Law degree at the University of Sydney.


I have to confess in those days I had no burning desire to become a lawyer. I was interested in law but there was no long-term strategic plan. In those days human rights wasn’t really on the legal radar. When I went to law school at Sydney University, human rights was not one of the core subjects. I did study a few optional subjects that were related to it because I was always interested in human rights but I had no detailed training, not like students receive today. This was in 1969, long before Australia became a party to many of the human rights treaties it has since signed.


“A BILL OF RIGHTS WOULD REPRESENT A HUGE STEP FORWARD BUT REMEMBER THAT WORDS ON PAPER ONLY GO SO FAR; WHAT IS REALLY NEEDED IS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE WORDS IN A PROPER AND REASONABLE FASHION. THE WAY TO ENSURE THAT IS EDUCATION.”


After I fi nished the Arts/Law degree at Sydney University, I travelled to London to complete my Masters, in which I specialised in international law but, again, not human rights. In those days I thought ‘what’s the point?’ I could have studied human rights with Professor Rosalyn Higgins, now Dame Rosalyn Higgins, who became the president of the International Court of Justice and a judge on the European Court of Human Rights. But in all the arrogance of youth I thought ‘well I don’t really want to study human rights; I want to do something a bit more substantive’.


I studied what is now classed as


international humanitarian law— laws of war.


It wasn’t until much later that I became interested in human rights, particularly when I came back to Queensland after completing my Masters. At that time I was probably the most highly educated but totally unemployable person in the country because I didn’t have any practical qualifi cations. So I started the College of Law course in Sydney to get my practicing qualifi cation. In the meantime, because I was thinking of an academic career, I won a lectureship teaching in Melbourne and so I switched from the College of Law course to the Bar admissions course, which was shorter, and became admitted as a barrister in New South Wales.


The big turning point came in 1978 when what was then the QIT set up a law school. I applied for a lectureship and was successful. I moved to Queensland where I remained for 26 years.


This move also coincided with the days of Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson. This period of time opened my eyes to areas of the law including human rights and civil liberties. That was the real start for me: moving to Queensland and seeing how much needed to be improved and how it might be improved. There was a lot of discrimination and one of the issues that arose in the early 80s was HIV and AIDS. There was a major federal scheme to inject money into health services and to educate people, but what the Bjelke-Peterson government had said was that, when it received this Federal money, it was going to use it solely for contact tracing—not for education, not for medication, not for research, but to contact trace. In other words it was going to be a witch-hunt against homosexuals. In order to use the money properly a trust was set up to which the then federal government gave the money and the trust then applied the federal funding for the proper purposes. I was appointed one of the trustees to oversee the distribution of this funding. That’s where I really got my start with respect to human rights.


It was also during this time the federal government passed the Racial Discrimination Act and then the Sex Discrimination Act, and the federal Human Rights Commission was set up.


The Commission had a small offi ce in Brisbane and by this stage I was very interested in and committed to trying to do something, so I wrote to this offi ce and said ‘I’m an academic at QIT and I am happy come up one day a week to do any anything that I can to help you’. The then manager of that offi ce, a woman named Joan Ross, wrote back and said ‘we’d be very happy if you could come up’. It happened that Joan had just resigned and the day I started was the day that the new offi ce manager started and her name was Quentin Bryce (Australia’s current Governor- General).


Quentin and I started at that offi ce the same day and I worked with her for many years in that capacity. To tell you how things have changed, when I started at the Commission I used to go every Friday to do the legal work as they didn’t have a full-time lawyer—I was their only lawyer for several years. I did all the legal work for that offi ce in one day a week which sounds quite incredible now because they have a couple of full-time lawyers on the staff of what is now the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Commission. It was a tremendous opportunity for me because I was learning on the job and I became the Queensland expert in the fi eld.


What sustained your interest in human rights and encouraged you to pursue it as a career in the law?


There are two aspects to this: general and specifi c. In general terms, moving to Queensland and seeing the lack of civil liberties that existed during that time and thinking ‘there’s got to be a better way than this’.


From a personal perspective I am a child of immigrants and so in that regard I’ve always felt growing up that I was ‘other’—having a funny name and having to spell it all the time in the days before Australia was as multicultural as it is now. Also growing up as a gay man, feeling that you’re on the fringes of society, it made me appreciate that the law can be a very eff ective


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