A federal parliament committee is hearing widespread views on the state of Australian democracy, including our inability to amend the Constitution and a reluctance to hold many referendums, in a series of ‘public’ meetings available to all citizens through streaming. Here is a precis of the comments in a submission by academic Dr Bede Harris, who has recently launched a major book on the subject.
Two experts, Hugh Selby and Barbara Etter, have formally asked Tasmanian Attorney-General Elise Archer to re-open the ‘in limbo’ appeal by Sue Neill-Fraser into her 2010 conviction for murdering her husband, Bob Chappell, aboard a yacht moored in Sandy Bay, Hobart, in 2009. The appeal has been heard, but a decision is awaited. The experts say police incompetence, or worse, has never been examined in the SNF case: if it was, she may well be acquitted.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.
