Sinking the Slipper

Recovering journalist Mr Denmore succinctly summarises the response of the media (at least the Murdoch portion of it) to the Peter Slipper controversy:

[T]he Tory regime changers of News Ltd could spin the Peter Slipper story into an imagined constitutional crisis and provide yet another reason to call for an ELECTION RIGHT NOW! to fix the mistake made two years ago and to “put an end to what many view as a dysfunctional government”. The News Ltd goons had Slipper in their sights anyway, having used their ‘news’ pages recently to depict him as a rat. (That there was no manufactured outrage over Slipper in the 18 years he served as a Coalition MP spoke volumes. A classic stitch-up, then.)

Indeed The Oz is so fixated on the story that it has even published a post linking to just about every op-ed they can find on the subject, even including a token few from non-Murdoch outlets.

Free speech, hate speech and human dignity

Federal Court Chief Justice Pat Keane

The audience at last night’s Austin Asche Oration witnessed an address by Federal Court Chief Justice Pat Keane which some might label as courageous in a Sir Humphrey Appleby sense. Without ever mentioning Bromberg J’s recent decision in Eatock v Bolt, Keane CJ cut to the heart of the central issue of controversy in current public debate.  That is, whether and how the law might appropriately balance the competing public interest imperatives involved in protecting freedom of political communication while simultaneously restraining socially destructive hate speech.

Who’s worth more? The nurse or the engineer?

(A truncated version of a paper presented by CDU law lecturer Tanjil Whitnell at: ‘Our Work Our Lives’ 2011 – Dili, Timor-Leste, September 2011, opening of the Timor Leste Womens Working Centre)

Australian legislation currently guarantees women the right to receive remuneration equal to that which men receive when women undertake roles which although different, are nonetheless of equal or comparable value to that of men’s roles.

However practical access to these rights remain limited primarily because of the difficulties posed by the requirement that a judgement be made about a woman’s worth versus a man’s.

THE EMPLOYMENT LAWS – the Australian Experience

The ‘Gender Pay Gap’ is the disparity between women’s earnings and men’s earning, which traditionally evidences that women are paid less for their participation in the workforce than men. It is this gap which has been the focus of much of the discourse in an Australian employment context in recent decades, and the problem which recent legislative changes has sought to alleviate.