Australia to Implement Protections Against Prisoner Abuse
After signing the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT) in 2009, the Australian government finally ratified the international treaty on December 15 last year. The nation is now obligated to enhance oversight in its places of detention to prevent the...
Religious Exemption Laws: An Interview With Professor Marion Maddox
Philip Ruddock’s inquiry into whether Australian laws adequately protect religious freedoms began last Wednesday. Malcolm Turnbull announced the controversial review in late November, in response to the concerns of his colleagues and ‘No’ voters over same-sex marriage laws. The expert panel assisting Ruddock...
The Top Five Australian Crime Films
Australian cinema has a long history of producing raw and brutal films. And none more so, than those that explore criminal conduct. It could even be said that the outlaw defines the zeitgeist of our colonial times. Perhaps part of...
1984: Dystopian Prophecies Become Reality
The week after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January last year, George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four became Amazon’s number one selling book. Penguin Books had to order a reprint of 75,000 copies to keep up with the increase in demand. It seemed people...
Medical Marijuana Innovation: An Interview With Andrew Kavasilas
In late 1930s Australia, dozens of cannabis-based medicines were widely available, either by prescription or over-the-counter. One of the most popular was Dr J Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, which was a preparation made from Nepalese cannabis resin. When a Victorian MP...
The Mandela Rules: Minimum Prison Standards Must Be Implemented
Nelson Mandela famously said, “no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.” And after revelations about the mistreatment and torture of young people inside Darwin’s Don Dale youth detention centre, it must be acknowledged we have...
Norway Benefits from Rehabilitation, While Australia Lags Behind
Studies have consistently found that sending people to prison significantly increases their chances of offending, rather than reduces it, and that alternatives to imprisonment are more likely to put offenders on the straight and narrow than full time prison custody....
Release Yanto Awerkion: An Interview with Free West Papua’s Raki Ap
West Papuan independence activist Yanto Awerkion is set to stand trial on charges of treason in Timika District Court tomorrow. Mr Awerkion was due to go before the court in West Papua last Tuesday, but the trial was postponed, as the...
Turnbull’s War on Welfare Recipients
As you sit at home in your Point Piper mansion, and it’s getting close to end of year celebrations, what else would one think as prime minister of Australia, but, “Who am I gonna take a swipe at next? Ah,...
Indentured Labour in the British Empire: Slavery Reworked
In 1807, British parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which banned the practice of transporting enslaved African peoples to the Americas to be sold there. This brought to an end to Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave...
