News and Events

Plans to expand NSW police powers would encourage officers to arrest people for spurious reasons and to hold them in custody even if they face only financial penalties, legal experts have warned.

THE charging of domestic violence victims who retract allegations should be approved only at the highest levels of state police forces or by directors of public prosecution, says the Australian Law Reform Commission.

RLC's Police Powers solicitor, David Porter, spoke with Eleanor Bell on ABC Radio National's PM show, on measures to address youth crime.

In the year of its 20th anniversary, the Federal Disability Discrimination Act is under scrutiny thanks to a 78-year old woman taking on an airline policy of not flying more than two people in wheelchairs on the same plane.

The veteran disability rights campaigner, Sheila King, 78, is undaunted by the barrage of hateful comments that followed her unsuccessful court action against Jetstar for its ''two wheelchair'' policy.

This week David and Goliath have been playing it out in the Federal Court of Australia.

A disabled woman has taken action against Jetstar in the Federal Court after the airline refused to allow her onto a flight because policy restricts any one flight to two wheelchairs.

The impulsive need to condemn is a reaction to our inability to describe why riots happen in some disadvantaged areas and not others. We should be making a concerted effort to separate the process of identifying and punishing criminal acts from understanding why they happen, particularly on a large scale. Instead we get the constant insistence that people are rational moral actors — and that violence has no place in a reasonable society.

The chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Service is spot on with her statement that "employers need to be less discriminatory".