Displaying items by tag: Australian Politics

The COVID scare has hit us like a meteor, without warning and with great consequences for our freedoms and our rights.  Is what the State says right?  Is our way of life under threat?  And does the State even know what it is doing?

There is something rotten in the State of New South Wales.  The State is run by paid lobbyists who control the Liberal Party.  And the interests and philosophies of these puppeteers are decidedly not those of mainstream folks who believe, naively, that they control the governments that they vote for.  The governments are puppets.

Accepting that the Victorian institutions involved in getting Pell need reforming, this two part essay explores the uncanny parallels between the Pell case here and similar cases in the UK, and draws lessons from these in charting a course towards reform.

Senator Cory Bernardi has had the wind knocked out of his sails by successive electoral defeats for his party. Hindsight is 20:20, and he should never have left the Liberal Party. The Australian Conservatives had all the potential in the world to bring a genuine conservative revolution to Australian politics, but not as a party in its own right.

Dave Pellowe interviews Teeshan Johnson, the Executive Director of Cherish Life Qld, about this insidious organisation that has an invisible hand in every Parliament in Australia. What extreme agendas do EMILY’s List members have for Australia’s future? What have they already achieved without the general public knowing who was behind it?

Well, it's that time of year when we look back over the last 12 months and thank God for His blessings and protection. It's also customary to examine our lives - our achievements and failures - to see what can be improved upon in the coming year. I'll certainly be spending some time in the next couple of weeks considering what improvements can be made to the website and its content. Below are the articles that you liked best and shared the most widely during 2018.

In my former posts (here and here), O Friend of Law and Religion, I have dealt with all that the Ruddock Report covered in recommendations 1-12 and 15, along with the official Government Response to those recommendations. In this post I aim to cover recommendations 13-14 and 16-20. These deal with important issues of the law of blasphemy and religious free speech, along with State discrimination laws, collection of data, education on religious freedom, the role of the Australian Human Rights Commission, and the exercise of leadership in the area by the Commonwealth.    

Following my previous post giving comments on Recommendations 1, 5-8 and 15 of the Ruddock Report and the Government Response, I will comment here on another set of recommendations (Recs 2-4, 9-12) and the likely outcome. Comments on recommendations 13-14, and 16-20, will (hopefully) be made in Part 3!

The long-awaited Religious Freedom Review: Report of the Expert Panel (chaired by the Hon Philip Ruddock) has now been released publicly, along with the formal Government Response. After the prior leaking of its 20 recommendations there were no major surprises as to the final conclusion, but there is much interesting background to the recommendations (and in one or two cases the full Report seems to have a significant impact on how one should read the language of the recommendations.) It is also important to see the announced intentions of the LNP Government as to how they will respond. In this first post in response to the full Report I will comment mainly on recommendations 1 & 5-8 and recommendation 15, with the other recommendations to be left for part 2 or later.

A brief note about the Sex Discrimination Act amendments which have the subject of a number of recent posts. The House of Representatives has now adjourned for the year without a Government Bill being introduced to make any changes concerning religious schools and discrimination. So no binding changes will be made this year. On 6 December the Senate referred the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Removing Discrimination Against Students) Bill 2018 to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry and report by 11 February 2019. Submissions to the Committee can be made at the website linked here, and must be provided by 11 January 2019: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Affairs/Sexdiscrimination.