ABSTRACT
This chapter is a personal reflection of the possibilities and the challenges of working as an advocate for human rights both inside the governmental system and outside it. It focuses on work done primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter begins with a brief account of the challenges and positive aspects of working outside the government system as a rights advocate. It provides an account of the work of the Commissioner for Equal Opportunity, which was the author's position in the early 1990s. The Victorian legislation required complainants and respondents to cooperate with the Commissioner’s investigations and to participate in alternative dispute resolution. The Victorian Equal Opportunity Act empowered an individual to pursue a remedy for direct, even unapologetic, discrimination by making a complaint, and having an authoritative statutory basis for doing so.
