Former ATSIC deputy chairman Ray Robinson is spearheading legal action in the Brisbane District court next week.
He says he will be arguing the Howard government acted illegally by abolishing ATSIC.
“A number of members of the board of commissioners are challenging the validity of the winding up of ATSIC,” he said.
“I am challenging that it was invalid, unconstitutional. We had advice from a top constitutional lawyer, David Jackson QC, and I am challenging on that advice.
“This one will go all the way to the High Court of Australia.
Filed under: Australia, law | Closed
strip-colonising atop uluru
Wow, I had no idea that this had even happened. May we say, the sooner this event gets handed over to the po-cos for destruction, the better ?
Disgraceful – and ungraceful.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
bin laden
An audio message said to have been recorded by the al-Qaeda leader says the abduction was retaliation for “France’s injustice to Muslims”.
It says forthcoming French curbs on the full veil are “colonial oppression”.
??
Filed under: media, Political developments | Closed
Correspondence on the stance of Australia’s ‘progressive’ Overland magazine, reproduced on the blog of Antony Loewenstein.
20/4/10
Dear members of Overland Editorial Board,
We are writing to express our grave concern about your journal’s unbalanced coverage of Israeli-Palestinian issues in recent years. We all strongly respect Overland’s tradition of providing a forum for free and open discussion of democratic and progressive ideas. But the recent biased and prejudiced coverage of Middle East affairs has the potential to bring Overland into serious disrepute.
We can all agree that the Australian Left has no consensus on this issue. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that a wide majority on the Left today support a two-state solution which encapsulates recognition of both Israeli and Palestinian national rights. It is also fair to say that those fundamentalists who advocate the elimination of Israel and its replacement by an Arab State of Greater Palestine represent a small, if sometimes vocal, minority.
Yet it is precisely these marginal views, which demonize Israel and infantilize the Palestinians, that seem to have captured Overland’s agenda in recent years. We note, for example, the three recent articles that appeared in issues 187 by Ned Curthoys, 193 by Antony Loewenstein, and 198 by Michael Brull.
What is common in all three of these articles is the collective essentialising of all Israeli Jews and all Jewish supporters of Israel’s existence, whether supporters of the Israeli peace movement or supporters of a Greater Israel, as inherently evil oppressors. Equally there appears to be a concern to promote miniscule groups such as the Committee to Dismantle Zionism and the Independent Australian Jewish Voices group as in some way representing a significant Jewish dissenting voice. This is a complete nonsense. In fact, they represent a tiny minority even within the wider Jewish Left, and their simplistic viewpoints are overwhelmingly rejected by progressive Jews. Highlighting their views means implicitly excluding the perspectives of 99 per cent of Australian Jews from your journal.
[…]
Yours Sincerely,
(Professor after Professor)
response:
Let us begin with the obvious point that accusing an overtly political journal of ‘bias’ makes no sense whatsoever. When Overland launched in 1954, it proclaimed its ‘bias’ (literally) with a famous phrase borrowed from Joseph Furphy. That slogan was meant to signal that the journal gave a voice to the Left, just as Overland does today.
But we suspect that by employing words like ‘bias’, ‘prejudic[e]’, ‘demonise’, Mendes and co. intend to imply something rather darker – that the Overlandeditorial team is anti-Semitic. If that is what they mean, they should come out and say so. For the record, any allegation that Overland publishes, accepts or otherwise endorses anti-Semitism or any other form of racial discrimination is utterly scurrilous, and we reject it entirely.
[…]
More generally, in an increasingly homogenised mainstream media, emerging voices that don’t parrot Murdoch talking-points often struggle to be heard. We believe that by providing a platform for ‘marginal’ writers – even if those writers occasionally scandalise a conservative or two – Overland performs an important function. That is the policy the journal has followed since 1954. It is one we will continue to uphold.
(OL Editorial Board)
Fascinating developments I think — on several levels.
Filed under: Australia, Israel/Palestine, media, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Queensland criminal law was essentially English law with some local modifications, but its chief distinction from the latter was that it was largely administered by Queenslanders. While their legal definitions might be the same, crimes were often understood differently in late-nineteenth-century Queensland and England; some, like sheep-stealing, were seen as more heinous in the former; others, like the killing of nonwhites, generally as less so. Moreover, Queensland, as a colony of settlement, enjoyed almost-complete autonomy. In contrast to either India or to directly ruled Crown colonies, the Home Government was extremely limited in its ability to influence Queensland justice.
Wiener, An Empire on Trial (CUP: 2009).
Filed under: Australia, Empire, law, Quote, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter, ed., Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
A collection that focuses on the role of European law in colonial contexts and engages with recent treatments of this theme in known works written largely from within the framework of postcolonial studies, which implicitly discuss colonial deployments of European law and politics via the concept of ideology.
Contents:
PART I: EUROPEAN LAW AND GLOBAL JUSTICE
Global Justice and Regional Metaphysics: On the Critical History of the Law of Nature and Nations; I.Hunter
Justice and Imperialism: On the Very Idea of a Universal Standard; D.Ivison
PART II: TRANSPOSITIONS OF EMPIRE
The Legalities of English Colonizing: Discourses of European Intrusion upon the Americas, ca. 1490-1830; C.Tomlins
The Uses of the Rule of Law in British Colonial Societies in the Nineteenth Century; J.McLaren
‘Your Sovereign and Our Father’: The Imperial Crown and the Idea of Legal-Ethnohistory; M.D.Walters
The Justification of King Leopold II’s Congo Enterprise by Sir Travers Twiss; A.Fitzmaurice
PART III: FRONTIERS OF JUSTICE
Samuel Marsden’s Civility: The Transposition of Anglican Civil Authority to Australasia;
A.Sharp The Limits of Jurisdiction: Law, Governance and Indigenous Peoples in Colonized Australia;
M.Finnane The Pig and the Peace: Transposing Order in Early Sydney; L.Ford
William Pember Reeves (1857-1932): Lawyer-Politician, Historian and ‘Rough Architect’ of the New Zealand State; P.G.McHugh
PART IV: THE CROWN IN COLONIAL NEW ZEALAND
Sovereignty as Governance in the Early New Zealand Crown Colony Period; S.Dorsett
Imperial Policy, Colonial Government and Indigenous Testimony in South Australia and New Zealand in the 1840s; D.Ward
Law and Politics in the Constitutional Delineation of Indigenous Property Rights in 1840s New Zealand; M.Hickford
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Empire, law, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
Brett Shadle, ‘White settlers and the law in early colonial Kenya’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 4, 3 (2010)
Abstract:
This article examines settler attitudes toward the law and the legal system in early colonial Kenya. Settlers believed that English law was the culmination of centuries of evolution and was unsurpassed for its justice and logic. Nonetheless, they insisted English law and legal procedure were supremely ill-suited for the African context. When courts released Africans on “technicalities” it only encouraged more crime; insufficient punishments did the same. Settlers argued that the state – administrators and the judiciary – must twist the legal system to fit settler needs. The law must be a tool used on behalf of whites to bend Africans to their will. It must be personal and racially biased, the punishment swift and sharp. In many ways, settlers held an older, cruder understanding of the law, one more suited to manorial estates or Jim Crow America.
Keywords: law; settler colonialism; Kenya; racism
Filed under: Africa, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 | 3:00pm
Stanford Humanities Center
This Mellon-Sawyer seminar will focus especially on how indigenous communities interacted with, resisted, and adapted to the the spread of settler colonialism, and on the connections among environmental and cultural changes prompted by the simultaneous expansion of these Anglophone settler colonies. One premise of the seminar is that we can better understand how nation states have incorporated lands that they claimed but did not fully control by looking at the construction of space — how movements of people, things, other animals, and ideas are expedited and constrained over historical time – in comparative and transnational context. Another starting point for discussion will be to ask how the 19th-century mix of settler colonialism and industrial capitalism produced political and scientific narratives of race, labor, property, polity, and environment, and how these discourses were both written and contested in law and on land.
We hope the seminar will be useful for scholars across several disciplines interested in these different Wests, in borderlands, environmental and indigenous issues, and in comparative colonialisms. The seminar will meet at least three times per quarter in 2010-2011, and will hold additional events in conjunction with the visits to Stanford of scholars and artists from Australia in the spring and summer of 2011. Discussion will be largely based on precirculated readings.
Hat-tip to Aaron B for sending word of this event.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Seminar | Closed
Rhonda V. Magee, ‘Slavery as Immigration?’, University of San Francisco Law Review 44, 2 (2009)
Abstract:
In this essay, the author argues that transatlantic slavery was, in significant part, an immigration system of a particularly pernicious sort – a system of forced migration immigration aimed at fulfilling the nascent country’s needs for a controllable labor population, and desire for a racialized one. As such, the law and policy of chattel slavery should be viewed as perhaps the most important historical antecedent to contemporary immigration law regarding low- and unskilled labor in the United States. Following an analysis of the treatment of chattel slavery in general immigration history scholarship, and in scholarship on the history of immigration law, the author concludes that immigration law texts must include a discussion of chattel slavery that properly locates that system as a forerunner of modern immigration law and policy, and immigration scholars should devote more attention to chattel slavery. She concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of such a reframing for the American national community as a whole.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
