For too long our politicians have focused only on short-term goals and objectives; never thinking much beyond the next election. It is time that we all start thinking about our long-term future; in 100 years, what sort of society would we like our grandchildren to be part of
Recognising the failure to meet the needs of the world’s poor, the United Nations General Assembly, on 8 September 2000, unanimously adopted the Millennium Declaration. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which followed the Declaration, are the world’s most broadly supported and comprehensive development targets — creating numerical benchmarks for tackling poverty and hunger, ill health, gender inequality, lack of education, lack of access to clean water, and environmental degradation by 2015
In 2012, 4.2 million Australians (18.5% of the population) were estimated as having a disability. However, as Vik Finkelstein, an English self-advocate has commented, the rest of the population could be labelled as ‘not yet disabled’, for disability is something that can affect each of us at some point in our life course
I received my first inkling of my own sexuality at about age 9. I was always precocious. In those days, it was not a very good discovery to find that one was homosexual. The afternoon tabloids were full of stories of entrapment and arrests of gay men in Sydney. They included some famous visiting artists, like Claudio Arrau, the great concert pianist
The first school that I ever attended was a local kindergarten conducted by Mrs Church. I have no idea of her first name. Back in 1943, schoolchildren never became familiar with their teachers. Certainly not in kindergarten
The small number of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children at school — 147,181 — belies the complexity and magnitude of the failure of the national school system to ensure that they are educated. Only half the schools in the education system have Indigenous students
Constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians is a fraught topic, presenting legal as well as moral challenges, and involves a large set of issues beyond my scope here. I want to explore in this chapter the problem of how to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, a matter given much thought by the members of the Expert Panel appointed by Prime Minister Gillard in December 2010
The Human Rights Commission notes that there are rights protected by international treaties for which it has local responsibility, as well as a broader range of human rights as understood by the community. Among those is the right to a healthy environment. Protecting the natural world has impacts on our health, our mental wellbeing, our ability to produce the food we eat and the water we drink, as well as the spiritual comfort we draw from our surroundings
Future justice has an economic dimension because economic decisions made today will have an impact on the level of wellbeing achievable by people in the future. For example, decisions today to use less of our non-renewable natural resources, such as coal and oil, will influence how much of these resources will be available for people to use in the future
Upon witnessing the last execution ever to take place in France, Judge Monique Mabelly was confronted with the horror of killing a lucid and healthy human being. At the end of her account, she describes the washing away of the blood as akin to concealing a crime. In modern times, methods of execution have become increasingly sanitised and silenced. There is a shroud of secrecy that envelopes its use, and this is designed to conceal the fact that the death penalty is, at its very core, inhumane and cruel