Should University Cheats Face Prison Time?
Federal education minister Dan Tehan has proposed tough new criminal laws which would see students who submit exams and assignments written by others, as well as those who receive fees to write material which they know will be submitted in...
NSW Magistrate Guilty of Sexual Offences
A jury in Downing Centre District Court has found the Magistrate charged with nine counts of indecent assault guilty of seven of the counts. 68-year old Graeme Curran was found guilty of indecently assaulting a boy aged between 13 and...
From Decriminalising to Legalising Cannabis: An Interview With Ex-ACT Health Minister Michael Moore
As far as ACT Labor MLA Michael Pettersson is concerned, his territory will be legalising the use and personal possession of cannabis before the year is out. The legislation he introduced to make this happen is currently before a parliamentary...
Government Slammed for Inaction Over Mass Incarceration of First Nations Peoples
Right now, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the most incarcerated people on Earth. Despite making up 2.8 percent of the overall population in Australia, First Nations people account for close to 28 percent of the adult prisoner population....
Muslims Are the Main Targets of Hate Crimes in NSW
A recent study by the Sydney Institute of Criminology (SIC) has found that the overwhelming majority of religiously motivated hate crime in New South Wales is perpetrated against Muslim people. The SIC’s Professor Gail Mason made the finding by looking...
First Nations Suicide Prevention: An Interview With R U OK?’s Dr Vanessa Lee
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicide rates have reached crisis point. After being very low in the late 1980s, the number of First Nations people taking their own lives over the last decade has been increasing dramatically. And over the...
Twilight of the Federal Coalition: It’s Time for Change
After eight years of the NSW Liberal Nationals government slowly implementing a suite of laws which have eroded civil liberties, including anti-protest laws and legislation passed under the guise of fighting terrorism, as well as a drawn out assault upon...
Use of Defence Lawyer As Informant Labelled ‘Negligence in the Highest Order’
The failure of Victoria Police to obtain legal advice before persuading and paying a criminal defence barrister to inform on her own clients was labelled in a 2015 report by the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) as ‘negligence in the...
Isolating Extremists Increases the Danger
One of the responses used by many countries to the threat of violent extremism has been to segregate suspected offenders in prison. However, a decade-long study of prisons in the Philippines by Australian National University researcher Dr Clarke Jones suggests...
Maralinga No More: The British Nuclear Bombing of First Nations Lands
As former Australian Conservation Foundation anti-nuclear campaigner David Noonan put it in 2005, “Australia is the only society to have ever provided its own uranium to an overseas nuclear weapons state to make nuclear weapons to then bomb back on...
