Category: Articles

Governments’ abnormal priorities founded on warped ideologies and broken promises are skewing important decisions around liberties and rights issues. Citizens are having to fight for basic health and disabilities spending, and charities are under active national assault. However security services and matters military are being showered with excessive funds, while crime dogs get $0.5m each. With the pandemic sure to impose continuing stresses on daily living for another year or more, the nation is in the run-up to an important federal election, maybe just a few months away, in which it is hoped public values, personal morality and political philosophy may pay a greater role than personalities.

Squabbling and politicking over ‘law and order’ elections is preventing states and the Northern Territory agreeing to set 14 as the Age of Criminal Responsibility for children, proving that federation is a waste of time, money and resources if we want a national approach to justice in the 120-year-old entity that is Australia. Meanwhile federally ministers are wasting billions of dollars locking up refugees and children on offshore islands, just so the government can maintain an anachronistic political ideology, and taking to court patriotic Australians whose only sin was to reveal alleged murders and grossly improper behaviour by public servants.

An unlikely pairing of two Liberal and Labor politicians are using the Senate Scrutiny Committee to rein in the ever-expanding power of ‘Executive’ Ministers producing legislation – about half of all Australian laws – that can change and expand under ‘regulations’ at the government’s whim, with the Parliament having no review powers over them. The Senators have taken the first step in restoring properly-balanced power between the Executive, the Judiciary and Parliament, as the Australian Constitution says it should be.