The official launch of Australia’s bid for a seat on the United Nations human rights council (UNHRC) was conducted, for all intents and purposes, in a parallel universe. Attorney general George Brandis’s speech earlier this month was incubated in Canberra, so it should not come as a surprise that it was detached from reality.

“Across the entire panoply of human rights Australia has not only been an activist, but those rights are integral to what we Australians regard as our sense of nationhood,” the attorney general said. You may have missed it, apparently we have a “vigorous, ambitious human rights agenda”, domestically and internationally.

Astonishingly, Brandis claimed to have “enlarged the scope” of the Australian Human Rights Commission. Under his careful grooming its role now “is to be a trustee of all human rights, including importantly, but not exclusively, the right to freedom from discrimination”.

Further, he made the well-worn, but illusory, claim that Australia is “one of the world’s most generous societies to displaced people”.

Attendees at this hyperventilating launch must have been pinching themselves, anxious that a mind-altering substance had not been slipped into their cups of tea.

After all, this was the very attorney general who had waged an ideological war against the Australian Human Rights Commission and announced that he had lost confidence in the president of the commission, Professor Gillian Triggs, for having the temerity to conduct an inquiry into children held in immigration detention.

The government was so affronted by the children in detention report that it attempted to engineer Triggs out of her job as president of the commission. Brandis also has overseen a cut in the commission’s budget (at least 30% over three years) and has not replaced the outgoing disability discrimination commissioner with a stand-alone appointment. The sex discrimination commissioner’s job is still vacant as well.

It was as though, for the Coalition government, the AHRC was public enemy number one. Miraculously, the commission now has been redeemed and wheeled into the frontline of the campaign to secure Australia a place on the UN’s leading human rights body.

Foreign minister Julia Bishop was also on hand at the RG Casey building for the launch, assuring members of the diplomatic corps, senior mandarins and politicians that “our record on human rights is strong”.

The campaign for this prized UN seat is focused on five “pillars”: freedom of expression, gender equality, good governance, the rights of Indigenous people and strong national human rights institutions.

For the only western democracy without a human rights act or a developed constitutional underpinning of human rights, putting up our hand for a seat at the table looks like a piece of unmitigated presumption.

Not only doesn’t Australia, as a nation, possess these protections, but the Coalition government is actively opposed to their implementation, while Labor squibbed the opportunity to do something about it in 2010.

Consequently, when it comes to real protections for free speech, marriage equality, Indigenous opportunities, good government and institutions that can uphold and enforce human rights – the five pillars – there is a chasm that yawns.

We need scarcely to be reminded of the criminalisation of those who speak out about injustices in the border protect regime.

Last month the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau, cancelled a proposed inspection of Manus Island and Nauru detention centres because of the reprisals that lurk in the Border Force Act against those who speak out.

There are also punitive penalties facing journalists and publishers who report on Asio’s “special intelligence operations”, even though they may not be aware that an operation has been classified in this way. Overarching these prescriptions is the data retention regime, that is both intrusive and chilling.

Under Brandis’s aegis the FOI system, which is supposed to foster open democracy, has tumbled into disrepair. The funding and staffing of the office of the information commissioner have been shredded, with the privacy commissioner acting in the role only until the end of this month.

The chairman of the Australian Press Council, Professor David Weisbrot, has called on the government to repair the damage that has been done to FOI.

The interim report from the Australian Law Reform Commission on Commonwealth encroachments on freedoms pointed to the fact that parliament’s joint committee on human rights has called into question incompatible pieces of legislation on 80 occasions since 2013.

The Australian arm of the New York-based Human Rights Watch has said that Australia should “lift its game” on human rights if it wants to be a worthwhile member of the UNHR council.

Possibly, this enthusiasm for membership of the council is a way of giving us a warm inner glow, despite the significant shortcomings in Australia’s human rights record.

The Geneva-based UN human rights council is itself a strange affair – comprising 47 member nations, elected by the UN general assembly by secret ballot, which rotate every three years. One of its main functions is the regular universal periodic reviews of member states’ human rights performance.

Obviously, strong home grown human rights are not a prerequisite for membership, otherwise what are China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Maldives and Kazakhstan doing on the council? Maybe, that is a factor that has emboldened Australia’s application.

Happily, at the conclusion of launch event in Canberra, the assembled ambassadors, public servants and politicians were given DFAT showbags, containing some tea, a mug and macadamia nuts. That should get us over the line at the UN.