Mission & Justice

Patricia Karvelas; 30/9/08

Responsible Aborigines will no longer be subject to strict controls on how they spend their welfare money under Rudd government proposals to soften the radical intervention into Northern Territory communities. In a winding back of the hardline Howard intervention strategy, The Australian understands that the review board handpicked by the Rudd Government to analyse the controversial policy will urge an end to the compulsory income management system, under which welfare payments are heavily controlled. While the Government believes strict restrictions on welfare payments has led to a dramatic rise in the consumption of fresh food, review board chair Peter Yu will call for an overhaul to reward responsible parents.

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29/9/08

A federal government review of the controversial intervention into Northern Territory indigenous communities has been given extra time to report. The review board, headed by West Australian indigenous leader Peter Yu, was originally due to deliver its long-awaited report on Tuesday. But the board will now deliver the report in mid October, after federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin approved an extension.

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Greg Craven; 26/9/08; a leading constitutional lawyer and vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

How can civil libertarians deny others a right they fight for? One of the great truths of life is that everyone loves rights. We love them when we have them. But we particularly love them when we can loftily confer them on somebody else. So satisfying. The problem is that being a rights-giver carries its own challenges. Anyone will defend a right they like or a minority of which they approve. But the real test is whether you are prepared to stick up for the uncongenial rights of groups you just do not care for. This is the test set by proposed abortion legislation for various members of the Victorian Parliament and assorted civil liberties glee clubs such as Liberty Victoria. So far, they are failing it like a fencepost sitting VCE physics. Oddly enough, the immediate issue here is not the vexed one of abortion, which admittedly raises vastly different reactions in different sections of the community. Rather, the issue is freedom of conscience.

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Emma-Kate Symons; 27/9/08

Social revolution and “hedonism” are coming to Asia’s only Catholic country as The Philippines’ Congress prepares for the first time to back government distribution of free condoms and the pill to poor families. The historic law defying church teaching could be voted on as early as next week. Couples would be offered a choice between natural family planning - based on abstinence during women’s fertile days in their menstrual cycles - and artificial methods. President Gloria Arroyo’s administration favours the former option. Sex education, including family planning, would be mandated for pre-teens and adolescents in schools, a move one priest condemned as “child abuse”. If advocates of contraceptive choice win, as expected, the movement is expected to grow to embrace reform of marriage laws, and even legalisation of abortion.

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Ian Munro; 27/9/08
Amid conflicting reports about the progress of Washington’s finance industry rescue, demonstrators laid siege to Wall Street yesterday demanding that the finance industry be left to fend for itself. Their message was that taxpayers should not have to rescue the free-spending moneymakers, who awarded themselves seven-figure bonuses until the economy was on the point of collapse. They shouted slogans such as “You broke it: you bought it” and “No deal for Wall Street”, and claimed that “financial terrorists” were worse than al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

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26/9/08

Myanmar pro-democracy groups and activists are marking the first anniversary of a bloody crackdown on anti-government demonstrations by the country’s ruling military. The crackdown last September followed weeks of protests triggered by a sudden hike in fuel prices after the government slashed subsidies. The price rises added massively to the hardships suffered by many of Myanmar’s people, millions of whom struggle with grinding poverty on a daily basis.

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Mariam Al Hakeem; 23/9/08

The agents of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice have been barred from entering the family sections of restaurants and hotels without the express permission of the commission’s chief. Shaikh Ebrahim Al Gaith, who heads the commission, said he received directives from Prince Khalid Al Faisal, Emir of Makkah region, to ban commission members from entering the family section of restaurants unless prior permission is granted to them. Al Gaith said the Emir’s instructions do not apply to eateries in malls and shopping centres.Commission staff randomly enter malls, restaurants and local and private establishments to enforce proper moral conduct.

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24/9/08

People in the border area of Morobe and Oro Provinces do not have schools, aid posts or trade stores. Up to 10,000 of them travel a whole day on dinghy to go to school or the health centre and there are no telecommunication facilities and very few economic activities. The two Binadere communities, Eya and Gugumi along Huon Gulf coast to the Oro border claim they are still living in the dark ages. While Gira, Manau, Mambututu, Deboi and Bowera from the coast and Pepeware, Agotame, Gobe, Yema, Tube and Sekare from the inland Waria area in Sohe district of Oro at the border with Morobe also live in the same way. Their councillor Kennedy Dabari informed the Post-Courier recently that although his people live between two resource-rich provinces, there were no services of any kind in the area.

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Jumana Al Tamimi; 22/9/08

Saudi politicians, researchers and intellectuals have closed ranks in defence of the country’s treatment of its citizens and described a newly released Human Rights Watch (HRW) report alleging a “pattern of discrimination against the Ismailis” as a document that has blown things out of proportion. The initial reaction of the Saudi intelligentsia - many said they have not had a chance to examine the report in detail or ascertain the sources on which it bases its assessment - varied greatly but suggested a general consensus that things were not as bad as HRW had made it out to be. Some sought to rebuff the perceived bias while others accused Iran of exacerbating Sunni-Shiite tensions in the region by instigating Shiite groups to speak against their governments.

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Shlomo Shamir; 22/9/08

A group of Iranian organizations working in the U.S. is preparing to stage a rally against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ahead of the Iranian President’s visit to New York on Monday for the United Nations General Assembly. The Iranian activists, some of them known as human rights activists, are organizing a mass demonstration on Tuesday, titled “Ahmadinejad, why are you executing children?” Within the framework of the rally, to be held in the plaza adjacent to the United Nations building in New York, organizers plan to erect a “wall of shame” which will include a series of pictures and documented proof of Iran’s abuse of jailed minors.

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