Human Rights in Australia

Human Rights in Australia have largely been developed under Australian Parliamentary democracy, and safeguarded by such institutions as the Australian Human Rights Commission and an independent judiciary and High Court who apply the Common Law, the Australian Constitution and various other laws of Australia and its states and territories. Universal voting rights and rights to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion and freedom from discrimination are protected in Australia. As a founding member of the United Nations, Australia assisted in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is signatory to various other international treaties on the subject of Human Rights.

Contemporary Australia is a liberal democracy and heir to a large post-World War II multicultural programme of immigration in which forms of racial discrimination have been prohibited. As a former British Colony, Australia's historical approach to Human Rights has been subject to the inheritance of its Colonial past - thus notions of the rights and processes established by the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689 were brought to Australia by British colonists, but so was the European legal precept of Terra Nullius (overturned in 1992) by which Indigenous Australians were initially dispossessed without treaty nor compensation. By the 1850s, Australia had become a laboratory for Western democracy: Australian colonies were among the first political entities in the world to grant male (1850s) and female suffrage (1890s) and old age pensions and a minimum wage were established around the turn of the century. Capital punishment in Australia has been formally abolished. Vestigial laws discriminating against Aboriginal Australians were eradicated in the 1960s, and major recognitions of injustice towards Aboriginal Australia have been offered by Australian governments and courts throughout recent decades. The situation in regards to LGBT rights also continues to improve in Australia