There is no right not to be offended. Yet dozens of provisions on the commonwealth statute books make it unlawful or illegal to offend. There is a right to freedom of speech, and each of these...
Rahm Emmanuel, one-time Chief of Staff in the Obama Administration, once said: ‘You never let a serious crisis go to waste… It’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.’ It...
Simon Breheny debates Gillian Triggs over how the AHRC handled the QUT case.
“Section 18C must be included in any review of religious freedoms,” said Morgan Begg, research fellow at the free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. The Coalition...
As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So naturally, when the Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, decided last week to share his view of...
When the legal affairs editor of this paper, Chris Merritt, sent a carefully worded reply on March 9 to an email he had received two days earlier, that should have been the end of a matter...
It’s clear now that the Coalition government is not only uninterested in the idea of restructuring the bureaucracy, but it also is not even interested in making decent appointments. The...
“The federal government’s decision to appoint Rosalind Croucher as the next President of the Australian Human Rights Commission represents a failure to defend fundamental human rights in...
The Human Rights Commission’s selective agenda does not include the protection of fundamental human rights like freedom of speech. For that reason alone, it must be abolished. But while the...
Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane’s essay “Setting the Record Straight” about Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (LSJ February) perpetuates more misconceptions than it...
“The Coalition government must take its commitment to reform section 18C to the next election,” said Simon Breheny, director of policy at the free market think tank the Institute of...
We might soon be approaching the end of the beginning of Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership. A harsh critic of his government might argue that since the federal election in July last year...
