The “Complaint-Based Citizen”: Reactive recognition ≠ rights. Anti-Discrimination Law and the Neoliberalisation of Human Rights in Australia

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Social Sciences in the 21st Century

Year: 2026

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The “Complaint-Based Citizen”: Reactive recognition ≠ rights. Anti-Discrimination Law and the Neoliberalisation of Human Rights in Australia

Jessica Shulman

ABSTRACT:

Australia is the only Western liberal democracy without a national bill or charter of rights. This absence is not merely constitutional; it shapes the everyday experience of rights in Australia. In place of a universal human rights doctrine, Australia relies on a fragmented architecture of sparse constitutional protections, parliamentary scrutiny, administrative law, and anti-discrimination statutes. This paper argues that anti-discrimination law has become one of Australia’s principal substitutes for a national rights framework, but that this substitute individualises and neoliberalises human rights by rendering protections reactive rather than presumed, prospective and enforceable. Rather than imposing a general positive duty on the state and powerful institutions to secure equality, dignity and safety, Australian anti-discrimination law requires individuals to identify, translate, evidence and pursue rights violations through complaint. It produces what this paper calls the “complaint-based citizen”: a legal subject who is formally rights-bearing but practically responsibilised for enforcing those rights. The escalation of antisemitic incidents in Australia after 7 October 2023, culminating in the 2025 Bondi Beach terrorist attack and subsequent Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, extends this argument from the individual to the collective level. It demonstrates that Australia can recognise minority vulnerability after spectacular violence, but lacks a universal rights doctrine capable of converting documented and foreseeable group-based harm into ordinary, prospective and enforceable public duties before catastrophe occurs.

Keywords: Anti-Discrimination; Antisemitism; Australia; Human Rights; Law; Neoliberalism; Reactive Recognition