Category: CLArion

CLA saw one of its prime recommendations adopted by the parliamentary Homelessness inquiry: we don’t often get a committee agreeing completely with us, but here we did. Also, the CLA Board has decided how we can operate more efficiently and therefore effectively in future, with details and the dates of a special general meeting set out in this issue. CLA member Barbara Etter and barrister Hugh Selby have exposed gross incompetence, and possibly worse, by the Tasmanian Office of the DPP and TasPolice in ‘evidence’ collected and filtered before tendering to the judge and  jury in the original trial of  Sue Neill-Fraser, now in her 13th year wrongly jailed. Her defence counsel was kept in the dark about some witness statements that could have helped her.

Once mass vaccination eases the pandemic, laws need correcting to restore democracy, civil liberties and human rights to Australians, CLA says. When C-19 broke out, our rulers first abandoned parliaments, which stopped meeting entirely. Then draconian emergency laws empowered politicians and police to act virtually without restraint. Soon, instantly imposed regulations, stemming from the unbridled emergency powers, saw us all locked in our homes, unable to work, travel cross-town or interstate ,or even choose to travel overseas, and with no prospect of tribunal or court appeal around special individual circumstances. Once the panic is over, we must restore Australians’ freedoms and liberties by demanding meaningful Human Rights Acts throughout the nation.

Senate and Joint committees are fighting ongoing battles to reclaim power to the Parliament after years of dominance by the Executive,  the small group of Ministers and the Prime Minister who run the nation day-by-day. The Executive Ministers have wrestled power away from Senators and MHRs over decades and through both Coalition and Labor rules…but now parliamentary committees want to put human rights front and centre in all money bills, and also take control of supervising and approving delegated legislation (laws made without having to be passed by both Houses, usually written at the say-so of the Executive).

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.

It’s good to look back on an extraordinary 2020 to re-set the gauges of life for 2021 and beyond. A virus has curtailed personal liberties in the name of a wider good, so the challenge becomes to decide how basic freedoms can be entrenched better in ordinary times – and extraordinary times – in future. This year will feature a push for human rights laws for all of us in more jurisdictions (including federally) and, in particular, the quest for justice denied these past 12 years for Sue Neill-Fraser, still locked in Hobart’s Risdon jail.