On August 30 last year Blak and Black lodged a petition on the GoPetition website calling for a Royal Commission into the Australian Federal Police (“AFP”). Blak and Black has…
The Samoan Government has announced that Australian Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, will visit the country next week as part of a Pacific tour that also includes Nauru, Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Solomon…
July of 1969 was a big month. Whilst the ‘civilized’ world was focused on the deployment of three men to the moon, Indonesia was finalizing steps to wrest control of…
The criminal justice system consists of three main parts: (1) Legislative (create laws); (2) adjudication (courts); and (3) corrections (prisons, probation, parole, fines, community service). In a criminal justice system,…
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…
Do we want to bequeath the next generation a society where those with money and influence are exempted from the legal accountability?