Family Violence Prevention Legal Services
I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Noongar people, the traditional owners of the land where we meet today, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Noongar people, the traditional owners of the land where we meet today, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
I would like to begin by acknowledging and paying my respects to the Traditional Owners, the Wurundjeri people, and to pay my respect to their elders.
I am honoured to present this distinguished lecture, which has been established as a tribute to the contribution of Sir Wallace Kyle to Western Australian society.
It is a particular pleasure for me to have been invited here today to launch the City of Dandenong's Diversity Action Plan. Allow me a few moments to explain why.
On 30 March 2007 I was waxing lyrical to my computer screen in Sydney. My words were not quite the same, but they had equal passion and determination. At 1.40 a.m. on that Saturday morning Sydney time, I was having a few glasses of wine and watching Australia line up with 80 other countries at the United Nations (UN) in New York, to sign that same Convention on the first day it was open for signature—via podcast to my computer screen. It was Friday New York time.
This paper addresses one of the Forum themes: ‘Security and Human Rights’. Since 11 September 2001 governments around the world have responded to the threat of terrorism with tough measures to protect the lives and security of their communities – to protect their fundamental human rights. New security measures give government authorities unprecedented powers, which can seriously infringe the basic human rights of those against whom the powers are exercised.
Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to speak at this conference. I'm very pleased to be here. Firstly as a senior Commonwealth public servant not based in Canberra I immediately warm to this forum. The challenges of interacting with, and learning from, our colleagues are increased greatly by the fact that we aren't located in the city viewed by most commonwealth public servants as the centre of the universe.
Firstly I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we stand and by so doing remind ourselves that Australia's cultural traditions stretch back many thousands of years.
Allow me to start in the customary way. I would like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people who are the traditional custodians of the land we are meeting at. Thank you for your invitation.
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land upon which we meet, the Gadigal peoples of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to their elders, past, present and future.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to address you today and express my admiration to you all for taking on the very necessary venture of providing practical legal assistance to some of the most powerless and marginalised people in society.
It is a great pleasure to be speaking today with Judge Clifford Wallace. I had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions at Judges' conferences in the Pacific. I was very sorry to miss him when he was in Adelaide in 2003.
It would clearly test to destruction the tolerance of the ordinary red-blooded Australian to have a Pom getting off the plane from London and telling them how to run their country. So I shall not presume to say how the current human rights debate in this country should be resolved. But perhaps I may contribute some thoughts, prompted by our own experience in the United Kingdom, acknowledging as I do so that the Australian context, while in some ways similar, is in others significantly different.
My thanks to the Human Rights Law Resource Centre, in particular to Phil Lynch, for inviting me to address this important gathering of human rights advocates and supporters about what I consider vital for the implementation and promotion of human rights in Australia.
Before I speak about agreement making on Indigenous lands, let me acknowledge the Larrakia people on whose land we are today. The Larrakia are the neighbours of my people the Kungarakan whose country borders the Larrakia to the south west of Darwin.
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