The Human as Unequal: Racism Article 2 made the Declaration’s widest promise: that every right in it belongs to everyone, without distinction of race, colour or creed. Racism is the systematic breaking of that promise. After years of listening to more than a thousand Australians with lived experience, the Australian Human Rights Commission produced a National Anti-Racism Framework, a plan to confront racism in every form, against every community, with First Peoples at its centre. Yet this year the Commission’s funding was cut by close to ten million dollars, even as racism explodes online, becomes normalised. Racism is fought with one standard, applied without fear or favour to every community alike. One framework. For every community. No exceptions. The same even-handedness must govern how we face extremism. Religious extremism. Racial supremacy. Nationalist fantasies of superiority. We have seen the devastation of these ideologies in Christchurch, in Bondi, many times around the world. We must oppose it all. All states, all religions, all ideologies must be open to scrutiny, criticism and accountability by the human family. And yet today it is those who argue for fairness and equality who are accused, at a challenging time for human rights advocates. A world of moral inversion, where right is wrong, and wrong, right. Human rights advocates always make enemies of authoritarians, recalcitrant states and their supporters, of course. By definition, the persecuted always have a persecutor, which is why human rights defenders have their own protection under international law. Yet we have begun to erase that distinction. No definition of hatred should brand the defence of human rights and international law as bigotry, or shield a political idea or state. This does a double harm. It hollows out the fight against real racism, turning the word into a shield for a government. And it clears a path to impunity, because if naming a state’s crimes is racism, they need never be mentioned, let alone answered. Nowhere is this clearer than on our campuses, here and around the world. We must always raise our voices against the most egregious crimes against humanity. This is a basic human duty. Yet, too often students and scholars have been met with force, silencing and removal. The freedom to inquire, to dissent, to protest injustice is not a privilege that power grants you. It is an inherent, collective human duty. Free speech ends where it becomes hate, where it dehumanises and incites. But human rights advocacy is the opposite of hate, and in fact, our only path to its absence - to oppose apartheid, all forms of supremacy, the slaughter or starvation of children, wherever they are. If speaking against genocide is the offence, if opposing racist structures is the crime, then compassion itself is outlawed and shared humanity is recast as a threat. A society that silences its most humane voices, as Australia is doing now, does not grow safer. It trades solidarity for supremacy and division, and division hardens into hate, and hate into more violence. The defence of human rights, the simple insistence that all people live free of violence, is not a danger to Australia. It is the only real safety Australia, and the world, will ever have. So do not be threatened, bullied or silenced out of your conscience. The world has never needed human rights voices more. Curtin University Centre for Human Rights Education Oration, 2026