Calls to Reform Flat-Rate Fining Regimes That Paralyse the Poor
The COVID-19 penalty infringement regime that’s prevailed nationwide since the pandemic onset has brought into stark relief the disparities involved in the practice of imposing flat-rate financial penalties across the entire population regardless of socioeconomic circumstances. Hiking COVID infringement notices...
The Long Warned of Far-Right Threat Has Descended
The rise of the far-right has been of increasing concern across western liberal democracies over recent years. The election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the spike in the right-wing vote throughout Europe have all indicated a drift towards authoritarianism, which...
PM Ignores Calls for a Federal ICAC, While Claiming to be a Champion of Freedom
“The people of NSW know that what was done to Gladys Berejiklian was an absolute disgrace,” Scott Morrison told parliament last Thursday. “The Australian people know that the former premier of NSW was done over by a bad process and...
Chomsky Agrees With Keating and Toohey on the Fallacy of the China Threat
“The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China,” MIT Professor Noam Chomsky told Democracy Now host Amy Goodman this week, in response to a question about the Biden administration’s foreign policy. “By now, there is constant talk about...
Morrison Moves to Enshrine the Right to Be a Religious Bigot in Law
The exposure draft of the Religious Discrimination Bill 2021 (RD Bill) was released on Tuesday. And compared to its first two iterations, it’s watered down. Folau’s clause has been dropped, and so too has the provision that permitted health practitioners...
The Climate Crisis Is an Extraordinary Emergency, XR Activist Jane Morton Argues in Court
The 2018 Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene paper first put forth the Hothouse Earth scenario, which outlines that global warming is likely leading to a “planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much...
“Strip Searches Were Never Meant to Be Routine”: RLC’s Sam Lee on the Splendour Class Action
The protocols stipulating when police can carry out strip searches are set out in a piece of legislation commonly known as the LEPRA. Section 31 of this Act requires that when outside of a police station “the seriousness and urgency...
Climate Activist Imprisoned Over Successful Blockading of Newcastle Coal Port
The heat is turning up on all climate fronts. Keeping below 1.5°C on preindustrial levels is looking increasingly unlikely, while political leaders globally are growing more cunning at presenting their inaction as movement, and climate activists are becoming far more...
Palmer Champions His Own Freedoms, Not the Peoples: Morrison Instigated Mandates
The Freedom movement continues to grow nationwide, as those opposing lockdowns, border closures and vaccine mandates, rally together on the streets, calling for the upholding of rights and the restoration of freedoms. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the...
Morrison’s Voter Suppression Laws Will Provoke US-Style Electoral Paranoia
Over recent months, the increasingly Trumpian Morrison government has introduced a suite of laws relating to partaking and voting in federal elections that not only stink of desperation, but they appear as a solution to electoral issues imported from the...
