), a network of several hundred academics and university staff, published a report on antisemitism in universities. Its co-author, Andrew Markus, is a long-standing researcher into racism and multiculturalism and spent years arguing in papers and speeches that antisemitism was not a big problem in Australia. He no longer believes that. The 5A study was based on an online survey answered by 548 students and staff members. They reported that in separate incidents, students spat on two Jewish students, one wearing a Star of David necklace. Protesters handed out brochures with the star superimposed on Hitler's face. A student witnessed Nazi salutes at a student council meeting. Activists entered a lecture and forced everyone to vote for or against Israel, then took a photo of the result. A staff member was told, 'Jews cause all the problems in the world. If the Arabs wiped them out, they would be doing the world a favour.' Nearly a third of respondents saw posters or fliers with Nazi imagery, and more than half material that legitimised Hamas. Many heard phrases such as 'F--- you, ZioNazi,', 'Zionist pig,' and 'How many babies have you killed today?' A girl walking past a student who she knew was Jewish, said, 'F--- the Jews' under her breath. There's a lot more of this and the effects are unsurprising. Nearly half of Jewish respondents went to fewer classes. One said, 'For the first time in my life, I was afraid to be Jewish.' Anti-Muslim prejudice What of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism on campus? The Islamophobia Register Australia, a national record of anti-Muslim bigotry, registered 15 incidents in 2023 and 2024. They include nine of abuse, a graffito praising Christchurch mosque killer Brenton Tarrant, and two assaults, one involving fireworks thrown into a pro-Palestine encampment. The register records hundreds of incidents elsewhere, usually against women and girls, and the number has risen dramatically since October 7, 2023. Most occur in shopping centres, car parks, on the road, on public transport and online, not at universities. It's not a competition, yet these figures raise questions for the Racism@Uni report. In the 5A survey, 84 per cent of Jewish students were very or somewhat concerned about antisemitism coming from the political left, and just 37 per cent from the right. But campus activists on the left call themselves 'anti-racist': they charge Israel with racist and settler-colonial practices, and Jewish students who feel a connection to Israel with condoning them. Will Racism@Uni address this impasse? What is its value if it does not? And can the AHRC establish itself as an impartial arbiter? At a session on racism in Australia chaired by Sivaraman at the commission's Free + Equal conference last year, one speaker, Sisonke Msimang, said the discussion needed to focus on what she described as the 'genocide' in Gaza, prompting thunderous applause. Under the AHRC's structure, de Kretser is not directly responsible for the report but he will approve it. Our last meeting, in a Sydney cafe, follows a summer marked by attacks on Jewish buildings in Australia, attacks that would resume in July. Is antisemitism, I ask him, the biggest human rights issue Australia faces today? 'I would say the impact of the war in the Middle East is the biggest issue,' he replies. 'Different communities are experiencing that in different ways. We're seeing childcare centres, synagogues burn. The fear in the Jewish community is palpable. For Muslim communities, there's prejudice that you're hostile to the country or are connected to terrorism. The perception of Islam as a religion that is negative to Australian values is pervasive in Islamophobia.' But, I say, hasn't he just created an equivalence between the two forms of prejudice? Long-term data suggest there is more hostility to Muslims in Australia than to Jews but, right now, surely the latter group is experiencing more incidents of hatred and violence? For a moment, de Kretser's calm leaves him. 'This is exactly the problem,' he says. 'We cannot get into a hierarchy of comparison, of saying, 'Who is experiencing this terrible thing worse?' 'I completely accept that antisemitism at the moment is far, far … it's terrifying. The Jewish community is experiencing prejudice and hatred from the extreme right and the extreme left – that is absolutely unique. The Muslim and Palestinian experience is different.' The 2018 Christchurch mosque massacre, he adds, demonstrates the risk of extreme anti-Muslim prejudice. 'When October 7 happened, and we saw people tooting and flying flags in Western Sydney, and people on the steps of the Opera House saying, 'Where's the Jews?' and 'F--- the Jews' – that is horrific. It brings back memories of Kristallnacht and 1930s Nazi Germany.' However, 'nor can we separate the historic context for Palestinians – the injustice of the occupation, and the impact on them of what is happening in international affairs, with the President of the United States saying we should turn Gaza into the Riviera, move two million people out of there and turn it into a real estate operation.' We need to embrace nuance, to walk in the middle where most Australians are, de Kretser tells me. Long after our conversation, though, I wondered about the link he made between events in Gaza and in Australia. Israel's occupation of the West Bank is indeed unjust, and the death toll and destruction in Gaza – albeit initiated in response to a barbaric massacre – are horrifying. But that does not justify the fact that many people are sliding from blaming the Israeli government to blaming Jews. The cause of human rights means opposing racism as a pure principle, not finding justifications for it in the conduct of the Israeli state, however brutal and merciless. Building bridges As AHRC president, de Kretser has tried to build trust with Jewish and Arab communities. He spoke at two parliamentary iftars, a meal that marks the end of Ramadan, while making a speech about antisemitism at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. And once again, he contrasted a different experience with his own life. At Yoorrook he had learnt about intergenerational trauma and how people had the right to express their identity, yet here were Australians, often descendants of Holocaust survivors, worried about their children wearing a kippah or a Star of David, or even whether it was safe for them to go to school. During our conversations, de Kretser reminded me of a point Michael Ignatieff made, speaking two months after October 7 with the destruction of Gaza in full swing. 'Human beings on both sides are dying and suffering unjustly – hold on to that with all your might,' Ignatieff said. He acknowledged a sympathy for Israel: he had many friends there. But the principle of human rights told him to not thoughtlessly embrace that allegiance: 'It leads you to a place where you do not want to be.' 'If people reject human rights because they're being shouted at, we all lose. We need to find common ground.' Hugh de Kretser In other words, don't think with the tribe. Relentlessly test your position against those who disagree. Try to get adversaries around the table, as the commission does in its conciliation process. It's hard work, but de Kretser seems to be up for it. 'If people reject human rights because they're being shouted at, we all lose. We need to find common ground and build empathy. I want the commission to do more of this.' Could Racism@Uni set out the rights and responsibilities of all students with a stake in the Middle East conflict, not as separate groups but in interaction with each other as Australians living in a democracy? When I put this to de Kretser, he says, 'Watch this space.' Loading De Kretser began his career as a human rights advocate determined to fight injustice and use his privilege for good. He came to his job wanting to push for a national Human Rights Act to protect legally the rights set out in the Universal Declaration. It's a goal that many Australians before him have tried and failed to achieve. But perhaps his task now is both more complex and more elemental: to help reimagine human rights for a world that has utterly changed since the 1948 declaration. A world that, if it is to survive, may need to shore up basic democratic principles: the idea that our rights come with responsibilities, compete with other rights and must be held in balance. Walking back to his Sydney office, de Kretser says with mild exasperation that we've talked for an hour about race but said nothing about disability discrimination, which comprises by far the largest number of complaints the AHRC is required to conciliate. Unable to drop the topic, though, I ask what he knows about critical race theory. 'Not much.' He mentions intersectionality and systemic racism. But in his office a moment later, he says: 'I hate academic jargon. I want to talk to ordinary people in ordinary language. If we don't, we will fail.' He hands me a booklet that contains the text of the UN's Universal Declaration. 'You don't really have an ideology,' I say. De Kretser doesn't so much speak as breathe his answer: 'Oh no, I'm an ideologue. I'm an ideologue for human rights.'
