Matthew Keeley

Matthew Keeley is the Director of Youth Law Australia (YLA), affiliated with UNSW’s Faculty of Law and Justice and a key trainer on DTP’s child rights program. He is a solicitor, human rights advocate, access to justice campaigner, and researcher whose interests include children’s law, disability law, human services law, government law, legal tech, and legal service development.

Through YLA, the Child Rights Taskforce and other roles, networks and campaigns, Matthew has been involved in child rights advocacy for thirty years. YLA provides a national legal service to children, promotes knowledge of child rights and advocates for change. Working next to DTP’s offices at UNSW, Matthew has been a source of informal advice and guidance over many years. More recently he has been a key partner and driver of DTP’s child rights programs, providing strategic leadership, teaching on its programs and facilitating its webinars.

Matthew is working for a world where children’s rights are respected and fully implemented, where children have access to assistance to exercise those rights and access to remedies when those rights are violated.

“My career has been about standing with people who are being bullied or oppressed. And I particularly do not like it when a government or the state is the abuser. I like to side with the people who are standing up to the power”.

Matthew believes DTP is making a significant impact through its child rights workshops and webinars. The workshops and webinars meet a key need, as awareness and understanding of child rights in Australia is low and there is a need to share expertise and experiences of applying child rights to policy and practice.

“The impact is in the transfer of knowledge, including from international experts and practitioners, which is unbelievably valuable. With each workshop or webinar, we can see the significant level of interest there is in the Australian community for learning from these experts.

We also see participants seeking to apply this knowledge in practice. Individuals and leaders of organisations have reached out to us, saying they are inspired, and they feel more confident and equipped to apply children’s rights-based approaches within their organisations. And the program supports this work through the provision of resources and the development of a “knowledge network.” 
 
So, as a form of capacity building, I would say that the program is impactful and is working, and that is something of which we are immensely proud.”

Matthew’s work at YLA, which provides legal assistance to thousands of children and young people a year, gives him a unique perspective on the need to listen to children and young people and to make changes in policy and practice. He sees the work on the child rights program with DTP and Australian Lawyers for Human Rights and key academic experts as complementary to his work at YLA.

“We look at the interests of individual participants before each workshop, and we endeavour to tailor the content towards those substantive areas. An example might be that we will do within a workshop a particular session on the right of children to participate or, say, on children in the criminal justice system and their rights.”

When asked why he is so passionate about the rights of children and young people, Matthew mentions strong family influence, with one side of the family coming to Australia as political refugees following the Hungarian War of Independence and many working in the caring professions.

“There are so many ways to contribute to promoting and protecting human rights and children’s rights, and amongst them all I especially value the collaborations that DTP facilitates, and its approach in supporting respectful dialogue on how human rights can be implemented by us all”.