I had an “appointment” in my work calendar that I had completely forgotten about until about 10 minutes prior. It was an entry for only 5 minutes and I had to get to the HR floor for this. It’s time for another flu shot.

It was only 8deg this morning when I left home, and I had to put on a jumper – albeit not my much loved woollies, which would no doubt be needed before too long. Last night too, as Tress and I sat on the couch and watched tele – we both felt a little cool and I had to go put on my jeans and that same jumper. Shorts and t-shirt days are numbered, as days shorten and the temperatures slowly descend.

I think in some ways Tress and I have both moved a little – she is no longer embracing stinking hot days and I no longer look forward to cold ones. But I may be wrong, and old habits may prove difficult to perish and may well make their ways out again soon.

On Saturday morning too, it was a bit cool. I was still clinging on to a shorts only attire though. We went yum cha with the Hipos and Chews, to farewell Hipos’ mum. After that I had wanted to do some gardening but the skies continued to threaten opening up. Tress and I had walked up our street to a property auction when we got home from yum cha and it had started to rain a little then. So we pottered around and didn’t do much.

We went and watched George Clooney’s “Monuments Men” that night, and later that night watched Mourinho’s Chelsea maul Arsene on his 1000th game.

Sunday was the usual with church and lunch thereafter at Madam K’s. We then went home and I finally got to do some gardening. We continued trimming the old lemon tree at the back corner, and I mowed and edged the lawn, before taking LBJ for a walk. Still when it was all done, it was only about 4pm. The Bolt Report came on, and we just continued along a languid, restful weekend. It had been a terribly busy and trying week so this restful weekend was much welcomed.

I think the best part of the weekend wasn’t that it was uneventful and therefore relaxing, but that we no longer expected anything exciting or “meaningful”. I was just happy to sail along and not worry (too much) about not having anything on/happening. I was at rest in more sense than one I guess.

I first met Laurence in 1993 (I think), when the clubhouse was still near the old Jaya Supermarket. I cannot remember the address now. I remember signing up as a member with great excitement, United having just won the league after a 26 year drought. He was relaxed, in his shorts and t-shirt (as always) and wary about another glory hunter. When we next met and he discovered my favourite player was Dennis Irwin, I think he started to see me differently.

After some continued success, Peter Kenyon became the CEO of United PLC. Wanting to build the Asian following, he withdrew the official supporters club status from Laurence and us. Laurence then asked me to write a few letters to PK, which I did. One thing lead to another and soon we became friends (Laurence and I, not with PK!).

Our friendship didn’t have a lot of opportunities to develop but we did travel to Barcelona to watch that glorious triumph over Bayern. We (there were about 6 of us) walked back from Nou Camp that night, stopping for champagne before reaching our hotel at the wee hours of the morning – tired, drenched and deliriously happy.

After that we made more trips – to Bangkok, Old Trafford, Singapore – all to watch our beloved United. His passion equalled that seen in Carrington or Old Trafford and the great Cantona himself commended Laurence and the club for his and its passion. As did Sir Alex himself. It was a wonderful time. Men who would otherwise have little in common,, found fellowship and camaraderie in a love for a football club. The club and the game may be a few thousand miles away but we recognise skill, passion, commitment and athletic wonder as universal traits that transcend geographical and cultural bounds. The common love for these traits galvanised men in the tropics sipping beer on humid nights across on the other side of the world. Laurence lead these men. His passion was recognised and celebrated and gathered a following. Those fortunate enough to share in his passion discovered friendship, loyalty and simplicity of love for a football code.

Through his passion we came into contact with our heroes. Who in our right mind would have dreamed of being in the same small room (that is the clubhouse) with the likes of George Best, Bobby Charlton, Dennis Law, Eric Cantona, and Bryan Robson? Many of us did. We spoke to them. Took pictures with them. Shared a beer with them. All made possible because of the passion of one man. Laurence How, you were only 67. A youthful 67 (although you would say your knees feel 76). You were sending emails to the supporters’ mailing list just a few days earlier. It was an absolute pleasure to have known you. I will miss you. I am sorry I never got to talk to you about Jesus. I hope you knew him and his saving grace. May you rest in peace.

It was uncomfortable. Then there was an itch on my nose, which I couldn’t scratch. Those hands were in the way. They have been the cause of the discomfort for a while now – over an hour. They were pressing into my face. They held tools which they shoved in and out of my mouth as they violated tooth after tooth. Occasionally more hands would press down as the first pair exerted more pressure in their acts of violating my teeth.

As I sat there for close to 2 hours I knew my life would never be the same again. 14 March. One month short of my daughter’s 20^th birthday. Barely 49 years old and a 2 hour assault which would forever change who I am. Or would it?

Truth be told, the assault began nearly 10 years earlier. For one reason or another they were all fighting a battle to get out. A battle that could only be detected by time lapsed photography – a battle which creeps up on you slowly but ever so surely. Slowly, the fatal blow lands on one after another. Often, days (sometimes weeks) of throbbing pain precedes a death. Then when death comes the pain stops. And it is no more. Life needs to go on however and so a prosthetic is put in place. A prosthetic had for its purpose largely cosmetic, and only a little bit functional.

Ten years on the carnage is complete. The tomb is whitewashed. One can adjust to prosthetics but life has irretrievably changed. Physically and to a large extent in many other respects it is adverse change. Coping and adjusting to prosthetics is a first step not unlike a baby learning how to walk perhaps.  Maybe that’s just life. One adjusts and copes with changes at all turns. Some are harder than others and some are more far reaching than others. But everyone encounters events which require adjustments and coping.

This carnage though, would take a long time to come to terms with. If at all.

The “fish bowl” I work in is a section cordoned off by floor to ceiling glass panes. It houses procurement, client services, strategy and legal. It has maybe up to 25 people.

Last Friday someone organised for everyone in the fish bowl to have a drink after work. It was the first time the fish bowl inhabitants did this. I was there for just under an hour, and then left for home. Tress picked me up from the station, having gone home early on one of those monthly early Fridays at her workplace.

Later that night we had Jason and Mel over for some wine and chit chat. They left relatively early and we went to bed shortly after.

Saturday morning after a quick dry cleaning run we went to Cranbourne to visit the royal botanical gardens. Auntie Hooi have been raving about the place for a while so we organised for a few families to meet there. The Hipos’ had one of their 2 little angels down sick with food poisoning so they skipped it last minute and Alex’s family was swamped with their usual sporting activities so it was just Jason and Mel, Hooi and Marloney and Tress and I.

Tress and I arrived earliest and we picked a spot for lunch. Tress has been mastering and refining a salad which was great for the day. Later the other 2 couples arrived and there was even more to eat and after lunch we wandered through the gardens, which were faithful representations of native flora. We only left the place close to 5, made our way home, walked LBJ and then just hung around and watched tele, ending with a match between United and WBA, which United won comfortably (for a change). I had donned the “”Pure Genius” t shirt the whole day (produced after the 1999 treble) so it was a fitting end to the day.

Sunday after church we met up with the Hipos, Chews and Jackie for a farewell lunch to Madam Hipo senior – Jessie. She would be leaving to return to Singapore in a couple of weeks. We met up at Glen Waverley. Strange how after months of not coming to Glen Waverley, Tress and I found ourselves there 2 days in a row. We had stopped there on our way home from Cranbourne the day before for some groceries.

After lunch we adjourned to The Glen for some coffee, where we caught up with Mark, Jackie’s boy who’s now in Monash studying medicine. We stayed for about an hour then Tress and I left to go to Eltham to pick up an ear wash for LBJ. We stopped at Montsalvat for a glimpse of the famous building, then went home, to veg out the remainder of the day.\

Monday was a public holiday so Tress and I spent the better part of the day cleaning up the garden. It was a warm day and after a few hours I was soaked in sweat and caked up with the dust thrown up by the mower on a hot and dry day. We finished up close to 2pm, then watched “The Butler” off iTunes, before meeting up with the same group from the day before, for dinner and also at the same place! We finished just after 8.30, went home, and started preparing for the new working week. We had been exchanging FB messages with Kiddo the afternoon and it was good to hear the work she was hoping to complete had been completed.

So we had a terrific long weekend, with loads of time with friends, lots of food and visiting parts of greater Melbourne we hadn’t been to before.

I was in Adelaide last Thursday and Friday for the Law Council conference. There was a pre-conference drinks session on Wednesday night but I wasn’t going to spend an extra night away from home just for an hour of hobnobbing with other lawyers I hardly know and unlikely to meet or have anything to do with for the most part. So I just left early on Thursday morning – leaving home at 5.30am – to catch an early flight to arrive just on 8.30am for the first talk.

The first morning was enormously boring – it was laden with detailed discussion of the development of trustees duties in the context of legislative expansion in that area. 2 current judges – one each from South Australia and NSW – 1 ex-judge from NSW (who was also my lecturer in UNSW) and a senior QC right through the morning made it heavy going and sadly, switched me off the rest of the conference.

Anyway I ploughed on and tried to take it all in and at the end of the first day was ready to look at some emails and do some work when the boss rang to ask if I wanted to have a drink with him. He too had switched off but out of necessity as the office had been hounding him. When I caught up with him at the lobby of the hotel, he looked drained. We walked a couple of blocks to a bar. We had that drink but he looked like he just wanted to get away from his laptop and have a drink and chat to someone.

There was a dinner that night for the conference delegates so we left the bar and walked to the dinner venue. It the food was a bit ordinary the wine was nice but there was the next day – another full day of talks – to work through.

I finally left Adelaide at 6pm, got home around 8.30 and felt relieved to be home again. Tress fixed a very nice dinner for me and it was good to be home again.

I no longer enjoy travel for work.

We didn’t do much over the weekend – just a lot of cleaning. The house hasn’t been vacuumed for a while so I got on with that. Scruffi’s groomer called on us, so he got clipped and washed too. Tress did a truckload of laundry including all the sheets so at the end of Saturday, the house felt clean and I was able to really relax. We had gone to Madam Kwong’s for lunch so we weren’t going to have a proper dinner. We’d also rented a promising movie (Gravity) from iTune so we just settled down on Saturday night to enjoy that.

 

Overnight there was an entry in Kiddo’s blog. Tress wondered how she was doing and I said I thought it was a reflection of her thoughts and also possibly a self-admonition exercise. There are too many “look good, feel good” programs (and dare I say it, mainly in Universities or amongst so called intellectual circles) and too few outcomes based actions. I said I thought I wasn’t particularly concerned with what she has written as it didn’t sound like a negative experience, intensity of angst notwithstanding.

It was an unusual way to end the week – Tress and I took the little fellow to the vet on Friday night, to get his ears looked at. While there the vet followed up on his eye condition as well and it ended up a lengthy visit and with not an un-hefty bill to boot! We came away with a bagful of medication with promise of more to come. Sigh… in as much as the bill was painful, it was more painful to know the little fellow had challenging issues with his eye (right one) as well as his ears.

The next morning, after attending a men’s breakfast in church (with Jordan Hitchcock sharing), we went to a new dentist in Balwyn to get a plan for the myriads of problems I have had building up for a long time. It was nearly noon by the time we left Balwyn so it had been nearly 5 hours of not-fun activities.

After lunch and a quick grocery shopping and laundry drops, it was the optometrist’ turn to poke around and squeeze some moolah. Tress and I have both been experiencing vision challenges when it comes to reading on screen as well as print so we went to have it checked out. It took a lot longer than we expected and by the time it was done, the whole day had been taken up and we went home, did about an hour plus of gardening and then settled down to finally have a rest.

After church the next day we went to see Uncle Jin again, at the Western Hospital in Footscray. He looked very tired and after a couple of hours as we drove away headed for home, Tress and ached for him and Auntie Pin. We wondered what we could do to make it a bit easier for him and for them but we didn’t have any answer.

So it was a weekend that started, ended and interspersed with visits to healthcare service providers. From a little dog to a dear uncle, and I guess you can say I really got my teeth into this and we had eye-balled health issues the whole of this weekend.

Kiddo’s on a plane now heading to Hong Kong. After a few hours in transit she would then continue on her journey towards New York, where she’d spend the next 10 days or so in Princeton University.

It would no doubt be an exciting time for her and the rest of the team who are there for a forum on third world development or something like that.

We wanted to speak to her before she left but she was in some other event and could only speak to her way past our bedtime. We did however, speak to her over the weekend and she was down with a cold and was coughing a bit but otherwise she seemed fine.

I remember the first and only time I visited New York. It was back in the 90’s when the world trade centre was still a landmark feature towering up all the way into the sky. My colleague and I went up to the roof and had pictures taken there as well as at the ground floor, where a metal sculpture of the globe stood.

That was nearly 20 years ago. I remember darting into a Bloomingdale store to get a little dress for kiddo. We eventually discovered the dress was in fact made in Malaysia so I had travelled half way across the world to buy my daughter a dress which was made in Malaysia.

That little (yellow) dress had since been passed on to various people and I now wonder whether it is still in use and by whom.

These days, when she is in Melbourne, she goes shopping for dresses with Tress sometimes. I sometimes play along and come for the ride, offering my half cent’s worth and making either a lame joke or a flat suggestion. I have a severely under-developed fashion sense and what ideas pop into my head are largely of the practical variety. Sad but true.

Kiddo’s her own person. I’m in a large-ish church full of talents. So I rarely feel the need to do anything. Work’s just the usual flurry of activities and talkfests abound as always. We don’t get/haven’t gotten involved in any other types of organisations or activities. Meeting up with people just for meals (with little other shared interests) is becoming harder work. It all adds up to freedom on the one hand, but also restlessness and aimlessness on the other.

I have been reading the scriptures from scratch again. Praying too. I am about to finish Deuteronomy. I am about to go into the more exciting narratives surrounding the entry into the land flowing with milk and honey, and the heroic conquests of Joshua & Co. I’m not sure how this will provide guidance on what I do with the time ahead of me. It may be that is a short window. It may be, as the ABS now says, it is still a long journey ahead (up to 41 years to go!). But while I can countenance doing the same thing for the next x number of years or for as long as I either need to or don’t die of boredom or frustration or stress, it’d be much more interesting if I’m seeing what difference I would be making to the world around me, other than depleting its natural resources, notwithstanding I am a relatively conservative consumer of goods and services. I guess it’s the age old urge and question of what else might I be doing that would make things more interesting, exciting and less of a grind.

But I guess that’s part of waiting on the Lord. Reading His word and spending time with Him is what I hope will take me to “the answer”. Maybe then I’d find peace and joy in whatever it is that I would do.

20 years from now, Kiddo may reminisce about her trip to Princeton. I hope by then both she and I as well as Tress would continue to press to find purpose and continue to wait on the Lord.

But I wonder where that little yellow dress is now…

Occasionally I wonder what would have happened had I been totally uninvolved in what happened to Jason. Coming across an article like this sort of puts that occasional concern to bed.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2014/02/16/what-to-expect-when-youre-telling-the-truth-a-guide-for-whistle-blowers/   

 

February 16, 2014 By Guest Contributor 2 Comments

A great post by my friend Jenell Paris, who is Professor of Anthropology at Messiah College.

By Jenell Paris

I grew up fundamentalist; conservative in things political, religious, and sexual. The sexual scandals of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart came as a rude awakening in my formative years. Ruder still, when my pastor was found guilty of molesting dozens of boys. Since then, in my immediate circles I’ve known a pastor harassing college students, three in affairs with parishioners, and another covering up an affair.

In national news, such stories are in constant supply, from all sectors of Christianity. Starting last fall, a new spate: the great Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder sexually abused women physically and theologically. A recently released list of credibly accused Catholic priests in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Diocese includes thirty names; the list at just one Minnesota Catholic university includes eighteen. A group of former Bill Gothard followers expose him as a sexual predator and spiritual abuser.

Deviants abound, but so do heroes; people who insist on bringing the truth to light.

Is there someone in your life, church, or religious circle who uses their power to manipulate, dehumanize, molest, or otherwise violate your well-being, of that of people you care about? Are you thinking of blowing the whistle?

Maybe you’re hoping people will believe you. They’ll reject the legitimacy abusers’ authority, withdrawing their consent to be led and taught by them. They’ll stop the abuse from happening to others. Maybe they’ll even thank you for your bravery.

This could happen, but don’t count on it. Prepare yourself for a more likely scenario, one that plays out like a formulaic script in religious settings where leaders abuse power.

Scene 1: You answer the clear and relentless call of your conscience. You saw something, so you say something.

Scene 2: The response: a few people might listen well. Some might take decisive and quick action. More likely, however, you’ve inflamed people’s fear of seeing their leader fall off a moral pedestal. You’ve raised the possibility that an institution that carries tradition, holds resources, and administers sacred rites may be flawed, even to a diabolical degree. This fear is often more painful to them than whatever harm you might have experienced or observed.

Accordingly, responses may begin with the word “You.”

– You are alone. No one else has ever complained about this person. If you’re right, which you likely are not, it must be an isolated incident.

– You are wrong. Your perceptions are off, memory flawed, mind confused. You didn’t see what you saw. You don’t know what you know. Your truth is nothing more than a mistake, or a lie.

– You are angry. You are pushy and loud; you just won’t let it go. If you’re female, you’re unfeminine, disrespecting godly authority. In fact, perhaps the real issue here is why you are such an angry person.

– You are bad. Good people are faithful, prayerful, and obedient. You are untrusting, unfaithful, and unloving. You need to pray more.

Scene 3: In some situations, the abuse is incontrovertible. The script may then shift from responses beginning with “You” to responses beginning with “But.” Yes, the abuse happened, but…

– But he did so many other good things. Let’s focus on his preaching, his books, and his public ministry. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

– But that was a long time ago. The stories you’re telling are from years ago, or months ago, or weeks ago. It’s probably not still happening. Surely he’s worked on his issues.

– But you need to forgive. You say you want truth told, but consider how hard that would be for everyone to hear. We can’t undo what happened, so just forgive, let go, and quiet down.

Scene 4: The script often ends in one of two ways. The first is that justice remains undone. The truth isn’t told, or if told, isn’t heard. The abuser either continues in ministry, or is rewarded with higher status for having suffered your accusations. The whistle-blower moves away and moves on, or lives with a damaged reputation within the community that continues to support the abuser.

The second is that justice is done; the truth is told, the air is cleared, the abuser is held accountable, and the victims are offered meaningful support and recompense. In this scenario, the people who said, “You…” and “But…” instantly change position, and claim to have been concerned, supportive, aware, and on the case all along. You weren’t in it for glory, but still, it is painful when your contribution is minimized or ignored.

* * *

Given this deplorable cultural script — boring in its predictability yet soul-stabbing in each particularity — is it worth stepping onto the stage and raising your voice to speak?

The abuser could be called to account; systems and institutions can change. The likelihood in any given case is probably small, but nonetheless, very real. If this doesn’t happen — should the abuser continue with acclaim, and the institution or community crush you in order to protect itself – there still is gain.

It’s the blessing Jesus extends to the reviled. “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (Mt. 5:11).

And to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness: “they shall be satisfied.” And to the peacemakers, because truth and accountability – not niceness or silent submission — is the path to peace.

This blessing is not for the afterlife and not for the spirit alone; it is real and tangible in the here and now. It is the kingdom of God. The blessed:

– Enjoy the unburdening – lightness, some even say – that comes with telling painful and necessary truths.

– Empathize and stand in solidarity with every other person who has lived with or near abuse.

– Appreciate, from an insider’s perspective, the dynamics of injustice and the slowness of righteousness. The blessed reject, once and for all, religious platitudes about God being in control, or all things working together for good, or the virtue of suffering in silence.

– Know reconciliation and forgiveness is more than quietude. The blessed savor the dignity that comes with asking for all that true reconciliation requires, regardless of the response.

Prospective whistle-blowers, count the cost: additional trauma, shunning or judgment, loss of employment, position, or reputation, and the possibility that meaningful change will prove elusive. Your answer will emerge from your conscience and from the sacred voice that speaks, in various ways, to each of us. It may be ‘no’, or ‘not yet.’ It may be ‘yes’, in a certain time and way.

Count the cost, and then do what you have to do. There’s no telling what will happen, except for one thing that is absolutely predictable. You will be blessed, and not with trinkets like propriety or approval, but with the resolute blessing of a dignified life adorned with wisdom and courage.

We’re into our 10^th year in Melbourne but we’d never been to Daylesford. Tress’ cousin will be getting married in April and has invited us to the wedding in Daylesford. We didn’t have anything particularly pressing last Saturday so after the usual dry cleaning run we took a drive there, taking Little Black Jedi along with us.

We left just after 9.30 and got into Daylesford about a couple of hours later. Lakehouse restaurant was one of the first place we saw and a bit after that we stopped by the lakeside and took a walk around the lake. It was a cool and calm respite, after a very warm, humid and busy week in Melbourne. We then drove towards town and after a quick check online for some places to eat, we went to a deli place called Broconcini, sat along the footpath (because of LBJ). The food was very good and service very courteous and attentive.

Other than a drive for a day out, we wanted to visit Daylesford also for the purpose of some reconnaissance.  We had the luxury of time and decided to use it to check out where we can stay when we visit for the wedding in less than 2 months. So we drove around town, then on to Hepburn Springs, saw a few choices and Tress talked to a local accommodation guide office and got some ideas too.

We left close to 3 and got home, did some grocery shopping and went home to prepare some stuff for the dinner we were going to at Ing Tung and Chin Moi’s on Sunday night. Kiddo then called on skype and we had a good chat. She was going to New York in a few days, and would be there for a couple of weeks.

On Sunday morning it rained and Tress and I were both caught as we walked from the car park to the church building, which was a distance of maybe 100 metres. We were soaked and it took a while to settle down but when we did the service was enjoyable as always. There was another very good sermon by David Williams (who is also CMS training and development leader) on looking at church through the lens of who Jesus is. We spent some time talking to a new couple (who is expecting their new baby in July).

We went home after lunch and a bit more grocery shopping and that night, after doing a simple dish to bring along, we met up with Ing Tung and Chin Moi at their home, where they had an old friend – Vincent Lu – over. Vincent’s oldest boy would be starting at Monash, along with the daughter of Catherine and Alfred, another friend in the same circle.

At the dinner, there were 5 who were in the same class in school in Sibu. 2 of them were even in the same kindergarten. All are 50 years old now with kids in uni, and it was a time for some reminiscing. We had a wonderful time with these old friends, trying to take a peek into the world of young people in uni and trying to make sense of the world we now live in. Margaret’s husband had been a senior scientist at Telstra for years but had been made redundant end of last year. The rest of us were just plodding along in what work we can find. Life goes on and time with friends is cherished. We talked about church too – about where to go and where we’ve been.

A bit strange in another time but last night, I understood some aspects of it all. Rare thing. Unusual.  But I saw – life isn’t about achieving. It is about dealing with challenges and issues at every turn and doing it honestly and if possible, corporately. To this end a place like Daylesford, though serene and beautiful maybe lacks something.

The below article resonated with me. It sings a tune that I liked, from around the time when I first came across the work of Roger Scrutton. I am lurching ever more towards such liberalism especially given the economic challenges many western countries face. Dependence on big government is a beast once created, invariably becomes an unwieldy behemoth. Dismantling it can be as hard as cleaning the Aegean stables.

In Australia, recent figures showing the proportion of population dependent on one type of government handout or another illustrate the depth we can plumb on the back of this addictive beast. Weaning it off a dependency mindset can be a multigenerational task. I only hope we can all manage to fend for ourselves and only the very truly needy seeks help.

Another side difficulty is of course, the issue of where we draw the line. Who is the very truly needy? Maybe if the Christian community do as the scriptures say and share our wealth more readily, we don’t need big governments and can avoid the shackle that holds a country back from achieving more. More not in terms of capital accumulation but in terms of enriching the lives of its people in wholesome, industrious and honest manner.

http://ipa.org.au/publications/2234/how-the-left-corrupted-human-rights

How the left corrupted human rights
IPA REVIEW ARTICLE

| Simon Breheny

In May 2011, a United Nations Special Rapporteur declared that people had a human right to internet access. It seems absurd to argue that such a right exists but it is the logical progression of the corrupting influence of leftist ideology on the traditional conception of human rights.

It’s worth pointing out that this is not just an obscure debate within the confines of an irrelevant international body. Finland had implemented legislation a year before-in July 2010-that granted every one of its citizens the right to speeds of one megabit per second.

The right to internet access is just one of the many ‘human rights’ manufactured by the left throughout the course of the last century. The right to welfare is another example. Earlier this year, another UN official said that an Australian government decision to reduce welfare payments was a violation of the unemployed’s fundamental right to receive Centrelink benefits.

‘Rights’ to other social privileges have also become popular over the last hundred years. During his State of the Union Address on 11 January 1944, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a ‘Second Bill of Rights’. This new Bill of Rights included rights to employment, a living wage, freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, housing, medical care, education and social security. FDR believed that the US’ original Bill of Rights had ‘proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.’

A similar set of ‘human rights’ was later included in the 1952 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Universal Declaration included rights to employment (article 23), housing, healthcare and welfare (article 25) and education (article 26). If the internet had been around in the 1950s the right to bandwidth probably would have been included too.

Of course, none of these things are actually human rights. At best they’re vague policy aspirations. By definition, human rights exist without the need for policies and programs of government. Universal human rights are not privileges granted by the state but restrictions on what the state can do. The concept of human rights is based on the idea that people acquire them by virtue of being human. So if coercion is required to give effect to a potential human right, it’s not a human right. Compulsory redistribution of resources of the kind that is required for government programs such as subsidised education and healthcare are therefore not human rights.

The fundamental issue with this group of so called rights is not just that they don’t meet the definition of human rights. That would be a pretty abstract concern. The deeper concern is that their implementation unavoidably entails their violation.

Rights to free schooling, housing, jobs, and healthcare require the government to take money from one section of the community and give it to another.

This is just old-fashioned redistribution and it clearly violates your human right to do with your property what you will. But it’s sold under the guise of human rights.

And a strikingly large number of people accept that these are in fact rights to which we as human beings are entitled. It is remarkable that so many have come to accept these vague policy goals as immutable rights. And it’s important to understand why.

The key reason these ‘rights’ were developed was to achieve particular ideological ends. While conservatives and liberals see human rights as an end in themselves, the left-wing view human rights as another tool to achieve outcomes. And it’s for this reason that leftists have co-opted the language of human rights. It’s not hard to see why. What’s more powerful: ‘I think the government should subsidise education’, or ‘people have a right to free education.’

The language of human rights has been used very successfully by the left to fight for particular interest groups they have decided are important. It allows the left to elevate left-wing principles of equality to the same level as human liberty.

The left’s co-optation of the language of traditional human rights to their own agenda has corrupted human rights. Original ideas about civil liberties place a distant second in the minds of many human rights lawyers and academics if they even figure at all.

More particularly, the left has corrupted legitimate human rights that broadly fall into the category of ‘positive liberties’. In his 1958 essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Isaiah Berlin argued that there are two categories of freedom-positive and negative liberties. Negative liberties are those that exist when an individual is free from coercion. Freedom of thought and association, for example, are respected simply by the state doing nothing to restrict these rights. Rights to participate in the political system are distinct-they require some level of government action. The right to vote is a positive liberty.

The success of the left was in twisting Berlinian positive liberties into what they now call positive rights. This co-optation by progressives was successfully used to include what became known as economic, social and cultural rights. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is the best example of this. The UN treaty is filled with the kind of vague ‘rights’ loved by those on the left. Of course, due to their ambiguity it is impossible to objectively enforce these rights because they require qualitative measurements.

In stark contrast, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights defends true human rights. Civil rights are negative freedoms, while political rights are positive freedoms in the classical sense.

True human rights are rooted in the idea that individuals should be free to pursue their own goals. They go to the heart of classical liberal philosophy-human rights act as specific limits on state power and create the blueprint for legitimate government built on the protection of human rights, not their abrogation.

Rights based on human freedoms are the only human rights. Any other characterisation misses the fact that human rights are those that must be able to exist in absence of the state. The left has clearly failed to grasp this important idea. But conservatives and liberals have also failed to address this corruption. It’s time for us to take on the left and return to a truly liberal conception of human rights.