An ‘Ethics Commissioner’ without ethics: welcome to Australia
Yesterday, Thursday I received a phone call from Captain Fred Martens, the man who spent a 1,000 days in jail, having been wrongly convicted of an offence under Australia’s Child…
Yesterday, Thursday I received a phone call from Captain Fred Martens, the man who spent a 1,000 days in jail, having been wrongly convicted of an offence under Australia’s Child…
For some years now I have been considering the concept of complicity. What constitutes complicity, how far does it extend, where does responsibility for wrongdoing cease? You can all blame…
Captain Fred Martens, whom I have written extensively about on Blak and Black in the past, was employed as a commercial pilot flying light aircraft within PNG and between PNG…
Little fly, Thy summer’s play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance And…
Racial classification today is commonplace; people routinely catalogue each other as members of this or that race, and seem to assume that everyone can be thus classified Bernard Boxill, "Introduction"…
In the late afternoon of May 22, 1787, a group of a dozen men officially assembled at James Phillips' bookstore and printing shop located at 2 George Yard, London. While…
The TNI under Suharto was seen as different from other armies because: Indonesian army sees itself as quite different from other armies in the world, because it was never created…
Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is both famous and obscure. A twentieth-century political theory, containing two canonical sentences: "Sovereign is he who decides on…
Following is a response to the statement published by Ernst & Young. People with things to hide generally sneak around, aiming to placate those who can advance their situation. They…
The current humanitarian crises in West Papua, formally West New Guinea (“WNG”), has at its roots Western colonial greed and paranoia over Soviet influence in the region. WNG was and…
There’s been significant debate in the past year about the introduction of ethics classes in public schools in New South Wales. The St James Ethics Centre was tasked with developing…
As most readers of Blak and Black, indeed as most readers of any daily paper in Australia will be aware there has been an ongoing dispute between Fortescue Metals Group…
'Poetry, like the law, is a fiction’, wrote William Hazlitt in a critical essay of 1816. Hazlitt the critic took as his subject all aspects of his society’s culture, including…
I have spent the last few weeks travelling around remote Indigenous communities collecting signatures in support of a Royal Commission into the AFP and statements in support of my application…
The ACT Government isn’t so much corrupt as it is immoral – Senior ACT Public Servant I had lunch in Canberra yesterday with Paul, a former colleague from my public…
There are many reasons behind Blak and Black’s decision to attempt to identify and expose Australian Federal Police (AFP) corruption where we can, the main reason however is the relative power…
I have been arguing since 1996 that it is unlikely that David Eastman is responsible for the murder of Colin Stanley Winchester APM (18 October 1933 – 10 January 1989).…
For very many Aboriginal Australians the phrase 'Australian justice system' is an oxymoron. There are any number of reasons, many of which are justified, why we as Aboriginal Australians think…
A few months back I penned an article about the plight of Marlon Noble, an Indigenous intellectually disabled man consigned to the correctional justice system for a crime of dubious…
My apologies for my tardiness in updating Blak and Black over the last week or so, I’ve been reviewing evidence with a former colleague and equally concerned citizen relating to…