My actual final speech

The final question

My Final Speech

Running again
It’s nearly two years since the last election, when the Democrats lost all their seats, and over sixteen months since I finally left the Senate,  as did the Democrats as a party.  After a lot of thought,  I’ve decided to get back into party politics and contest a seat at next year’s federal election. It was formally announced today that ’ll be running in

Pieces published elsewhere
Following are links to some items I’ve had published on other sites: This piece at Asian Correspondent examines a new report released by Australian lawyer Jessie Taylor. The report is titled ‘Behind Australian Doors: Examining the Conditions of Detention of Asylum Seekers in Indonesia’.  It examines many of the detention centres currently funded by the Australian government. An article noting some  more reports on the terrib

Good and bad ways to reduce boat arrivals
Peter Mares is a long time follower of refugee issues and critic of the problems inherent in the former government’s approach to asylum seekers in boats.  He wrote a piece in The Age which emphasised a point about the Howard’s government asylum policies which does not get highlighted enough. former treasurer Peter Costello wrote in these pages that the only way to prevent asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat is to ‘’stop the sea trade”. He is right. This may sound surprising coming from a critic of Howard-era

Some facts about the people on the boats
Given all the speculation and commentary about the two boats with Tamil asylum seekers aboard currently in Indonesia, I thought it would be helpful to publish some basic facts about the people.  This information comes from Pamela Curr from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in Melbourne, a person I’ve found to very reliable on these sorts of things – certainly far more so than anonymous, speculative or presumptive comments in the media. ———————– *Two boats* “Merak” is anchored off the Indonesian port of Merak and has 255 people on board including “Alex”. Â

Road map for West Papua
I wrote a piece recently about the new Cabinet of the Indonesian government, including their new Foreign Minister Marty Natelegawa who gained his PhD at the Australian National University.  As I’ve written a number of times, Indonesia has made very impressive progress in a range of areas in recent years.  I believe one of their biggest unaddressed challenges is West Papua, which is an issue with both internal and foreign policy components. Carmel Budiardjo, a co-director of the human rights organisatio