Category: Human Rights
Can a WellBeing Budget complement human rights
How is Australia improving – or otherwise – as a nation and a society? Are we becoming a fairer, more equal place to live, concentrating on what produces better outcomes for people? Is our traditional narrow focus on GDP doing us a disservice as a people? CLA’s HR Campaign Manager Chris Stamford examines new ways of measuring progress.
Swastika is an image, misuse is the problem
Jurisdictions throughout Australia are hell-bent on banning symbols they don’t like, when it is way the symbol or sign is used rather than the image itself that is the problem. CLA made this point in a submission to a parliamentary process in the ACT, pointing out that there are thousands of signs, symbols, gestures, chants that could – and do, at times – give offence when misused.
What are human rights? Where from? Why?
‘Human rights’ is a simple concept: the rights let you do what you reasonably want to do…without preventing someone else doing what they want to do. But they can get bound up in formal ‘legalese’. Here, CLA explains our understanding of what ‘human rights’ means as applied to Australia, and why we should have a national, or federal, Human Rights Act or bill of rights like NZ, Canada, the UK and the USA.
Tas Police: secret, illegal keepers of the dark arts
Recent revelations of secret recordings of lawyers and their clients at Risdon Prison by Tasmanian Police over two months raised major alarm bells. The Commonwealth Ombudsman has been consistently calling out TasPol for its recording devices and surveillance warrant failures for years. TasPol's “compliance culture” is lacking, the Ombudsman says. In other words, TasPol does not obey the law. SPECIAL ANALYSIS reveals how extensive the TasPol problem is: nothing less than a full inquiry into TasPol will get to the root causes of its problems.
Warrants: how Tas compares; why reform needed
Police can self-authorise some warrants, or get a magistrate or judge to issue others. But whatever method is mandated, warrants are frequently incorrectly issued in Australia on false, dodgy or incomplete information containing wrong details and not meeting legal requirements, or by unauthorised people. The Commonwealth monitors warrant processes, and its Ombudsman has singled out one state in particular, Tasmania, for compliance and culture criticism over the past few years