Mission & Justice

29/8/08

Australia’s citizenship test set-up by the Howard government is set for a major overhaul after a review found it to be flawed and discriminatory. Richard Woolcott is the head of a committee commissioned to review the test said the 2006-document needs reform, News Ltd reports. The committee is believed to have forwarded its opinion to Immigration Minister Chris Evans in a report. The standout recommendation would be that the present test is flawed and seen by some as intimidatory and needs substantial reform,” Mr Woolcott told News Ltd.

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Josh Gordon; 29/6/08

A company that provides strategic political advice to the Prime Minister’s office is also being paid by mining and energy companies to lobby the Government as it prepares to unveil its greenhouse strategy. Hawker Britton, overwhelmingly made up of former Labor staffers and party insiders, is working for at least six companies that would be nervously watching the Government’s emissions-trading deliberations. The company’s website says it has played a “central strategic role in every Australian state and federal election campaign since it was founded in 1997″. It also has a “national alliance” with Labor’s pollster of choice, UMR.

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Paul Toohey; 28/6/08

East Timor doesn’t need any more confusion, but it got in doses yesterday. Jose Ramos Horta announced he would no longer chase a job as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and would stay on as President - at the same time refusing to guarantee serving out his term. Mr Ramos Horta had said on Thursday that he was considering the UN position and needed the night to think about it. This was despite UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon denying yesterday that he had offered Mr Ramos Horta the Geneva-based post or decided on a preferred candidate. Mr Ramos Horta said an “idiot journalist” in New York had backed Mr Ban into a corner, and made him look like he was claiming the job was his.

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Paul Toohey; 27/6/08

Jose Ramos Horta had his country on tenterhooks last night as he asked for another 24 hours to decide whether he would stay on as East Timor’s President or pursue a job in Geneva as the UN Human Rights Commissioner. It seems almost certain that Mr Ramos Horta will go. His heart was never in the presidency but that was compounded on February 11 when he was shot twice in the back, outside his own home, by rebels he had been trying to help. As he recovered in Darwin, he remained deeply traumatised and revealed to The Australian that he was likely to throw in the towel some time after his return to the capital, Dili, in April. He said at the time: “I will address the parliament when I return and I will not promise the country that I will serve the full term.”

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Adele Horin; 14/6/08

Belinda Neal is finally to get professional treatment for her temper. Other MPs and ministers should be joining her in the circle at anger management classes. Neal’s mistake was to behave badly in public, compounding a well-known pattern. But federal and state parliaments are full of members who behave badly in private. They shout abuse at staff, belittle public servants and intimidate those below them. Hothead ministers and MPs are not being frogmarched to counselling - their tantrums are thrown behind closed doors. The behaviour of these bullying MPs is just as unacceptable as Neal’s. The world is full of angry people. For too long, they have got away with terrorising waiters, spouses, employees, children and colleagues. Something has to be done to curb the bullies and help the hotheads.

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Ben Naparstek; 14/6/08

It must take nerve for Tony Judt, professor of European history at New York University, to check his email. He receives hundreds of vitriolic messages, sometimes threats against his life or, worse, his family. People do not, needless to say, want his head for his scholarly tomes on the history of the French Left or for his magisterial 900-page book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, published in 2005, which was a Pulitzer prize finalist and helped secure his place in the world’s top 100 public intellectuals named in a Foreign Policy-Prospect survey in May. What makes the celebrated British-born academic a target for hate are his essays on Israel and US foreign policy in the Middle East, the best known of which is Israel: The Alternative, published by The New York Review of Books in October 2003. Describing Israel as an anachronism, he wrote that “the time has come to think the unthinkable”: the dismantling of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state and its replacement by a secular and binational state of Jews and Palestinians. As Judt is the son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish refugees, his detractors struggle to label him an anti-Semite. He has always taken unorthodox positions. A long-term anti-communist, he is a firm believer in state intervention. He is politically progressive but rejects postmodern theory and finds academic political correctness “just as annoying as the reactionary politics of Washington”. A historian of French ideas, he is no Francophile. In Past Imperfect (1992) and The Burden of Responsibility (1998), he attacks French intellectuals for closing their eyes to totalitarianism.

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Ian Munro; 14/6/08

From Barack Obama’s pastor, to Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, to Mike Huckabee’s Southern Baptist roots, religion is the constant in America’s choosing of a president. Racism, sexism, health policy, the economy and Iraq have their moments, but religion renews itself with every fresh controversy. Even John McCain, relatively secure as presumed Republican candidate, has jettisoned a preacher whose endorsement became politically untenable. Yet the most influential and enduring religious force in the country - elitist Christian fundamentalism - is mostly unsighted and rarely remarked upon, according to the writer Jeff Sharlet.

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Carol Nader; 7/6/08

The contentious character test that has led to the cancellation of 250 visas in the past four years should be urgently amended to make the system clearer and fairer, the Federal Government has been urged. Government figures show there have been 68 visas cancelled on character grounds this financial year to the end of May. Of the 27 cancellations based on character since the new Government came to power, all but one were by the Immigration Department. In only one case the Immigration Minister was the decision maker. There have been 26 visas refused on character grounds so far this financial year to the end of March, and 178 in 2006-07. While the numbers are a small proportion of the numbers of visa refusals and cancellations, there is debate around the fairness of the test in deciding what constitutes good character. Most cancellations and refusals based on character involve people who have committed serious criminal offences including child sex offences and murder.

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2/6/08

The people of Guadalcanal are not prepared for the Government’s planned national reconciliation because of failures by successive governments to address the Guadalcanal bona fide demands. The statement, largely directed at the government, was made by the Leader of the National Parliamentary Official Independent Group and Central Guadalcanal MP, Peter Shanel. In a recent interview Shanel said that he does not see how a national reconciliation would be achieved when key issues on both sides of the conflict are still to be addressed by successive governments. “The Guadalcanal people are not ready for the national reconciliation because they are still waiting on the Government to address their demands which have been ignored by previous governments and the current government,” he said.

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24/5/08

The chairman of the nation’s largest Aboriginal land council, the Northern Land Council, has issued a public apology to the organisation’s principal legal officer. In a statement yesterday, chairman Wali Wunungmurra said the NLC executive council had reviewed allegations of bullying levelled against lawyer Ron Levy by a female anthropologist. The allegations led to Mr Levy’s sacking from his position at the NLC in February, later found by a court to be unlawful. Mr Wunungmurra said the allegations that prompted Mr Levy’s suspension, including that he improperly accessed the anthropologist’s personnel file and improperly tried to influence an investigation into her allegations, had been found to be untrue by the NLC executive council.

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