Bartlett's Blog

This Sunday marks the start of Refugee Week, with plenty of events around the country to acknowledge and celebrate the contribution refugees have made and continue to make to our society, culture and economy. I'm speaking at a rally being held in Brisbane Square this Sunday from 1pm to mark World Refugee Day. I have attended many refugee week events over the years, and they often involve people from ...

I've posted a piece over at The Stump about the links between global hunger and climate change, and the unfortunate parallels between the less than successful climate change summit in Copenhagen and an even more dismal outcome at the recent Hunger Summit in Rome, which received far less attention.

Writings and doings The asylum seeker debate is causing a lot of political and media flurry at the moment.  In one way that’s good, because it’s an important and complex issue with some crucial principles at stake.  But for years I have found it frustrating that an excessive focus on a very small number of people arriving here in boats takes up so much attention, while there is so ...

Last night I attended the public forum I wrote about here, featuring Pacific Island peoples speaknig about the impacts of climate change on their homelands, health and cultures. It was very well attended and the speakers were engaging and enlightening. I've published a piece about it over at Crikey at this link. If for some reaon you want to see my efforts at live-Tweeting the forum, ...

If you are only going to read one thing about how Australia’s federal Parliament works – and more importantly how it doesn’t work – read this fabulous piece by the long-standing Clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans. Among many things, he highlights the fact that the supposed ‘Westminster system’ we are repeatedly told Australia has, is in fact no such thing.  The almost totally rigid party discipline – a relatively ...

The political responses to asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat is starting to focus more and more on other countries in our region.  Until recently this has mostly involved Indonesia, but Malaysia is now being mentioned more frequently.  I recently wrote a piece for Crikey and also had a letter published in The Australian detailing some of the serious human rights abuses inflicted on asylum seekers and ...

There is less than a week to go for people to put in personal submissions for the national human rights consultations, with the general cut off date this coming Monday, 15 June.  If you were planning on having your say on how best to protect and promote human rights and responsibilities, now is the time to do it.   The efforts at consultation, carried out by an independent committee ...

The tragic explosion on a boatload filled with refugees from Afghanistan has generated another war of words over asylum seeker policies in Australia.  Ive written a piece on this over at Crikey, which you can read by clicking here.  We've had enough debate on this site about asylum seeker issues lately, so I'll leave comments off here. Comments can be made over at that site.

In May 2007, months after Fiji had suffered its latest coup, I noted reports that the military was trying to prevent access to anti-government blogs. Now the transition to a military dictatorship is complete, the censorship crackdown on the local media has been redoubled, leaving local blogs and other websites as a crucial source of uncensored news from Fiji.  I've done a post on the Crikey website with more details.

All of the attention on this weekend’s COAG meeting between federal and state governments has focused on funding agreements for health and education. The equally important area of housing seems to have fallen off the public radar.  Click here to read a piece I’ve written at Crikey on this matter.

Everyone knows that billions of dollars are needed to address the third world conditions many Indigenous Australians live in, including horrendously overcrowded housing, poor road access and other infrastructure problems.  But I haven’t seen any mention so far of spending money to address these problems in the flurry of bidding that has started following the federal government’s announcement they are looking at spending $20 billion on infrastructure to ...

Ronan Lee was due to speak just prior to me at the Love Earth Gathering at the top of Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall yesterday morning.  When I arrived, the organisers told me he had sent them a text message that morning giving his apologies, saying an urgent matter had come up.  I must say that, despite his previous record of being prepared to be a bit outspoken, I’d ...

If you're in Brisbane this Saturday morning, you can lend support to the campaign against the Traveston Dam by farewelling marathon kayaker Steve Posselt as he heads off on another journey to spread the message.  He's leaving around 12 noon from the boat ramp at West End on Riverside Drive, between Jane and Boundary Streets.  Last time he paddled from Brisbane up to the site of the dam, ...

I’ve been pondering the possible makeup of the Malcolm Turnbull’s shadow ministry, likely to be announced tomorrow. With 45 positions from 101 MPs, you think there'd be little trouble getting all the really talented people a spot. But it never works that easily of course. The need to minimise internal unrest probably means there won’t be a huge number of demotions or surprises, even before other factors like factional, ...

Two weeks of the new Senate is enough to show there is a strong likelihood of the government ending up with a large pile of rejected legislation - plenty for a double dissolution election some time next year should Kevin Rudd want one.  There have already been four packages of legislation knocked back so far this year. I've written about it in more detail in this piece over at Crikey.  

Crikey has expanded their efforts at giving exposure to the blogosphere, setting up a page displaying a range of bloggers, including some of their existing contributors having a go in the blogging format. I’ll be writing regular pieces for Crikey which will appear on their site. You can read the first of them by clicking here. It’s about the prompt reappearance of the time-honoured tradition Senate bashing, as soon ...