I just became aware of this piece of legislation, recently introduced into the South Australian Parliament: the Serious Crime (Control) Bill 2007 (SA). You can see the bill here in Rich Text Format or here in PDF.
This legislation is ostensibly aimed at bikie gangs, but it goes a lot further than that, and doesn’t […]
Archive for the 'stuff you should know about' Category
least reassuring statement ever
13Dec07FYI:
[W]e have no current plans to accumulate massive armaments on our neighbours’ borders.
- regards, Russian Foreign Ministry.
Thanks for letting us know. Is it perchance time to stop devoting 100% of our resources to chasing criminally insane Arabic men around in the deserts of the world and start paying attention to Russia’s increasingly aggressive militarism and […]
You might have seen this: the US military ‘lost’ five or six live nuclear warheads and ended up mistakenly flying them across the country. The mistake was not discovered for three and a half hours, when the B-52 in question landed at Barksdale Air Force Base.
The initial questions asked in the media were, of […]
Repeating the mantra that members of parliament meet with Australian citizens “all the time”, it has emerged that the Government’s links to the extremist Christian sect the Exclusive Brethren remain as strong as ever. As mentioned previously (1, 2), the sect both prohibits its members from voting or from participating in society generally, and […]
This week is turning into a big week for the notion of the separation of powers in Australia. As you (should) know, the separation of power between the judiciary and the parliament/executive is one of the devices included in our Constitution to prevent abuses of power by those who govern on our behalf.
In addition to the clash […]
This article in The Age is superficially positive - the new British PM is having trouble getting extended detention powers in anti-terrorist legislation implemented in Britain due to rational parliamentary opposition. The reason is a report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights:
The Joint Committee on Human Rights said in a report it had seen no […]
an enemy of the open society
01Jul07This article from The Australian, entitled “Silencing Our Basic Freedom”, is compulsory reading for anyone who cares about the future of democracy in Australia. This blog is frequently critical of that particular newspaper, but on this issue it is fighting for an extremely important and non-partisan cause - the ability of the media, and […]
The US has established “Africa Command” on the Horn of Africa - a military group with a mission including fighting Islamist militants and, it seems, getting involved in local conflicts in the process.
Some relevant details:
the US now has two-dozen ‘forts’ established in the region
operations include supporting the “xenophobic to the core” Ethiopian regime […]
