Just who do rights serve?

In Australia there's a debate about bringing in a bill of rights. Opponents argue that a bill of rights would undermine the ability of parliament to pass laws in the national interest and transfer power instead to unelected judges.

Here's some very strong evidence that this is a valid concern. Australia is currently experiencing a mining boom. There's a particularly strong demand for our mineral resources in China. But the Chinese aren't content just to buy the minerals. The Chinese want the mines (and the farms) and are now even wanting to replace local Australian workers with Chinese ones:

HUNDREDS of Chinese contract workers will be brought to Queensland by mining boss Clive Palmer.

Mr Palmer revealed yesterday that up to 10 per cent of the construction workforce for his planned $8 billion coal development in the Galilee Basin of central-west Queensland would come from China. This fly-in contingent would number up to 600, many of them engineers.

The proposed coalmine, a 500km railway and port are being pursued by Mr Palmer in conjunction with the Metallurgical Corporation of China.

He said yesterday MCC would be the main contractor on the project, with three of its government-owned subsidiaries each having responsibility for the mine, the railway and the port. Each would sub-contract to Australian firms, Mr Palmer said, and he expected about 60 per cent of the work to go to foreign companies and 40 per cent to Australian companies.

MCC is also building Mr Palmer's $5.2bn Sino Iron project in Western Australia, and the magnate said the 60-40 division of operations on that project would be replicated in Queensland.

But Mr Palmer told a Brisbane press conference yesterday he expected about 10 per cent of the workforce on the ground in his Queensland project would be Chinese workers.

"In Western Australia, in our projects there, we've had something like 10 per cent who are Chinese people on site," he said.

"We've had 7000 workers, we've had about seven or eight hundred Chinese engineers who are directing the work. It would probably work out something like that" in Queensland. The three parts of the project are expected to generate 6000 jobs during construction and 1500 jobs when fully operational. A spokesman for Mr Palmer said after the press conference that much of the work would be prefabricated overseas.

Mr Palmer, the biggest political donor in Australia and an active member of Queensland's Liberal National Party, said the only hurdle to the project going ahead was the Queensland Labor government's approvals process.

What does the generally right-liberal Australian newspaper think of all this? It blames, wait for it .... low migration levels!:

We report today that Queensland mining boss Clive Palmer expects to bring in about 600 Chinese engineers to build his new $8 billion coal project in the Galilee Basin ... Low migration and tight labour laws have created the perfect storm ... Labor added to workplace rigidity and costs with retrograde industrial laws before adopting a "small Australia" approach to migration...

C'mon guys. Immigration is being run at massive levels, about 250,000 a year. You can't blame "low migration" for the Chinese bringing in their own workers to run things.

Anyway, it gets worse. David Marr is an old-style Australian left-liberal journalist, one of the "luvvies" as they are sometimes called. He gave the official human rights oration this year.

It's a curious thing, but the speech he delivered differs in one respect from that reported in the papers. What was reported in the papers includes a line that was left out of the official transcript. I'm guessing that he provided a transcript to the papers but then had second thoughts about this particular line and left it out.

And I'm not surprised he left it out. Because in the newspaper version of the speech, Marr complains that:

In 2010 there is nothing in law to stop Western Australia closing its iron mines to Chinese workers.

So David Marr, a left-liberal luvvy, thinks we need a bill of rights so that the Chinese Government gets to determine who works in our mines rather than our government. He wants to deprive our parliaments of the power to determine migration policy.

It's an attempt to lock in a liberal, individualistic, internationalist view of how things should be, to effectively place it beyond political contest. No doubt Clive Palmer and other mining bosses will be pleased, as will the Chinese Government. Human rights legislation will serve some very powerful interest groups seeking material gain, rather than ordinary Australians.

We should be wary of those pushing the rights agenda.