High Court finds treatment of two Sri Lankan asylum seekers lacked procedural fairness
A very important decision has been handed down by the High Court today, affecting the offshore processing of asylum seekers. Ken Parish sums up: It restores fairness (at least in terms of natural justice and judicial review rights) to offshore [...]
Armistice Day 2010
11 November is significant for a number of reasons – the dismissal of the Whitlam government 35 years ago, the birthday of my dearest friend who left us in 1994, and of course the conclusion of World War One. It [...]
You couldn’t make this stuff up: Bligh and Fraser sell Port of Brisbane to themselves
The Queensland privatisation push has now descended into total farce: read all about it at John Quiggin’s place.
Election quickies and the politics of publishing
A couple of weeks ago, I read both Barrie Cassidy’s Party Thieves and Mungo MacCallum’s Punch and Judy. Both are insta-books on the 2010 election, published an alarmingly short time after the event. This publishing phenomenon perhaps existed overseas for [...]
George Brandis on the Tea Party: “legitimate but very heated criticism”
The Liberal Party of Australia, for at least a decade and a half now, has been more than happy to have its own little free trade agreement with the US Republicans, borrowing campaign and political strategies as needed, regardless in [...]
George Bush’s “Decision Points”
Following in the wake of Tony Blair and John Howard, George W. Bush has released his memoirs – Decision Points. No, I haven’t read it, but that’s not the point. There’s a stack of coverage at The Guardian. One of [...]
The debate over the banks
The last couple of weeks of political debate over the banks, and its accentuation in the wake of the Commonwealth Bank’s move to raise interest rates by double the increase in the Reserve Bank’s cash rate, has been an interesting [...]
Climate change policy after the US elections
In a sense Obama’s scrapping of the cap-and-trade climate legislation was not news. It was never going to fly after the mid-term elections. So the interest is in how he sees the US tackling the problem. At the press conference [...]
Senate to consider the bloggers v. journos conundrum in journos’ shield law amendments
Stilgherrian reports on comments made by Greens MP for Melbourne Adam Bandt on amendments which will be moved in the Senate to the “journalists’ shield law” bill, which is expected to be unanimously passed by the House of Representatives after [...]
Guest Post by @liz_beths: What is politics?
Cross-posted from Left Flank as a valuable discussion starter about the interactions between electoral politics, activism, and social movements. So what is politics? For most, politics is that thing that happens in Canberra and on Macquarie Street. That thing to [...]
Public transport and the Victorian election
Sometimes, the novelty of being in a marginal seat is enough to convince one that the Victorian election is all about Labor and the Greens fighting over who’s the most progressive. As such, it’s a useful corrective to look at [...]
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