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Search Results: Brandis

  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's OPCAT problem

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 17 November 2022
    1 Comment

    Australia’s ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT) came about as a reaction to the abuses recorded at the Northern Territory’s Don Dale youth prison. To monitor compliance with OPCAT, UN independent inspection teams are permitted to conduct unannounced visits to any place where people are deprived of liberty. But on October 24, a Corrective Services NSW spokesperson announced that inspection teams were ‘refused entry without incident’.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Path to a Referendum: From Uluru via Garma to Canberra and on to the People

    • Frank Brennan
    • 17 August 2022
    2 Comments

    We need to be able to do more than simply give notional assent to the Uluru Statement. We need to be able to contribute to the hard thinking and difficult discussions to be had if the overwhelming majority of our fellow Australians are to be convinced of the need for a Voice in the Constitution.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Uluru Statement, the Constitution and the Election

    • Frank Brennan
    • 06 May 2022
    3 Comments

    Whoever is Prime Minister after the election on May 21, he will need to address the question of Indigenous recognition in the Australian Constitution. This is the sixth election in a row when the question has been a live, unresolved issue during the election campaign. The patience of Indigenous leaders is understandably wearing thin. Trust is waning. There is still no clear path ahead. So where to from here?  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Restoring Australia's cultural ambition

    • Esther Anatolitis
    • 20 August 2019
    1 Comment

    At stake here is who takes responsibility for sector development in the arts as both a cultural and an economic good. Because right now, there is no national organisation or government agency whose role it is to take a responsible, long-term, national view, making sure there are programs in place to address key priorities.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    'Career' Brexiteers fail the Edmund Burke test

    • Max Atkinson
    • 02 August 2019
    17 Comments

    Now that the UK is in the final phase of leaving the Union we should ask, before the bell tolls, how much this misadventure — or folie de grandeur — was due to politicians putting their interests above those of the nation, ignoring democratic theory and long-settled constitutional practice.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A parliamentary route through Uluru impasse

    • Frank Brennan
    • 16 October 2018
    16 Comments

    Despite what Turnbull and Morrison have said, I reject the classification of the First Nations Voice as a third chamber. Still, given that the proposal has been rejected by three Coalition prime ministers over the last three years, the question now is: what is the best way to proceed?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Walt Whitman on Donald Trump

    • Wally Swist
    • 03 September 2018
    5 Comments

    Oh, you snake oil selling provocateur, you faux gilded imposter, selling authoritarianism for American democracy; may you choke on your own phlegm-filled speeches, your conspiratorial rants, your endless quiver of lies, whose equivocal insults you brandish and shoot like arrows at those whose integrity you should quaver beneath.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Where have all the arts ministers gone?

    • Eliza Berlage
    • 02 March 2018
    1 Comment

    Is it any wonder that when I came to work in the press gallery I was cynical about arts policy? In those lockup hours scouring budget papers it was clear yet again the arts would not see any wins. It wasn't always this way. Prime ministers and arts ministers of yesteryear produced arts policy informed by their personal and political interest.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2017: ATSI custody needs action not just inquiry

    • Kate Galloway
    • 09 January 2018

    The inquiry into Indigenous incarceration in Australia recognises and validates widely held concerns. On the other hand, it also represents the abject failure of successive governments around the country to pay heed to what we do know about the incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The empty platitudes of Australian human rights

    • Kate Galloway
    • 25 October 2017
    5 Comments

    Within the one week, the UN announced Australia would be joining the Human Rights Council, and the UN Human Rights Committee criticised Australia for 'chronic non-compliance'. The dissonance of these two stories calls into question Australia's commitment to human rights, even as it proclaims its global human rights leadership.

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  • MEDIA

    Encryption and liberties on the 'ungovernable' internet

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 14 July 2017
    6 Comments

    Turnbull's attitude echoes the fear all autocracies have: that control is slipping away, and that citizens cannot be trusted to behave in a modern communications environment without government intrusions. Arguments are repeatedly made that such enlarged powers are never abused - a charmingly naive assumption - and that law enforcement authorities merely need the 'capacity' to have them. These can either abate, or be extended, after a review. The reality tends to be different.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Aboriginal custody inquiry means little without action

    • Kate Galloway
    • 14 February 2017
    7 Comments

    The Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into Indigenous incarceration in Australia recognises and validates widely held concerns. On the other hand, it also represents the abject failure of successive governments around the country to pay heed to what we do know about the incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, including the failure to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

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