Kevin Rudd had the groundwork, the evidence and the political moment for a Human Rights Act – and still walked away. Anthony Albanese now has the same opportunity, and no obvious excuse not to take it.

My guess is that the political hardheads around Anthony Albanese’s Cabinet table (who of course double as Labor’s factional leaders) see a national Human Rights Act only as an opportunity to lose votes.

Labor’s thumping election majority has not been diminished in the nine months since it was achieved. The threat of the next Coalition campaign scare is still safely away in the distant future. Now is about the time, as former NSW Premier Nick Greiner nominated, that one does all the unpalatable, but right, things when one is in power.

But the Albanese team seems intent on window-dressing rather than making the effort to properly sell what is fine product – one it can claim as its own.

Window-dressing? How else to view Mark Dreyfus’s consolation prize after being dumped by aforesaid factional deadheads from the ministry. Dreyfus, KC, has been appointed our special envoy on human rights to take, in the PM and Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s words, “a special advocacy role” on various issues “on which Australia has a long record of international leadership”. So, we’ll tell others what they should do, but do effectively nought here at home?

Not only is the timing right, but all the spadework has been done, too.

A parliamentary committee report on ‘Australia’s Human Rights Framework’ was tabled in May 2024. Twenty-one months later, there has still been no formal government response. A No Rights Without Remedy Model, developed by the Australian Human Rights Commission has been incorporated in a draft Act and endorsed by the 2024 parliamentary committee.

Albanese has indicated that the idea needs bipartisan support for him to entertain it. Civil Liberties Australia chief executive Bill Rowlings has argued comprehensively how the proposed model truly satisfies Menzean ideology.

So, PM, what’s the hold-up?

Many have written of this government’s timidity and expressed exasperation at a supposedly progressive party, led by a leading Left faction player, with an unchallengeable majority, being over-cautious – to a fault.

Maybe we should not have expected any better.

In October 2005, former federal Labor minister Susan Ryan, Law Professor Spencer Zifcak and Pearls and Irritations founder John Menadue were among the leaders of the launch at Sydney Town Hall of a campaign for a Human Rights Act for Australia. Several hundred people gathered to hear former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser launch the campaign.

As a result, a draft Human Rights Bill 2009 was developed, but only after, as John noted in Politics (Pearls and Irritations wasn’t founded until 2013) a voluntary committee sponsored further public meetings to discuss the model Bill and its purposes in all capital cities, many regional centres, small towns and suburbs. Discussions were held with dozens of groups representing churches, legal bodies, refugee advocates and a range of welfare bodies.

Before the elevation of Kevin Rudd to the prime ministership, the committee had conducted over 60 face-to-face meetings with federal parliamentarians, across all parties.

“Our experiences over nearly four years of this community conversation have reinforced our belief that Australia, to protect rights effectively, must have a specific law such as we propose,” John wrote.

“Mistreatment of the mentally ill, discrimination of many kinds against the disabled, the lack of dignity in the treatment of many of our vulnerable old people, and the appalling disadvantages suffered by Indigenous Australians, all these realities cry out for stronger legal recognition and protection of human rights. People understand this.”

The model statute was written by Professor Zifcak with detailed comments from experts in the field, including Julian Burnside, QC; Professor Hilary Charlesworth, then of the ANU, but now of course a judge of the International Criminal Court; Helen Watchirs, the then ACT Human Rights Commissioner (the ACT has had a Human Rights Act since 2004); and Professor George Williams (UNSW).

The model statute was altered in response to almost 200 submissions.

The similarities between 2009 and 2026 are eery.

Labor is ensconced in power with a popular leader. Then it was Rudd, achieving near record ratings in the wake of his handling of the Global Financial Crisis.

PM Rudd had before him a thorough, evidence-based campaign, supported by a team of true heavyweights of Australian public policy.

You might have thought it would be a neat quadrella of events showing his active departure from the Howard administration. There had been the Apology to the Stolen Generations, the immediate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and the GFC response. Surely a domestic Human Rights Act would have been a lay-down misere?

But, as then Attorney-General Robert McClelland let slip, it wouldn’t be happening as long as News Ltd was opposed. Ultimately, Labor simply lacked the political will. Of course, inside 12 months, Rudd went from being the can-do man with the 67 per cent preferred-PM rating to being the first Labor PM ever to be denied a shot at re-election, a victim of what his internal opponents labelled his inability to properly govern, with submissions stalled in Cabinet for up to four months while Rudd worried about appearances (and appearances only) in the next day’s media.

Fast forward 17 years. Labor is ensconced with a popular leader, who has been presented with a model statute ready to roll, after another committee report, this time a parliamentary one.

Arguably he has not achieved as much as Rudd did in a shorter time. Could that be a spur? The “hard Left” lifetime party warrior (always in the “out” faction in his home state of NSW) getting one over “Heavy Kevvy”, the folksy “fiscal-conservative” ’07 election winner brought to you by Queensland’s Old Guard, supported by the fossilised “Shoppies” (the right-wing Shop, Distributive and Allied Trades Union).

The motivation matters not. We’re now entering Nike syndrome, PM.

Just do it!