A bill introduced by New South Wales Greens MLC Jenny Leong to codify human rights, which is supported by scores of organisations and legal heavyweights, has been decried as “fundamentally flawed” by the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney. Source: Catholic Weekly.
Public hearings on the Human Rights Bill 2025 were held across three days in early November.
Supporters of the notion of a bill of rights claim that “the people of NSW live with some of the weakest human rights protections anywhere in the Western democratic world”. The ACT, Victoria, and Queensland have had human rights acts for several years.
“These laws have been delivering very tangible benefits to residents for decades,” according to the Human Rights Act for NSW Alliance.
The bill would guarantee about 40 human rights, including the right to culture, the right to health, the right to work, the right to social security, and the right to a healthy environment. It would even guarantee the “right to life” – but only after birth.
A submission by the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney on behalf of Catholic Bishops of NSW and the Bishops of the Australasian-Middle East Christian Apostolic Churches argued that Ms Leong’s bill is “fundamentally flawed”.
“Far from strengthening the established democratic processes in NSW, the introduction of a charter of rights would be destabilising, shifting contested questions of public policy from the legislature towards the judiciary, commissions and bureaucracies, providing uncertainty in their interpretation and application,” it said.
The archdiocese pointed out that a bill of rights failed miserably in Victoria and the ACT when it was put to the test.
Restrictions on Victorians during COVID “were amongst the most severe and long-lasting in the world”. “This experience demonstrates that a legislated charter of rights did not prevent highly coercive measures from being imposed on vulnerable communities,” the submission pointed out.
And the ACT government forced through the compulsory acquisition of Calvary Hospital without consultation. “The existence of a human rights act did not prevent the government from using legislation to compulsorily acquire a Catholic institution, its land, staff and assets,” it observed.
Among other problematic areas, the archdiocese’s submission pointed out that the underlying philosophy of the bill will fail to protect freedom of thought, conscience and religion, will undermine parental rights, will not recognise the unborn as human individuals, and would fail to protect religious institutions.
Freedom for Faith, a Christian legal think tank representing a number of Christian denominations, also attacked the bill as “deficient in both its conception and operation”.
The Australian Christian Lobby said NSW does not require a broad statutory Human Rights Act to strengthen the protection of fundamental rights and that “where genuine gaps exist, Parliament should address them directly through targeted legislative reform”.
FULL STORY
Proposed NSW human rights bill could endanger religious freedom, critics warn (By Michael Cook, The Catholic Weekly)
