Category: CLArion

Elections throughout Australia will loom large in 2024, with four or even five possible. Their combined effect could alter the rigid two-party hegemony over the nation that has lasted across a century. Meanwhile federally, thinking politicians, advisers and academics realise that active steps are needed to restore integrity in the bureaucracy and people’s faith and trust in government. With doubts in the justice system about whether forensic science is delivering on its past promise, and whether the legal profession plays by the rules in courts, we’re in for bumpy ride in 2024. Other news in this issue includes:

• Corruption comes to the fore in Darwin in untimely fashion
• Legal and allied system in turmoil up north
• Forensics in chaos: 103,000 samples to be retested?
• New national forensic regulator and authority required
• Key appointments to some pivotal positions
• Senior barrister has no faith in PIP, police-investigating-police
• Aboriginal people locked up and down disproportionately
• Minister talks pap: where does responsibility lie?
• Neighbour country under control of new, secret force
• Judge is demoted…but the election goes on after his ruling
• Prosecutor fined $20,000 for errors, failures, concealment

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CLA explained in detail in October to the parliamentary inquiry into rights precisely why Australia needed to create a national Human Rights Act, to achieve a ‘Fair Go’ for everybody and to help rebuild social capital and expand the national integrity network after years of significant stress. In examples of failed moral codes, the nation is paying Indonesian boat kids for our falsely classifying them as adults, just as Australia begins a new round of renditioning – kidnapping – asylum seeks to Nauru. In other developments:

• High Court wimps out of another key forensic science ruling
• Smartest Australians get half a vote in referendums
• NT, which started it all, at last gets to vote on VAD
• Prison bugging inquiry gets new investigator, free of former AG links
• New inquiry to quick-probe mess left by Sofronoff forensics findings
• Corruption has commissioner stumped
• ‘Blood boils’ as cops allegedly dodge proper inquiries
• Neighbour country under control of new, secret force
• Courts logging: where are ‘friends’ when you need them?
• Pommy prisoners to be transported to Australia?

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Today, 1 July 2023, is the deadline for lodging a submission to achieve a federal Human Rights Act in Australia. Please email your thoughts on a HRA today even if it’s only one or two pages (see where to email on Page 1). IN THIS ISSUE we name the nation’s worst police force as judged by the people of Australia, and warn police authorities about hiring duds from elsewhere as they desperately seek new recruits while trying to hide police misbehaviour from citizens. We remind AG Mark Dreyfus it’s time to drop the charges against whistleblowers Boyle and McBride.

30 June is the last day to prepare a submission on a proposed federal Human Rights law. Please get your supportive sub in, even if only a letter, or a short comment. Meanwhile, AG Mark Dreyfus is reforming the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, appointing a new head and planning new appointments, based on merit. The ACT is raising the Minimum Age of Responsibility for Children to 14, and will join SA, Tasmania, Victoria and WA with a legislated second and subsequent ‘Right To Appeal’ where there’s a substantial miscarriage of justice.

More details are emerging on how public consultation over a Human Rights Act for Australia will get under way: you can express your support in a submission to the parliamentary committee by 1 July 2023, so please do, even if it is just a one-page letter. Meanwhile, secret trials, indefinite detenton, vague laws, forensics problems and more Indigenous people being jailed are among the concerns in this issue, not to mention a swathe of government departments and agencies failing to act, acting inappropriately of refusing to meet mandatory deadlines for providing public information to the people they supposedly serve.

The Australian Parliament wants to know whether Australia should have a Human Rights Act (HRA)…which could be enacted by December 2024. The Committee on Human Rights invites submissions until 1 July 2023, then will hold hearings until December 2023, reporting to the Parliament by 31 March 2024. That would leave nine months for the Albanese government to legislate a federal HRA for Australia in 2024, before the next national election, likely in early 2025. CLA has been one of the most active campaigners for a HRA over the past three years and, with other activists and supporters, is celebrating interim success. Some 73% of Australians support Australia having a HRA: just 3% oppose one.

The Voice campaign for a special Indigenous path to parliamentary debate launched in February. The first official call for a federal Human Rights Act is expected when the Australian Human Rights Commission tables its ‘Free & Equal’ report, four years in the making, in the first week of this month.  Meanwhile liberties and rights, particularly of children, are under increasing threat from a combination of vigilante social media activist campaigns and state governments and oppositions ramping up ‘order and law’ issues ahead of elections.