• Judge • QC • DPP •
When political parties seek the approval of the people to govern in Australia, they do so with the implicit if not explicitly stated promise that they will provide certain basic fundamental services that are expected in modern democracies. These include, amongst others, a decent health system, transport system, education system and an affordable legal system that ...
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 ...
The least surprising aspect of Senator Anning’s speech was that virtually every ‘fact’ he asserted in his diatribe was simply wrong. He did us all a favour not only by exposing the depths of his prejudices but of revealing his cavernous ignorance. The most disturbing aspect of his speech was the demonstration of how an individual ...
It’s a task akin to herding cats. Getting all State and Territory governments to agree on an Australian energy policy while aligning climate change sceptics with those demanding higher emission reduction targets, seems to be beyond the capacity of our current crop of decision makers. While the “no sniping, no undermining” Tony Abbott and his disciples ...
The phrase ad hominem doesn’t get a lot of airplay round the pubs and cafes of Australia these days. It literally means ‘to the man’ and perfectly describes the state of Australian politics today. It is used best to describe a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of a particular topic is avoided by instead attacking ...
The resort to so-called ‘Cabinet confidentiality’ by Mr Malinauskas and the Labor Opposition concerning the report presented by former Police Commissioner Mal Hyde into carers working with vulnerable children, is as breathtaking in its arrogance as it is cruel in its effect. While cabinet members have traditionally claimed the right to keep differing opinions expressed amongst ...
It is a well entrenched principle of sentencing in the criminal law that certain features of a case may be regarded as mitigatory in their effect on punishment. Such features might include a plea of guilty, a demonstration of remorse, forgiveness by the victim or assistance given to the investigating authorities. The absence of these features does ...
For better or worse the involvement of the British Empire in the settling of Australia has left us with many of the trappings of British, and particularly English, life. We have benefited as a nation from a heritage of parliamentary democracy, our legal system and, of course, cricket. However we have had good cause to question the ...