In October last year, Queensland put a woman and her partner on trial for a crime that should not be on the statute books. Tegan Leach and Sergie Brennan were charged under sections 225 and 226 of the Queensland Criminal Code 1899 because Brennan asked his sister overseas to import misoprostol, a drug used for […]
It’s 8.20 on a Monday evening and a small man with nothing much to distinguish him, except perhaps his lack of shoes, is sprawled in the middle of the footpath on Mitchell Street, the main drag in Darwin. It’s the end of the dry season so the nights are unforgivably hot and sweaty. The town […]
That Australia is the only democracy in the world without a law to protect human rights is not a situation that can persist forever. So thinks most of the community. As far as our parliament is concerned, it has been very slow to respond to the need to legislate better protection of rights, in particular […]
For a garment designed to conceal, the burqa has managed to attract more than its fair share of attention. In France, where the burqa is worn by roughly 1900 women, or 0.3 per cent of the population, it was nevertheless deemed worthy of a blanket ban in all public spaces. Here in Australia, calls for […]
On the evening of 11 December 2008, fifteen year-old Tyler Cassidy was shot and killed by police during a confrontation at a skate park in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote. A coronial inquest into the incident is currently in progress. This follows an internal investigation by Victoria Police in which Assistant-Commissioner Stephen Fontana found the […]
I come from a very noisy family. My dad spoke six languages and told jokes in all of them; he was the family storyteller. My mum grew up in London traffic and I am the youngest of five outspoken children. When I was eighteen years old, the stories stopped. The valve between my dad’s oesophagus […]