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Entries Tagged as 'Human Rights'

Freedom of Religion in a Secular Society @ Auckland University this Monday

September 8th, 2011 Comments Off on Freedom of Religion in a Secular Society @ Auckland University this Monday

As part of AUSA’s Human Rights week at the University of Auckland, and in association with Thinking Matters, Matt and I will be giving a free public lecture with Q&A on the topic “Freedom of Religion in a Secular Society” on Monday 12 September from 7-8.30pm in Clock Tower Lecture Room 032. The Facebook page for […]

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Klingon Cloaking Devices Unmasked by Boat People

July 15th, 2011 15 Comments

It was inevitable.  Sooner or later a boat filled with desperate people would set out from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, whatever, for New Zealand.  We have been “protected” to date only by an accident of geography–New Zealand’s relative distance.  Australia has faced the problem for decades. A group of Sri Lankan poor (allegedly Tamils previously […]

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Middleton Grange, Free Exercise and the Gay Rights Movement UPDATED

July 26th, 2010 284 Comments

Over at GayNZ.com’s Proclamations of the Red Queen blog, Craig Young is in a celebratory  mood. Middleton Grange, a Reformed Evangelical Christian school has been forced by law to pay reparations and have their management undergo “human rights education” because they dismissed a netball coach on the grounds that he openly engaged in homosexual conduct. Middleton […]

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The Foreshore and Seabed Repeal: The Inconvenience of Due Process

July 2nd, 2009 14 Comments

That the state is not above the law but also subject to it is surely one of the foundational concepts of any just and free society. This notion has found its place in the writings of many influential philosophers, jurists and theologians, it can be found in the constitutions and bills of rights of most […]

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Blackout Victory: s92a Scrapped

March 23rd, 2009 Comments Off on Blackout Victory: s92a Scrapped

The NBR reports that the controversial s92A of the Copyright Amendment Act will be scrapped. If you recall its implementation was to be “delayed a month while ISPs and copyright holders continued efforts to work out a voluntary agreement on how it would be enforced … if they could not agree, the clause would be […]

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They Just Want Your Money (and your Voice)

February 27th, 2009 2 Comments

My post about student association membership reminded me that just yesterday I stumbled accross this article that I wrote for Critic’s diatribe column when we were at Otago. Despite the fact that OUSA membership has probably increased since we were there, that NZUSA’s annual budget is now almost certainly much more than the figure I […]

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My Conscience Cannot be Bought with a Jelly-Shot

February 27th, 2009 5 Comments

On Monday a new University year begins for thousands of New Zealand students. If you are a student, you probably don’t even realise that when you paid your fees to enrol at University, most of you joined a political organisation; a political organisation with strident viewpoints on all sorts of controversial hot potatoes that speaks […]

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