The prospect of another military deployment in the Middle East is real. After the strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the executive cannot be trusted to make that decision alone.
The fact that finding yourself on a police watchlist can lead to a death penalty meted out on the other side of the world should worry our attorney-general. Why doesn’t it?
Three times a year, the ordinary sittings of the Senate are suspended for the obscure but essential business of budget estimates hearings. For the next fortnight, the bleak theatre in the House of Representatives will continue as expected, but the Senate chamber will lie empty; the action on our side of the building playing out elsewhere.
Tonight I rise to invite Prime Minister Tony Abbott to visit the beautiful state of Western Australia.
It won’t make the front page but on 30 March, Labor’s deputy leader Tanya Plibersek quietly caved in on one of the most invasive of recent proposals for mass surveillance in Australia.
If the Abbott government succeeds in deregulating media ownership – using the web as cover – stand by for local news services to be cut and vested interests unexposed
11 February 2014: around the globe more than 6000 websites, with user groups ranging from sub-niche to hundreds of millions, are blacked out today. The cause is serious: government surveillance overkill that compromises privacy, the rule of law, journalism and democracy itself.
So we’re seven days into the search for #14votes, and there are probably another seven days to go.
I’ve now lost count of the number of candidate forums I’ve spoken at with an empty chair reserved for a no-show Coalition candidate.