Law & Crime

Look beyond academia’s well-intended fixation with linguistics and inclusivity and you’ll find huge body of historical and empirical evidence clearly demonstrates gender variance, non-binary gender identity and gender expression have been an intrinsic part of natural human diversity for millennia.

The Abbott grab bag of alt-right grievances amply demonstrates his crusade against same-sex marriage is merely a proxy against the sort of modernity he identifies with Malcolm Turnbull and contemporary Australia.

By now we’ve all seen enough of Turnbull not to expect a tough guy. We want the guy who knows stuff, who is across his brief, who can explain things in detail and persuade us he has it all in hand. Instead, this week, we got Turnbull as played by Sly Stallone, the action hero who couldn’t give directions to get to the pub across the street.

The process of selection is utterly foggy. No public advertisements, no need to be interviewed and no due-diligence panels. One recently appointed member just wrote to Brandis asking whether any jobs were available because he was out of work at the moment. Bingo, he secured an appointment worth up to $275,000 a year.

Politicians playing the blame game are nothing new, especially in the current febrile climate. It is made all the harder for Turnbull because he is under fire from within his own ranks for not being more outspoken on ‘Islamic’ terrorism. As a result, it is a term he and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop are now employing more.

On Wednesday, Labor tried to have the bills debated in the house of representatives. Bill Shorten said the government’s choice of the senate was nothing more than a cynical attempt by the prime minister ‘to be able to make the claim to the extreme elements in his party room that his government is taking action … while hoping MPs in the chamber can avoid having to vote on the issue’. The champions of free speech in the government immediately gagged the debate. So the plan to ‘strengthen the protection of free speech’, as Turnbull claimed, was dead on arrival. But the charade had to be played out, and not without damage in the broader electorate.

Where the bounds of acceptable civil disobedience in a democracy lie is a debate that will be with us so long as times change and society transforms. Implying, as The Australian does, that civil disobedience against bad laws has no place at all takes our country closer to autocracy than most citizens would want to go.

As if having the entire nation under surveillance for potential criminal offences was not sweeping enough, George Brandis has fresh thoughts about extending Big Brother’s scope.

He made his mistakes, he told me. Simple. He blamed no one else for his crimes. Against unimaginable odds, Myu had become a good man.

It is easy to assume race does not play a role in an incident when one claims not to ‘see’ race, or when race does not play a role in one’s life.