Opinion -What you say on issues
Is it OK for Australia to bug our neighbouring countries’ negotiating teams? Who makes such decisions? Should corporate interests benefit from state surveillance and bugging? What’s is permissible under the Rule of Law (ROL) and the Rule of Morals and Ethics (RoME)? We need a Royal Commission to get to the bottom of the East Timor bugging scandal, to decide what is right and what is wrong for the future.
With new Australian anti-terror laws running at about five a year over 18 years, there are two fundamental questions: has our safety changed for the better, and do we need all of them now, or should there be a consolidated ‘Anti-terror Act’ that reins in the draconian excesses, restores balanced rights and liberties, and better represents the real dangers in 2020 to the nation?
In a proposed new law before parliament, the government wants the right to conduct broad-spectrum surveillance, and hold photos on every Australian, without necessary safeguards. It claims the technology doesn’t exist for mass surveillance in real time, but The Guardian report’s CLA President Dr Kristine Klugman when she points out that a minor development could introduce the option of ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’ high-tech to Australia in just a few months, which police and security authorities would find ‘cheap and enticing’…and irresistible.
With marijuana – cannabis – soon to be legal in the ACT, we look forward to photos of Prime Minister Scott Morrison lighting up a rollie at The Lodge, and of Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton tending his four pot plants at his Canberra address.
Rabble is in ‘power’, but isn’t ‘governing’: Instead of a government, we have an ugly, vacuous rabble. They are somehow in power, but not “governing” in any intelligent way. Sexual assault accusations that go nowhere; deliberately divisive rhetoric (‘Whose side are you on?’ being a stand-out); Ministers accused of corruptly …
The recent Australian Federal Police raids on a News Corp journalist and the ABC are an alarming extension of growing repressive tendencies by the Australian government. When you combine bad laws and expanded unquestionable powers with poor management decisions and a curtailing of public and media reviews, the result is that unalert citizens unknowingly become subjects of a police state. John Passant asks: how far along that path are we?Victoria’s Minister Lisa Neville is not well please with federal Minister Dutton’s ’thought bubble’ in January about a federal Sex Offender Register: “The Victorian Government was disappointed that it was not consulted prior to the announcement of the proposal and I have written to Minister Dutton requesting further consultation on …
I read recently that many treaties, including the Trans Pacific Partnership, contain clauses prohibiting restrictions on where data is stored. It is designed, I understand, to stop sovereign governments from requiring that, for example, data stored in your cloud account or at your bank be stored on national servers. It …