Month: January 2016

THANK you, Senator Eric Abetz. Abetz’s comments this week on marriage equality should serve as a timely warning to the Australian Republican Movement and to all those who support the cause of removing the hereditary monarchy from our Constitution. Continue reading “Republicans be warned of plebiscite idiocy”

A DELIGHTFUL ding-dong has been going on this month between South Australian Independent Senator Nick Xenophon and the noted psephologist Malcolm Mackerras that has led Mackerras to call for a re-run of the 1984 High Court case that declared the present mad Senate voting system constitutionally valid. Continue reading “Senate voting system should be challenged”

PRIME Minister Jim Hacker in the Yes, Prime Minister series said of the British public, “I am their leader, I must follow them.” Continue reading “New ways of gathering public opinion”

THE brass plaques are everywhere. On bridges, hospitals, schools, highways and also on additions and extensions to them. They are on telecommunications towers, railway stations, bus interchanges, airports, ports, fire stations, police stations and sport stadiums. On virtually every bit of infrastructure that any drop of public money helped build. Continue reading “Infrastructure self-promotion by government not needed”

AN ASSERTION of judicial power to protect rights in Australia would not go amiss after a decade of onslaught by the legislature and executive against ordinary liberal-democratic principles.

An analysis by constitutional lawyer George Williams tallies 350 Australian laws that now infringe those basic democratic standards. The laws cover not just anti-terror and defence, but also general crime, discrimination, consumer law, migration, industrial relations, intellectual property, evidence, shipping, environment, education and health. Continue reading “Powerful Australian legislature stepping into judicial sphere”