Articles by Paul Gregoire

Currently, a parliamentary committee is reviewing a bill introduced into federal parliament in February that would establish a national facial recognition system allowing federal and state police access to a hub linking all identification photo databases that could be matched with CCTV images. The interoperability hub will be run by Dutton’s home affairs super-ministry, which has recently ...

An exhibition of actual human corpses that’s currently being shown at the Moore Park Byron Kennedy Hall is causing public outrage. Real Bodies: The Exhibition features the display of 20 cadavers and over 200 human organs preserved through plastination in China. Critics of the exhibition are calling for its closure, as they hold grave concerns ...

This Saturday marks a year since a boy who suffers from spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy was taken from the care of his parents. On May 19 last year, NSW police and Family and Community Services (FACS) removed the boy from Newcastle’s Church of Ubuntu. Section 43(1) of the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act ...

The war on drugs has failed. This is a reality that’s increasingly being acknowledged around the globe, as communities start to realise that the outcomes produced by this intensification of drug law enforcement have been overwhelmingly destructive. The close to fifty years of the drug war has seen the mass incarceration of people for merely using ...

The Victorian Liberal Party recently passed a motion to support the Nordic model of sex work regulation. This is a sex work policy that criminalises clients and support structures of sex workers, rather than the workers themselves. Passed at the April Liberal State Council meeting, the motion outlines that “a more sensible policing policy” will “protect ...

Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull met with his Canadian, UK and New Zealand counterparts for a security briefing at the UK National Cyber Security Centre on April 18. Along with the US, the four countries represented at the meeting make up the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. At the high-level meeting of the secretive data sharing alliance, ...

Thousands of Uyghur people rallied outside the European Commission in Brussels on April 27, calling on foreign governments to take a stand against the hundreds of thousands of their people being detained in re-education camps by the Chinese government. Up to one million Uyghurs are or have been detained in “political education centres” in the ...

The resounding success of Australia’s first government-sanctioned pill testing trial at the Groovin the Moo festival in Canberra last Sunday drew a line in the sand of this nation’s harm reduction landscape. Before it took place, the voices of those conservative forces who rallied against the trialling of a method that’s been proved saves lives ...

Alek Minassian ploughed a rented van into pedestrians along a 2 kilometre stretch of road in North Toronto on April 23. The 25-year-old college student killed 10 people and injured 14 more, in what witnesses said was a purposeful attack. Described as a “socially awkward” man, Minassian has been charged with 10 counts of first degree ...

A large number of Australians breathed a collective sigh of relief on April 16, as Greens leader Richard Di Natale announced that his party is proposing that recreational cannabis use be legalised nationally. Drug law reformists and harm reduction experts have long stated that what’s hampering change in this country is that politicians are unwilling to ...