Law & Crime

The loss of faith in politicians and the political system has been the most conspicuous aspect of the hollowing out of democracy in this country. The time to fix it is now – with possibly less than a year before the next federal election – by attempting to restore trust with a program of genuine political reform.

The behaviour of some of the commissioners and revelations of conflicts between them suggest ASIC has had serious troubles stemming from its leadership ... The response from ASIC on all these matters suggests an approach of ‘nothing to see here’.

This is the system that kills us – the chain reaction that starts when our kids are taken from us and ends with more Black deaths in custody, more kids without parents set on the same path, more trauma for the next generation.

The latest batch of published polls suggest voters are not yet ready to switch to the Dutton-led Coalition. In this context, it is not hard to see why Dutton, who has always been a strident partisan warrior, has given no quarter as he attempts to turn the High Court-directed release of indefinitely detained migrants and refugees into a national security emergency, a shambles and a catastrophe. In this he has the unabashed urging and backing of the Murdoch media.

New laws have been rushed through parliament with bilateral support but little analysis … This is ‘crisis’ law-making at its worst – reactionary, spurred on by a contrived sense of urgency and inflamed by fearmongering and political opportunism.

What would we not know were it but for brave whistleblowers speaking up? And what do we not know right now because the cost of courage in Australia is too high? These are the questions that keep me awake at night, and they are the reasons the Human Rights Law Centre is this week launching the Whistleblower Project, a new initiative to protect and empower Australian whistleblowers.

For a while, late on Monday afternoon in the house of representatives, you could be forgiven for thinking the Peter Dutton-led opposition had finally cast itself adrift from Scott Morrison.

The very low bar of not losing the Fadden byelection the previous week, and the evident polling success of the aggressive, colonial-tinged ‘No’ team in the Voice campaign, has buoyed Peter Dutton’s Coalition.

The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme has identified appalling dishonesty and lapses in government processes that had serious consequences for the innocent, and their families, who were hounded for non-payment of fictitious ‘debts’.