At the height of pandemic panic in 2020, a top national body tried to tell people which way to turn when exercising around a lake. The advice turned out to be superfluous and useless…but it raised the basic question of how far can governments make you go, and in what direction?
The ACT is about to get updated whistleblower laws…but are the changes enough? ANU law students from the social justice stream examine how naked a ‘ whistler’ can seem to become when all the supposed safety shields are stripped away from him, or her.
What are the drivers behind the Covid-a9 vaccinations, its priority delivery, the seeking of herd immunity…and whether the vaccine must be made mandatory? In a special cooperative project, CLA and its expert members helped a team of students work through the dilemmas to produce a thought-provoking paper.
The recommendations of Victoria’s Royal Commission into the Mental Health System provide a positive way forward, says Reg Murray, who lived through the old, antiquated thinking of yesterday’s laws. He welcomes Premier Daniel Andrews’ promise to implement all the 65 of the changes proposed.
Police investigating police misconduct – and producing no case to answer, or a whitewash – is common throughout Australis. Paul Gregoire tells of some recent cases, and CLA provides some better ways of handling complaints against police generally.
Australia continues to rack up more and more surveillance laws, as successive governments increasingly restrict freedoms in the name of unprovable ‘cyber threats’, the latest bogeyman of the security community, which must invent new threats continuously to maintain its huge growth rate of the past 20 years. Paul Gregoire reports.
The drip-drip-drip of inexorable increasingly-repressive surveillance laws keep emanating from the black hole of Home Affairs, run by Minister Peter Dutton and his sidekick Mike ‘The Pezz’ Pezzullo. The title of their latest Bill explains what they want to do to the Australian people and society: Identify and Disrupt.
A Year 6 student wrote a letter about the sameness of judges to a newspaper. CLA President Dr Kristine Klugman passed the letter to eminent retired jurist Michael Kirby, who took the time to write this personal reply to the young man…
What’s fair? Should all the special forces soldiers be punished for the alleged criminal acts of the few, by the withdrawal of the commendation as a meritorious unit? In fact, many SOTG soldiers had the moral courage to speak up when their superiors remained deathly silent. Shouldn’t charges be proven in a court of law before any action is taken? CLA member Dr Kay Danes outlines the issues…and asks supporters to sign a petition.
How we turn out first responders to emergency mental health situations colours the entire way people with drug-health problems are then treated, Bill Bush says. We need to learn lessons from other countries whose systems are much more helpful to people regaining their health and place in the community.
