August 1, 2009 – 10:00 pm
There is more evidence that, however unjust and dysfunctional the administration of Australia’s immigration laws was in our recent past, it is being outstripped by what has been happening in the USA.
There are more and more examples coming to light in the USA that have echoes of the Cornelia Rau and Vivienne Alvarez debacles of [...]
The shambles engulfing Australia’s international students continues to bubble along. Even worse, publicity about it continues to bubble along overseas, especially in Indian media.
There are now reports that the education sector is trying to crack down on so-called ‘rogue education agents’. It’s hard to see how that achieves anything more than window dressing. The previous [...]
On Tuesday night, July 28, around 300 people filled the Brisbane Room in Brisbane’s City Hall to hear speakers from the front line of climate change – residents of the Torres Strait and Pacific Island nations Tuvalu, Micronesia and Kiribati. It’s very rare for me to attend a forum with seven speakers all addressing the [...]
No doubt President Obama will disappoint plenty of people in plenty of areas before his time as President finishes, but one area where he seems keen to make improvements is in the way the USA approaches human rights issues internationally.
Last Friday he “announced his intention to sign the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons [...]
Saying sorry doesn’t magically fix injustices, past or present – a point which is often made in respect of the Parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generations. It is true that apologising for past wrongs won’t in itself address present problems, but this fact doesn’t validate the view that formal apologies serve no purpose or have [...]
The irrational obsession with pulling out all stops to prevent asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia is placing our country at risk of being party to human rights abuses on refugees much worse than those of the Howard era.
This week , the federal government is taking the unusual step of having the Prime Minister [...]
Last Thursday night, I was able to get along to Avid Reader bookshop in Brisbane to hear Malalai Joya speak at a launch of her new book – Raising My Voice. Ms Joya is often described as the bravest woman in Afghanistan. Being a women’s rights activist under the Taliban would certainly take some guts. [...]
As President Obama works slowly on reforms such removing the counter-productive and discriminatory ban on openly gay and lesbian people in the US military, some positive news has come from India, where a Court has ruled that a law criminalising consensual sex between two people of the same gender breaches India’s Constitution.
Ironically, the law in [...]
It’s hard to know for sure just quite what roles it playing, how accurate it is or what impact it will have, but the literally thousands of Twitter posts pouring forth in the aftermath of the Iran election is quite extraordinary to watch.
When I first signed on to Twitter over a year ago, I really [...]
When you contrast it with the wall to wall coverage given to the Australian ‘beer mat Mum’ who ran into some brief, although no doubt very unsettling, trouble with the law in Thailand, it is extraordinary that the experiences of the five Australians who have been detained in Merauke, West Papua for nearly nine months [...]
