Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights has tabled a report that makes a persuasive argument for comprehensive legislation to protect Australians’ fundamental human rights. Its Inquiry into Australia’s Human Rights Framework (2024) identifies a catalogue of deficiencies in the nation’s disaggregated systems of human rights protection. The report provides a new and compelling case for Continue reading »
Government
The security vetting process has gone off the rails in Australia. It’s been outsourced to the private sector, which has a financial incentive to make renewing a security clearance as lengthy as possible. Those with high-level jobs in many government departments, agencies and the defence bureaucracy have to renew their clearance every five years. They Continue reading »
Once upon a time the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken booked a nice hotel room with a Queen bed and invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to share it with him. Continue reading »
The Australian Labor Party’s solidarity pledge is being widely sledged in the wake of Western Australian Senator Fatima Payman’s resignation from caucus. But it’s worth stepping back and reconsidering this core element of Labor’s culture and history against contemporary culture and practices. 1. Pledge-style solidarity is not old hat Critics shouldn’t be so fast to dismiss the Continue reading »
Before leaving the Labor Party, Senator Fatima Payman made it clear she did not sign up to a Labor Government whose caucus had not itself signed up to the Labor Party platform which required a recognition of the state of Palestine and a two-party solution to the Middle East’s endless malaise. She made that discovery Continue reading »
My copy of Iris Chang’s THE RAPE OF NANKING is missing its collection of historical photographs. Having seen them once, I could not bear to see them again, nor risk my teenage son coming across them, so I ripped them from the book. Now, every day on social media that is not controlled by the Continue reading »
Yesterday’s French elections’ results are everything except what predictions had forecast. Only days ago, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party was tipped to win. But this weekend it became the clear loser of these French National Assembly elections. The far right National Rally is coming third, behind Macron’s centrist Ensemble coalition in second. And in first place, somewhat against Continue reading »
With former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Varghese undertaking a review of taxpayer dollars spent on strategic policy work, Australia’s China hawks have argued a Canberra-based thinktank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), cannot be touched. After an employee of the Chinese embassy included funding an “anti-China thinktank” in a Continue reading »
The essential difference between Senator Fatima Payman and the rest of the federal Labor caucus – and the Coalition caucus as well – is that she opposes genocide and wants the federal parliament to take effective action against it. She is a minority of one in the federal Labor-Coalition political class. Everything that has occurred Continue reading »
The purpose of this paper is to help promote discussion about the ways in which the efficiency, effectiveness and capability of the Australian Public Service (APS) and its integrity can be improved, and the standing of the APS as a key institution in Australia’s democratic system can be restored. Competent democratic government in the public Continue reading »