Bill Shorten is crying foul because the Trade Union Royal Commission advised us late on Friday he had not broken the law. This begs the question. There should be a law forbidding what he did. He took money from employers that he was negotiating wage agreements with. This is an unacceptable conflict of interest and […]
Continue Reading...Posts in ‘Legal’
Issue not whether Shorten’s actions were illegal, but whether they should have been
Saturday, November 7th, 2015Unions must challenge Dyson in Federal Court
Tuesday, September 1st, 2015Unless the unions challenge Dyson Heydon’s ruling that he does not suffer from apprehended bias they are piling criminality on criminality. In a statement yesterday ACTU Secretary Dave Oliver said the Trade Union Royal Commission is “terminally tarnished”. It is a crime to try to bring a Royal Commission into disrepute. Unless Oliver and his […]
Continue Reading...ACTU case against Heydon boomerangs
Saturday, August 22nd, 2015As I understand it, the ACTU case against Royal Commissioner Dyson Heydon is not that he is biased, but that an average person might think he was biased. Now I would have thought the only reason a royal commissioner should be stood aside is if there is a reasonable apprehension that he might be biased. […]
Continue Reading...Q&A mistake a category killer
Thursday, June 25th, 2015By putting Zaky Mallah to air the ABC made a category mistake. They categorised an existential threat to Australia as being just an ideological disagreement. They are not the only ones making category mistakes about terrorism and terrorist organisations, and until we sort them out our response to Islamic State, and it’s certain successors, will […]
Continue Reading...Once you travelled to war
Sunday, April 26th, 2015For Australians war is something we have always travelled to. We are unlike almost any other nation in this respect. It is something implicit in our celebration of Anzac Day. The battlefields of all these wars are somewhere else. But thanks to the modern age of mobility, war has come to us. It is small […]
Continue Reading...You be the judge on Ferguson
Tuesday, March 31st, 2015The shooting of a young black male in Ferguson, and the ensuing riots, is generally portrayed as a racist event, but depending on where you stand, the racists can be white or black. Verbatim Theatre is a genre where you take the actual evidence and lay it out in front of an audience. In Ferguson […]
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Ferny Grove spanner still poised above the works
Monday, February 16th, 2015If the LNP challenges the ECQ’s decision in Ferny Grove and wins, it’s possible that the Palaszczuk government will be one of the shortest in Queensland’s history. But everyone seems to think there is no chance of the LNP mounting a challenge, or succeeding. Having been through the 1995 Mundingburra appeal I wouldn’t be so sure. The […]
Continue Reading...Belling ALP institutional corruption
Wednesday, October 8th, 2014Every election campaign that I can remember in Queensland has featured claims that the LNP or Coalition side of politics is corrupt. Those claims had some force when Joh Bjelke-Petersen was premier, but that is now 26 years ago. Today it is the ALP which has problems. John Faulkner has just laid some of them out in […]
Continue Reading...Let’s rub out bigotry (and Catherine Deveny) Bill
Friday, August 15th, 2014I always thought that George Brandis was right – it is legal to be a bigot in this country – but Bill Shorten has corrected him, a correction which he tacitly seems to have accepted by abandoning his attempt to change section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act. According to Bill “…bigotry has no place […]
Continue Reading...Consensus on racism ought to be the end of 18c
Monday, April 28th, 2014One reason it is difficult to argue for the abolition of Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act is because there is no-one prepared to say that discriminating against someone based on race is OK. It allows supporters to switch the argument from free speech to whether you support racism or bigotry, or as Van […]
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