Drowning in compassion

THE intellectually lazy human-rights industry won't confront the hard questions.

OPPOSITION immigration spokesman Scott Morrison got it right when he said the tragedy that occurred last week off Christmas Island was "not a day for policy discussion".

A week later, that same tragedy, which so cruelly cut short an unknown number of lives, raises a very real need for a more honest policy discussion about asylum-seekers and border protection than we have had to date under the Gillard government.

In fact, this heart-wrenching human catastrophe is a symbol of a tough conversation we need to have about human rights in general. That would be a conversation about sustainable human rights. After all, it's been a big year for sustainability.

A sustainable Australia, not a Big Australia. A sustainable Murray-Darling Basin. Sustainable environmental policies. Sustainability everywhere. Except in one area where sustainability is most sorely needed. Rarely do we talk seriously about sustainable human rights.

Recently, that human-rights poster boy, Julian Burnside, popped up on the front cover of a glossy magazine extolling the virtues of being a human-rights "do-gooder" and wondering aloud "what's wrong with doing good".

In fact, there is plenty wrong with "doing good" if all it means is offering up syrupy, feel-good rhetoric about human rights. Indeed, the tragic events of last week expose the egregious and positively dangerous intellectual laziness that defines the modern human-rights movement.

Full of sweet nothings about human rights and social justice, Burnside represents the high priesthood of a growing brigade of human-rights activists whose eagerness to pull at the heart strings sits in stark contrast to their indolence when it comes to doing the hard intellectual yards.

In other words, they are too lazy or simply incapable of imagining there might be meaningful - and yes, even compassionate - limits on human rights.

This growing cohort of good time human-rights boys and girls treat any talk about human rights, regardless of the issue, as all upside and no downside. Captive to a kind of moral solipsism, so many members of the modern human-rights movement cannot conceive that other views apart from their own exist, or if they do exist, are worthy of debate. So, they don't bother with debates. Moral posturing is so much easier, and alluring to unthinking followers.

If Burnside is the misguided glamour boy for asylum-seekers, then Jemima Khan is the equally misguided glamour girl for some kind wrong-headed unlimited right to information.

When Khan appeared in the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court last week court to support WikiLeak's Julian Assange because she believes "in the principle of the human right to freedom of information and our right to be told the truth", she was uttering the kind of mindless rhetoric that, once again, defines the human-rights industry.

And I say that as someone on the record as a staunch defender of free speech. Even here there are always limits if you stop to think about it.

That's the problem of course. Most human-rights activists don't think enough.

Whether we're talking about those fighting to defend Assange and the simplistic claim for an unassailable right to information or the rights of boatpeople to unfettered asylum, too many human-rights advocates suffer one central problem.

They are exemplars of the human rights as absolute, unconditional, unqualified, inherent rights-of-man school.

For them, a human right can be stated shortly, simply and without any qualifiers. A right to information. A right to asylum. No ifs, no buts. End of discussion.

This foundation of the human-rights movement may sound grand but it is fundamentally unsound. The Greens garner more support than they deserve because emotional arguments so often trump reason. At least, until you start to reason.

As Michael Costa wrote recently in the Australian Literary Review, "Labor will never be able to match the Greens in a rhetorical battle on so-called social justice." The task of thinking Australians, be they politicians, political pundits or punters from middle Australia, is then surely to reason the Greens out of relevance.

And it's not a hard task.

Simple logic says there is no such thing as an absolute or unqualified human right. If such a thing existed, then the best candidate for such human-right sainthood would surely be the right to life. And we know that even that most basic right is hedged by laws and other restrictions devised by those elected to govern us.

Alas, we cannot even agree on when life begins. At birth or conception or somewhere in between? And then there are the laws of self-defence. And the laws of war.

The right to life is everywhere limited, qualified and explained by parliament and laws. Ditto the right to free speech, which is regularly fenced in by laws set down by parliament.

Laws create limits about defamatory speech, incitement to violence and national security.

So the prima donnas who damn parliamentary or executive attempts to regulate refugee flows with saccharine one-liners about the immutable rights of man are practising one heck of a deception. Theirs is an unworkable, unsustainable utopian world where no hard decisions need be made.

The same applies to a whole host of emotionally laden claims about human rights, whether it's about the right to access information, the right to housing or free university education or the right to asylum.

Pick just about any right and reason demands a legitimate debate about where one draws the line, places limits and qualifies that right.

By all means, argue about where to draw the line, but you can't sensibly argue parliament doesn't need to set some limits.

Claims, for example, to open the borders, to let the boats arrive, to put out the red carpet for desperate asylum-seekers cry out for a dose of the balancing act demanded by real sustainability.

A balance between the short term and the long term, between idealism and pragmatism, between emotion and reason, between social and financial factors. And so on.

Ever hear a peep, let alone a squeak, from the Greens, or human-rights activists or members of the Labor Party's hard left about such matters?

Sustainable human rights - in other words, ones that work and last - require all sorts of difficult trade-offs.

Rights that are compassionate but not open-ended. Rights that relieve distress but are not economically ruinous. Rights that maximise freedoms but protect national security, our troops and the need for frank and private diplomatic exchanges.

Straightforward intellectual rigour demands such trade-offs.

On that note, have yourself a sustainable and very merry Christmas.

janeta@bigpond.net.au