Still Sorry
Between 1905 and 1970, generations of First Nations children were forcibly removed from their families, under a policy of so-called ‘protection.’ The 1995 Bringing Them Home report estimated that between ten and thirty-three per cent of all First Nations children were taken from their loved ones.
Schoolies, Lockout Laws And Jelly Shots
With Schoolies 2016 and the Christmas silly season soon upon us, licensed premises owners, staff and patrons will need to brush up on Queensland’s new liquor laws if they don’t want to wind up on the wrong end of a hefty fine.
Racy Behaviour
This weekend’s Castrol Gold Coast 600 is yet another reminder that some people just seem to be a whole lot happier when someone gets their gear off.
Send In The Clowns
The circus is in town. A crazy new phenomenon is sweeping across the US, Europe, and now even Australia. It trumps the Trump, it’s scarier than Ruddy’s run at the UN, and it’s so weird it even out-weirds planking, if that’s actually possible. Scary killer clowns have taken to lurking on our streets, hiding in the shadows and around corners, waiting to maniacally leap out and scare the living socks off us.
Attack Of The Drones
With the currently almost endemic proliferation in Australian society of audio- and video-recording mobile phones, and the recent announcement by CASA of the relaxation of laws and regulations around the use of surveillance drones in Australian airspace, perhaps it’s time we all sat down to have a good hard rethink about some of our rules around privacy in this country.
Stool Pigeons & G Men
G men love stoolies. It’s a fact of life.
Over the centuries, the one thing that has most frustrated the work of ‘government guys’ – the regulators of all shapes and sizes, the G men, the Jacks, the fuzz, the heat, the traps, the Johnny Hoppers, federalies, wallopers, flatfoots, boys in blue, whatever you want to call them – the one thing that has most frustrated their valiant efforts to rein in the miscreant criminal milieu has been the unshakeable conspiracy of silence that has long existed between partners in crime.
Boom Town
When I was a kid my brothers and I used to watch those corny old black-and-white midday matinee movies on TV, and one of my favourites was an action adventure called “Boom Town”. It starred Clark Gable and Spencer Tracey as “Big John” Masters and “Square John” Sands, a couple of handsome wildcatters chancing their luck on the California oil fields. Together they carve out an empire in a rollicking western town where the saloons are overflowing with cowboys and dancing girls, and everyone is prospecting for something.