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We need to be on our guard against laws and policies enacted in the name of the public interest but with insufficient consideration for the human rights of the minority.
Frank Brennan responds to Greg Barns' Crikey article which accused him of issuing an authoritarian edict regarding the Victorian abortion bill.
Media coverage before a big event, be it World Youth Day or the Beijing Olympics, always focuses on defects and ideological conflict. Controversies regarding state funding and anti-annoyance laws aside, the young people celebrated WYD in their own way.
The Church needs to go beyond the benign 'we didn't ask for it' excuse for tolerating the controversial World Youth Day laws, which it can only regard as convenient. Its own right to strident expression of its views is at stake.
The rights of free speech and assembly should not be curtailed because World Youth Day pilgrims might be annoyed or inconvenienced. The NSW regulation is a dreadful interference with civil liberties, and contrary to the spirit of Catholic Social Teaching on human rights.
The text is from Professor Frank Brennan's 2008 Institute of Justice Studies Oration from 22 May 2008.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams might have tread more carefully when he suggested Britons might learn to live with some form of Sharia law in their midst. He was simply reiterating the obvious: thatlegal systems and obligations often have mutually sustaining andre-enforcing values.
The Government's Clean Feed initiative will allow families to surf the Net without risk of stumbling upon adult content. But there is real concern that the definition of inappropriate content could be widened.
A recent series of raids by the US Department of Homeland Security signals a new era of anti-immigrant sentiment in the country. This is rationalised by a false association of undocumented immigrants with the 'war on terror'.
Some political professionals would like to see the state behave just like the market, operating as a heartless machine for maximising outcomes. However, truly rational electors realise that if the system is to be imbued with compassion and humanity, the heart must play a role no less important than the head.
There are times when we Australians get the balance between national interest and individual liberty wrong, especially when the individual is a member of a powerless minority. One way of improving the balance is including the judiciary in the calculus, as has now happened in the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
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