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'Lee and Christine Rush are your average Ozzie couple, except that their teenage son Scott is on death row in Bali having been convicted of being a hapless drug mule. It will not go down well on the streets of Jakarta if Australians are baying for the blood of the Bali bombers one month and then pleading to save our sons and daughters the next month.'
The text is from Professor Frank Brennan's 2008 Institute of Justice Studies Oration from 22 May 2008.
Last month, members of the Pine Gap Four 'citizens inspection team' were acquitted in a Darwin court. Parliamentary committees, juries and the citizen's right to civil disobedience are necessary safeguards for liberty when government is tempted to use the legal sledgehammer to crack the nut of political dissent.
The power of the State can be exercised capriciously and unaccountably when the “Don’t ask; don’t tell” approach to government is immune from parliamentary, judicial or public scrutiny. It is the task of lawyers to make it more difficult for politicians to take this approach.
There are times when we Australians get the balance between national interest and individual liberty wrong, especially when the individual is a member of a powerless minority. One way of improving the balance is including the judiciary in the calculus, as has now happened in the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
If you look closely at the laws in Ireland 200 years ago, you will see that they denied to Irish Catholics all the civil and political, economic, social and cultural rights we aim to protect under the proposed Australian Human Rights Act.
The following is an edited text of an address given by Fr Frank Brennan sj ao, at the launch of his most recent book, Tampering with Asylum.
Art speaks, but we sometimes need translation
In a knee-jerk of anti-terrorist fervour, the French Government seems to want religion to be totally private, walled in.
Troy Bramston takes a closer look at America’s founding fathers in Gore Vidal’s Inventing a Nation: Washington, Jefferson, Adams.
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