News and Events

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 political posturing on law and order in the UK is all too familiar. Just as in Redfern and Macquarie Fields, the connections between crime, policing and poverty are fraught, writes Adam Brereton.

By all means let's investigate privacy abuse, including that of government ("A privacy probe? Yes indeed", Editorial, 28/7).

Can consumers expect better service and complaints handling from their phone company? And if not, who can they turn to for help? They are among the questions the Australian Communications and Media Authority will address in its draft report Reconnecting the Customer that it will publish today.

Civil libertarians have criticised state government plans to extend police powers to order drunk people in public places to ''move on'', saying it will lead to an increase in arrests of indigenous, homeless and mentally ill people.

Rogue landlords in Marsfield in Sydney's north west are piling as many as 20 students into shoddily converted family homes, demanding cash in hand and advance notice of visitors to avoid detection by authorities, international students say.

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

Jacqui Swinburne, Tenancy Coordinatory on ABC Triple J program, Students' O-Week Special on Sharing House.

Lawyers say foreign students are struggling with accommodation and workplace rip-offs despite an overhaul of the tertiary sector.

I sympathise with Michael Texilake's concerns (Letters, July 20), but many of his complaints can effectively be dealt with by existing legal remedies where the conduct is threatening or excessive. A more effective short-term solution to "music, burn-outs, fights and all-night public rampages" may be found in the Summary Offences Act and the Protection of the Environment Operations Act.