More rights scepticism

Benjamin Jellis' Sinking the Boat to Save it (a shorter version appeared in the Australian) joins the growing list of negative commentary on the Victorian Charter of Rights. It's a mostly careful piece whose central question-begging premises appear at the end:

"In our society, rights are protected by the representative nature of the parliament and the independence of the courts. It is a sorry shame, that in the name of rights, both will unnecessarily weakened."

There are really good questions in there, including the familiar ones about the effectiveness of parliaments in protecting rights and the impact of judicial review of rights instruments on judicial independence. The answers do seem to depend an awful lot on the details of political practice and on the political and legal cultures that grow up around rights instruments. Perhaps the proper stance is Charter-agnosticism, at least for a little while yet?