A Misuse of the Law to Silence Me: Vegan Activist Tash Peterson on Liquor Premises Ban
The disruptive protests of animal rights activist Tash Peterson have caused such a stir in her home state of Western Australia over the last three years, that WA police recently banned her from all licensed premises, issuing a barring notice under...
UN Inspection Body Visit Should Spur Action on Detainee Abuse, Says Shoebridge
Then attorney general George Brandis ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, otherwise known as the OPCAT, on 15 December 2017, which means our nation agreed to establish a UN governed system of independent bodies to inspect Australia’s places of...
“Police Powers Are Bleeding Out”: Redfern Legal Centre’s Sam Lee on the Strip Search Class Action
The long-awaited strip search class action was filed in the Common Law Division of the NSW Supreme Court on 21 July. The proceedings will cover all music festival attendees, who’ve registered and been subjected to a suspect strip search at events...
“The Time Has Come for Full Disclosure”: Former Senator Rex Patrick on the Timor-Leste Files
Former Senator Rex Patrick was standing outside Room 5.3 of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal on 28 July, while proceedings were taking place inside, as, despite his having initiated the case being heard, he wasn’t permitted to enter due to the secrecy...
Big Australian Retailers Sprung Collecting Customer’s Faceprints
In a move right out of former Liberal home affairs minister Peter Dutton’s playbook, a number of Australian retailers were recently found to be utilising biometric facial recognition technology to capture digital “faceprints” of customers that can be matched to...
Australian Imams Call Out Beijing’s Oppression of the Uyghur People
The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) released a statement last Friday, calling out the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decades-long persecution of the Uyghur people in their homelands, which has only been intensifying over recent years. The Uyghurs are a Central Asian...
As NYC Warns Residents to Be Prepared, Nuclear War Is Closer Than Ever Before
Earlier this month, the New York City Office of Emergency Management released a short public service announcement warning residents in the biggest city in the United States of what they should do in the case of a nuclear attack. The...
Attorney General to Restore Human Rights Commission, After Coalition Destroyed It
Following his decision to drop the prosecution against ACT barrister Bernard Collaery, federal attorney general Mark Dreyfus is continuing to clean up the deplorable condition nine years’ worth of Coalition chief lawmakers left the nation’s legal affairs in. On the...
The Sun Has Quietly Set on the NT Intervention, or Has It?
Considering the Howard government deployed ADF troops to remote Aboriginal communities in June 2007 to implement the NT Intervention, the brief 17 June post on a federal agency website announcing the main legislation facilitating the policy has just expired seems...
Sex Work as Work Is a Feminist Issue, Says Rights Activist Julie Bates AO
Writer/director Victoria Midwinter Pitt’s I’m With Her continues play to sell-out audiences around the country. The piece explores the journeys of resistance taken by eight pioneering women in patriarchal Australia through a #MeToo lens. Amongst the voices of the women that...
