• Judge • QC • DPP •
ESCAPING JUSTICE So we’ve had the Respect@Work: Sexual Harrassment National Inquiry Report (2020) and for over a year, Attorney General Porter has done absolutely nothing to implement any of the recommendations. We’ve had thousands of women (and a few men) march in our streets in anger, frustration and desperation in the earnest hope that those same streets ...
There is some dispute as to whether Emperor Nero was actually fiddling while Rome burned down around him.What is far more certain is that our health department is on fire and not a single politician has run for the hoses. The unspeakable tragedy of the recent death of four infants in government care, is the latest ...
So what have we learned? Has justice been served or, in other words was the trial fair? Fairness and legal procedure are not always coterminous. The loudest voices concern themselves exclusively with fairness for an accused – perhaps properly so. But does anyone ask is it fair for the victim? While an accused can sit comfortably behind his well ...
Once again the grandiose banner of “Your Right To Know” has been trotted out to justify a newspaper’s dishonourable exercise of self-interest. Under the populist guise of doing a public service, the press repeats the fallacious argument that the fact that an individual has been charged with a sexual offence is “hidden” from the public. The ...
Interesting to contemplate what the election outcome might have been if all parties had been required by law to tell the truth while campaigning. And at last we can now dispense with the fiction that Australian elections are about national policies and simply search for a Mr or Mrs Popularity to run for PM. Morrison fills ...
John Howard’s disgraceful comments that Pell’s convictions for raping and molesting children doesn’t change his opinion of Pell at all, are clearly the ramblings of an individual who is struggling for relevance and has lost touch with reality. For Tony Abbott to express similar support, once again confirms that he has lost the capacity, if he ...
So now we get to read what most of Australia, and the rest of the world, has known for months. George Pell has been convicted of five serious criminal offences involving the sexual abuse of young boys. Four counts of committing an indecent act with, or in the presence of a child under 16 and ...
The Catholic church is fast becoming a global pariah. In an extraordinarily self-righteous pronouncement, the church announced that is going to ignore the findings of the Royal Commission and will flaunt the laws in SA requiring the reporting of any admissions of child sexual abuse. Presumably they already adopt the same attitude in relation to those ...
Well, here's another fine mess they've got us into! Some say that our political system is the worst in the world – except for all of the rest - and while it has its pros, the dreadful spectacle of the last week has again revealed many of its cons. The stupidity of the loony right faction, who ...
When the founder of the Liberal Party, Sir Robert Menzies said – “As the etymology of our name ‘Liberal’ indicates, we have stood for freedom … believing in the individual….We have realised that men and women are not just ciphers in a calculation, but are individual human beings … (and) to protect the individual from oppression….” he ...