Writings on the wall

What follows is my submission to the Colin Brown Human Rights Project. This is a community consultation process carried out by the Law Reform Institute of Tasmania, at the behest of the Tasmanian State Government. The project is described here in more detail. It will culminate in a recommendation to Parliament for human rights legislation.
Introduction: [...]

Tasmania is considering bringing in a bill or charter of human rights, following the lead of the Australian Capital Territory and the state of Victoria. It has asked the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute to investigate the matter, consult with the community, and produce recommendations and a summary of the submissions it receives.
Australians don’t enjoy very [...]

Freedom of speech in Australia is in far worse shape than generally understood. Frank Moorhouse, researching his essay, “The writer in a time of terror” came across first one and then a large number of extremely frightening examples of Orwellian censorship and government interference. The following article is based on an interview Moorhouse did with [...]

Complex systems can have emergent properties. In other words the interactions between the constituent elements of the system can give rise to events, patterns, and behaviours which are not easy to predict by examination of the individual elements in isolation. In fact I would say two other things about this:

To predict the future state of [...]

This week I’ve found myself by turns angry and sad about politics for the first time since the Israeli bombardment of civilians in Lebanon. This time the reason, I think, is that I had begun to believe that the right wing assault on the foundations of democracy, freedom, and human rights had ground to a [...]