On creating a world that works for everyone

A strong sense of justice and an awareness about the inequalities in our society. It’s the reason I went to law school after I had my two children. I was watching the Tampa crisis unfold from my couch and was incensed by our treatment of asylum seekers, who are some of the most vulnerable amongst us. 

I had assumed we were a caring nation. I had assumed our government would act with kindness and humanity. Instead, we became a world leader in cruelty and inhumane practices at our borders. It’s horrific, that as resourced as we are, we don’t use our privilege to protect the human rights of others.

Today, the climate crisis is highlighting this inequality in stark reality; those who will be most affected, are those that have the least to do with causing the harm. We can’t keep sitting back and watching without doing something to rebalance it. We all need to make noise and remind those who aren’t paying attention to our shared humanity, of what the consequences will be if we don’t.

My heroes have always been human rights lawyers and the way they apply their brains and privilege to help others. My inspiration was born through Geoffrey Robertson and Julian Burnside, and now it grows through the work of Isabelle Reinecke and Jennifer Robinson. They remind me to keep fighting for what we know to be right and to always protect each other from injustice.

I give via a PAF that was set up by my mother 10 years ago. It’s multiplied in size after the recent sale of the family retail business which has allowed us to create a more focused strategy on identifying where the climate crisis and human rights intersect. We give through our granting program and funding strategic litigation, advocacy, and policy work. We are also pushing for better government and climate policy.

But even more significantly, we invest the entirety of our corpus towards impact. All our investments are directed towards improving systems to become more sustainable and benefit all of humanity, and not just a few.

I have learned that money itself is not enough, if you want to create meaningful change. It requires strong democracies, political leadership and collective action. We can’t just rely on grant money and kind hearts; all the money and all the activity need to move if we want to create real change. 

There is no point giving away 5% of our balance sheet to worthy causes, while we invest in banks and shop in places where all that good work is undone. We need to change our systems. We need to change our behaviour. And we need to change our leadership.

I want to use our recent growth to create lasting change that is human centred. Article one from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, ‘All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ We need to identify the parts of society where this is not the case and find real and lasting solutions. Changing systems is not easy, particularly financial ones. 

As Olivier de Schutter, (UN special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights) puts it; we need to “move from an economy driven by the search for maximising profits to a human rights economy.” 

Collective human flourishing must be at the centre of all decisions we make, financial and political. Every person has the power to help create a world that works for everyone. We must be the change we want to see in the world. By all of us. For all of us.