Category: Legislation
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Parliament’s current obsession with s18c
On ‘Harmony Day’ yesterday, the Turnbull government announced that it would seek to introduce legislation that would amend the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) to remove the words ‘insult’ or ‘offend’ from section 18c of the Act. Under these proposed changes, only racial ‘harassment’ or ‘intimidation’ would be prohibited. To many, this seemed like a…
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The Communist Party’s campaign for the Race Relations Act 1965
This month is the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of the Race Relations Act 1965 by the Wilson government, the first piece of legislation dealing with racial discrimination in the United Kingdom. As I have argued elsewhere (here and here), a major part of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s anti-racist activism between the 1950s…
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How the Aboriginal Tent Embassy challenged the government’s protest laws
Tomorrow is the 43rd anniversary of the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy outside (Old) Parliament House in Canberra. This post is about how the Tent Embassy challenged the protest laws enacted by the McMahon government the previous year, which sought to quash dissent outside the house of Federal Parliament. The McMahon government believed it…
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From the newly released NA papers: Thatcher, riots and the aftermath of Scarman in the early 1980s
The National Archives have just released archival documents relating to the Thatcher government for 1985 and 1986, with further releases in July 2015. There have been many media reports already on many other aspects of the papers (such as the introduction of the Poll Tax in Scotland, the Anglo-Irish relationship and her love-hate relationship with…
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Local legal history: A microcosm of the South Australian government’s ‘law & order’ agenda under Rann
While I was a criminal justice researcher in the public sector, I got really interested in sentencing laws in Australia and their history. This might form part of a broader paper about the pursuit of a ‘law and order’ agenda in South Australia under the 2002-2011 Rann government. As Don Weatherburn wrote in his book…
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The left, the state and anti-racist legislation: The example of the CPGB
The Guardian Australia today featured a debate between two figures of the left, Alana Lentin and Antony Lowenstein, on whether Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) should be on the statute books, after the announcement by the new Liberal government that they would seek to repeal this section of the legislation. This has…
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‘It’s a video nasty!’: Some background to the The Young Ones episode
Part of my research into my article on The Young Ones and Thatcherite Britain has involved looking at the moral panic concerning the ‘video nasties’ of the early 1980s. The boom in video sales in the first half of the 1980s provided a challenge to the authorities that classified film in the UK and there was…
New Historical Express 