Kevin Bell
The Hon. Kevin Bell AO KC is a baby boomer who grew up in social housing in the Melbourne suburb of Moorabbin – fittingly, in the language of the Bunurong/Boonwurrung, ‘Moorabbin’ means ‘resting place’ or ‘mother’s milk’. He graduated in Arts and Law from Monash University and worked at the Tenants Union of Victoria before practising as a barrister for twenty years, including in Victorian housing and residential tenancies law. As a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria for fifteen years, he wrote many influential judgments on human rights, including the right to housing and home. As a professor in the Faculty of Law at Monash University and director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, he similarly focused on housing, homelessness and human rights. He also served as a commissioner of the Yoorrook Justice Commission and has a Masters degree in international human rights law from Oxford University. He is presently an adjunct professor at Monash and the patron of Tenants Victoria.
Australia’s national identity is as complex as the people who make up the nation and the historical forces by which it was made. Our Indigenous peoples, whose unique histories precede the nation’s by more than fifty thousand years, are central to that identity. A century ago, making those statements would have been virtually unthinkable to most, such was the dominance of exclusionary colonial ... (read more)
Are you part of the non-Indigenous majority? Have you had too little contact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? Do you feel that you do not fully comprehend their worldview, but wish you could? Is entrenched Aboriginal disadvantage eating away at your sense of Australia as a fair and united country? Do you still possess the recollection of your first encounter with an Aboriginal pe ... (read more)