Detachment 88's major facility at the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Co-operation was established in 2004 with almost $40 million of Australian funding. According to its website, most of the…
The attached video shows very clearly what I mean by torture of West Papuan by Detachment 88. What this video shows is a clear violation of international law. Detachment 88…
Australia Day 2011, a mere 223 years after the English invasion and occupation of Aboriginal Australia, an invasion in which white ‘Christian’ males brought with them all of the then,…
They say that Christmas comes but once a year, but we all know that isn’t true. If you’re a public servant or an Australian Federal Police Officer it seemingly comes every day.…
I was recently discussing the genteel art of bullying with a former associate, Paulo Flores, who is a psychologist and mediator and Watershedd, a recent contributor to Blak and Black.…
Some observations on the realities of being and Aborigine in 21stcentury Australia by an observer who isn’t. One of my piano teachers was the sole child of Polish Holocaust survivors.…
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by…
While strolling along the foreshore of Botany Bay today I spotted a Kingfisher. In Classical Greek mythology "Halcyon" is associated with the Kingfisher. There was an ancient belief that the…
The Commonwealth and each of the States and Territories of Australia have an obligation to act as a model litigant in claims and litigation. This obligation is enshrined in legislation…
In a modern democracy the state controls the apparatus of power for the benefit of the people, or so the theory goes. The apparatus of power includes the police, the…
Kevin Spratt, an Aboriginal man from Western Australia, was tasered up to 41 times in a week and went to hospital with fractures, a collapsed lung and a dislocated shoulder…
Anna Bligh you’re a disgrace, a racist and potentially a war criminal! Yes, you the Premier of the rotten state. You know when I worked in PNG in the 90s…
THE Australian Federal Police don't quite know what corruption is and want a better definition included in relevant laws. "I don't think there is any universally declared understanding of corruption,"…
Human rights are said to be an attribute of any human being as humans are born free and equal. However, as legal norms they do not designate what is, but…
Lord, how this world is given to lying. Quite so, Falstaff, but there is lying and lying. No, not another diatribe on police mendaciousness or theft or even racism, but…
The first thing we should learn Epictetus was a stoic and the Enchiridion, from which the following extract is taken, was one of the principal manuals of Stoic philosophy. The…
“We are told the devil is the father of lies, and was a liar from the beginning; so that, beyond contradiction, the invention is old: and, which is more, his…
“No one shall be subject to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.” This statement of Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is part of what Michael…
As society becomes more narcissistic, as we push ourselves harder and harder in the name of status at the expense of everything else, society starts heading towards the unknown. It…
In my post titled Angelique, I noted that she was not the only Aboriginal person to have been discriminated against and forced out of the Australian Capital Territory Revenue Office…