CLA warning on mass surveillance highlighted

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.

Want to know about pill testing at music festivals?

Here’s a detailed, sober assessment of the issues around pill testing at music and dance festivals, written by a group who have lost children to drug-taking. Unfortunately, its opening lines – written on 12 Jan 2019 – are out of date: there’s been another music festival death since then. Police put their trust in sniffer dogs (accuracy rate, about 27%, a NSW Ombudsman study shows), and politicians promote prohibition. With teens and twenties, who come alive to to the beat of music, that works about as well as telling young people not to experiment with sex.

Lest we forget the dead, lost fighting for distant empires

Lest we forget we will all chant, as we have all chanted for a century now. And yet it is as if all that chanting only ensures we remember nothing. If we remembered would we 100 years later still allow our young men to be sent off to kill or be killed in distant conflicts defending yet again not our country, but another distant empire, as we have in Iraq and Afghanistan?