The Council maintains its position that the advancement of women’s equality and protecting them from violence cannot come at the expense of fundamental legal principles and arrangements designed to protect the liberty of everyone
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Every Australian has a right to freedom of speech and freedom of protest. It is the tactic of authoritarian regimes the world over to have armed police officers visit a person’s home to attempt to dissuade them from exercising their legitimate right to freedom of speech and freedom of protest.
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“It is absolutely vital that this Commission is not given an unrestrained roving commission to enforce vague notions of integrity” said Mr Cope
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Civil libertarians have traditionally been very sceptical about the creation of standing Royal Commissions such as this. And in our view, there have been examples of cases in which the State Commissions have abused their powers. So it is perhaps with some reluctance that we accept the necessity of this body. Accepting that there is a need for this body it is absolutely vital that it is not given an unrestrained roving commission to enforce vague notions of integrity.
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It is to be hoped that the Inquiry in reporting on the police discipline term of reference will recommend a top to bottom thorough and fundamental change to a seriously flawed Queensland Police discipline system”, Mr O’Gorman said.
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Mr O’Gorman posed the question does this mean that no practising Catholic can ever be a CEO of Essendon or any other football codes or clubs who have approved or have been silent on the circumstances of Mr Thorburn’s departure from Essendon
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“To change the double jeopardy law to get the State Government out of a political problem of its own making must be fought robustly and vigorously”, Mr OGorman said.
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In 2001 and 2005 the Federal and State Parliaments passed laws designed to deal with terrorism. Most of those laws were subject to sunset clauses. Over 20 years later those laws remain in place, with the sunset period being regularly extended with very little debate. The liberty undermining principles contained in those laws have now been extended into numerous other areas of the criminal law, as we predicted they would. We do not wish the continuing existence of these powers to be used as justification for the micromanagement of people’s lives in other areas.
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A number of underlying and systemic factors contribute to the often-uncomfortable necessity to partake in begging, public drunkenness and public urination. These factors should be addressed with a health-focused response and increased social support rather than relying on the criminal justice system. Punitive measures have not, and will not, effectively end the behaviours described, but will only serve to further entrench prejudice and discrimination on the basis of race and class.
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what seems right is to use law to protect the bodily safety of prostitutes from assault, to protect their rights to their incomes against the extortionate behaviour of pimps, to protect poor women in developing countries from forced trafficking and fraudulent offers, and to guarantee their full civil rights in the countries where they end up—to make them, in general, equals under the law, both civil and criminal….But the criminalisation of prostitution seems to pose a major obstacle to that equality
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“Faulty science has been one of the leading causes of miscarriages of justice in Queensland and throughout Australia for decades going back to the infamous Lindy Chamberlain monumental forensic scientific failure in the 1980s,” Mr Cope said.
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The expenditure cap for third parties should strike a fair balance between respect for freedom of speech and association, and the importance of preventing third parties exercising disproportionate influence in elections and being used to circumvent expenditure caps. The current proposal is that each third party can spend the same amount as all the mayoral candidate caps combined. This is absurd. This system permits every third party the same influence, in expenditure terms, as all the mayoral candidates combined. It is hard to see how this system would not inevitably lead to the exact outcome the system purports to be trying to avoid – that being the complete drowning out of other election participants’ voices.
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Evidence given by a former Queensland Homicide Detective at this week’s Whiskey Au Go Go bombing inquest that verballing allegations against police were “what criminal lawyers did in those days” is a tired old almost 50 year refrain by senior former Queensland Police trying to rewrite history.
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It is this Council’s position that the monitoring role by the CCC is ineffective both in respect of individual cases and in dealing with trends in relation to complaints against police. While high level corruption or other serious police offending is investigated and prosecuted from time to time by the CCC all other cases are handed back to the QPS with a so-called monitoring role by the CCC. It is submitted that Queensland should adopt the New South Wales procedure for investigating complaints against police namely that there should be a standalone body separate from the QPS and the CCC to investigate complaints against Police.
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“The government keeps on telling us that the powers will come to an end one day, but it will not tell us in advance in what circumstances it says it will no longer need the powers. This is not the approach of an open and accountable government.”
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“With the vast majority of the population vaccinated in a way which is overwhelmingly effective at preventing serious illness or hospitalization and effective treatments, including the Pfizer one which is 89% effective, it is time to allow people to make their own assessment of how they want to spend their time and the risks involved”.
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The Council has repeatedly called on the government to publicly identify the criteria which it will use to decide that the state of emergency is no longer required. We note it has again failed to do so.
We have maintained throughout this crisis the emergency powers are justified so long as they are necessary, proportionate and are in place for the absolute minimum period. It cannot be said at this time that the case has been made for the continuation of these emergency powers.
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One area of inequality is that of social status. Anti-discrimination law is directed at addressing inequalities of social status. It seeks to deal with the fact that some people in our society are denied “goods on the basis of the widely held view that certain facts about them, such as race, gender, or religion make them less entitled to those goods than others are. The fact people are subject to a widely held view of inferiority of this kind- of being less entitled to important goods and opportunities, and less suitable for valued forms of personal relationship-is a distinctive feature of discrimination
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