Category: Parliament
-
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…
-
Theresa May and UKIP: A repeat of Thatcher and the NF in ’79?
While everyone is falling over themselves to make analogies between the Labour Party of the 1980s and that of today under Corbyn (or stressing that it’s not a repeat of that decade), we are also in danger of seeing Theresa May’s time (however long) as Prime Minister through the prism of Margaret Thatcher. In the…
-
1951 and the attempt to ban the Australian Communist Party: When Turnbull’s predecessor gambled on a double dissolution election
Yesterday Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that if the Senate did not pass two pieces of legislation to re-establish the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), he would call for the Governor-General to issue the writs for a double dissolution election. This would mean that all seats in both the House of Representatives and…
-
New article in Journal of Australian Studies: Policing Protest in the Australian Capital Territory
Just a quick post to let you all know that the latest issue of Journal of Australian Studies features my long awaited article on policing protest in the ACT in the early 1970s. The full title of the paper is ‘Policing Protest in the Australian Capital Territory: The Introduction and Use of the Public Order…
-
Public engagement ftw!
Two guest posts by yours truly have been published in the last two days. The first is on my research into the UK perspective on the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975 and has been published by The Conversation. The second is on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and their view of Australia as…
-
The road to ‘The Dismissal’ in 1975: The British perspective
The Museum of Australian Democracy has announced that in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, it will be tweeting the events of late 1975 leading up to 11 November. This will be a very interesting for those into in Australian history and helpful in understanding how the events in…
-
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…
-
UK High Commissioner Morrice James on the Whitlam Dismissal 1975
I have blogged in the past about the files at the National Archives in London revealing the British attitudes towards the ‘constitutional crisis’ of 1975, when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was dismissed by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr after the Liberals, under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser, refused to pass supply bills in the Senate.…
-
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…
-
The PFLP/RAF terrorist who evaded the UK border control system: Zohair Akache and the ‘German Autumn’
In 1980, Lord Carrington, the new Foreign Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, ordered a review of how the UK border control system was utilised in the fight against terrorism, particularly in relation to terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa. The catalyst for this review were two incidents in May 1980 – the siege at…
New Historical Express 