"I cannot find them, I am sorry. I had them on a notepad."

With that bumbling, mumbled apology on Tuesday, the Attorney-General's Department's new secretary, Chris Moraitis, may have spared himself and his minister, George Brandis, from a criminal investigation.

How so? Without Moraitis' missing notes, the Australian Federal Police is powerless to act on Labor's urging that it investigate whether Brandis sought to bribe the Human Rights Commission president, Professor Gillian Triggs, into resigning.

Social Services Minister Scott Morrison says wholesale changes to the welfare system are "necessary", but he has signalled they will be introduced slowly and in stages.

from the The Anti-Empire Report

from PoliticOz ….

"By any measure, the threat to Australia is worsening," Abbott said. "The signs are ominous. ASIO currently has over 400 high-priority counter-terrorism investigations. That's more than double the number a year ago." And so on. This may be factually correct, but is it a prime minister's job to engender fear among his people? Isn't that the terrorists' job?

from PoliticOz …..

Australian media is full of suggestions that the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, will ban Hizb ut-Tahrir as part of his national security announcement this Monday.

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon says the Federal Government needs to come clean about whether it has decided to scale back the number of new submarines Australia will buy.

If you are freezing your balls off (or your tits off) in some eastern part of the USA now, you're entitled to say "global warming is crap"...

The United States and Turkey have signed a deal to train and equip Syrian opposition forces, officials say.

The NSW Freedom Ride saw student activists tackle racist discrimination against Aboriginal people - a fight that continues today, writes Lachlan Marshall