Human Rights Survey Results and interview with Brian Burdekin AO

Interview with Brian Burdekin AO: The Conscience of a Nation

To mark Mental Health Month the Alliance is pleased to invite you to a LIVE online interview with Brian Burdekin AO – the Commissioner who put human rights before politics. Brian Burdekin AO is central to the consumer movement because he made people with lived experience the authors of the evidence, not the subjects of it.

We will also take you through the results of our 2nd Human Rights Survey.

Mental Health as a Human Right

Brian Burdekin’s report changed how Australia talks about mental challenges. He reframed "mental illness” (as it was called back then) as a human rights issue, not a welfare or budget problem so that neglect became a violation of rights, not merely poor funding.

Four decades of inquiry, law reform and advocacy

Brian Burdekin was Australia's first Federal Human Rights Commissioner (1986–1994). A former barrister, diplomat and adviser to a Prime Minister, several ministers and the Federal Attorney-General, he took a brand-new role and turned it into a platform for national inquiries that put the country's most powerless people on the public record and forced governments to respond.

The Report that still echoes

He chaired the National Inquiry into the Human Rights of People with Mental Illness. Over three years it took nearly 900 written submissions, heard from more than 450 witnesses and also consulted around 300 people across the country.

The report, tabled on 20 October 1993 and known ever since as "the Burdekin Report," documented systematic neglect: deinstitutionalisation savings never redirected to community services, pervasive discrimination and ignorance, agencies refusing to cooperate, and people with mental health challenges ending up homeless, in prison or in sub-standard boarding houses.

Webinar details:

Date: Thursday 20 October 2026

Time: 1 – 2:30 pm AEDT

Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89325423109

There will be an open Q and A session at the end of the webinar so please send your questions ahead of time to hello@nmhca.org.au.