THE TELECARD AFFAIR

THE TELECARD AFFAIR

Author: Gerard Charles Wilson

Publisher: Gerard Charles Wilson Publisher

Published: 2024-04-11

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1876262605

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In October 2000, The Canberra Times broke a story about the misuse of Liberal MP Peter Reith’s government funded Telecard. The card was for member’s personal use to have access to a public telephone when no other telephone was available. Mobile phones at the time were not in common use. Unauthorized calls to the tune of $50,000 had been rung up on the Workplace Relations Minister’s Telecard after he had given his son, Paul Reith, the card’s PIN in contravention of the Remuneration Tribunal’s guidelines. For more than two weeks the media was in uproar, smelling the blood of a hardnose conservative politician. Editorial writers, political commentators, and radio talkback hosts charged Reith with the Telecard’s misuse. This was another case, they said, of a rorting politician coming to grief over his all too frequent nose in the trough. The author took a different view. In the opening chapter of The Telecard Affair: Diary of a Media Lynching Second Edition, he writes: ‘While the media and the Labor Party had Peter Reith battered and strung up as a public warning, I will argue that the Telecard Affair is not about former Workplace Relations Minister, Peter Reith. It is not about MPs’ rorts. It is not about the usual ‘snouts in the trough.’ It is essentially about the media as the sharpest corrupting influence in our social and political life. It is about those media groups who function as amoral commercial enterprises. It is about journalists who betray their calling and are seduced, or coerced, by people who rule themselves according to their materialist objectives. It is about the slow death of public justice.’ The Telecard Affair was a paradigm case of the media’s irresponsible and ideologically driven misuse of their disproportionate power in the state. The author’s analysis of the media’s reporting of the Telecard Affair is unrelenting and targets some well-known media figures. He has undertaken a thorough revision of the text and added further comment to the political uproar of twenty-three years ago.


Motivating Ministers to Morality

Motivating Ministers to Morality

Author: Ian Holland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1351784951

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This title was first published in 2002: Political ethics is a rapidly growing field in disciplines such as political science, philosophy, applied ethics and public policy and it has become a major topic in current affairs’ reporting of politics. This book discusses the most prominent subjects - and occasional victims - of the ethics debate: government ministers. It is the first major work to discuss institutional reforms around the world that target ministerial morality and asks: how are these reforms influencing the motivation and conduct of the most powerful of our politicians? The book provides unique insights into ministerial behaviour and the changing role of institutions in influencing the ethics of the executive, with analyses from around the world. Contributors to the volume include international high-profile players in political ethics. They include Lord Nolan, the first Chairman of Britain's Joint Parliamentary Committee on Standards in Public Life; Professor Robert J. Jackson, a leading Canadian political scientist instrumental in establishing the Canadian Office of the Ethics Counsellor; and Associate Professor Noel Preston, the leading commentator on ethics in Australian politics, who has been involved in developing a number of its ethical regimes.


The Latham Diaries

The Latham Diaries

Author: Mark Latham

Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing

Published: 2011-04-01

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0522860648

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Here are the political diaries of one of Australia's most promising national leaders—published within twelve months of his resignation from office—an historic first. The Latham Diaries are searingly honest bulletins from the front line of Labor politics. They provide a unique view into the life of a man, the Party and the nation at a crucial time in Australian history. Mark Latham resigned from parliament in January 2005, after only fourteen months as Leader of the Opposition, amid bitter post-election recrimination and his own ill health. From the beginning of his career he was viewed by many observers as the ALP's resident intellectual and larrikin, the great hope of a new generation with the drive and talent to become prime minister. So why did his career end so abruptly? As The Latham Diaries reveal, the rising tide of public cynicism about politics, the cult of celebrity, the dangerous liaison between politics and the media, and the sickness at the heart of the Labor machine all played their part. As did Latham's own errors, as he candidly records in these diaries. This is a riveting chronicle of life inside politics: the backroom deals, the frontroom conniving, the bitter defeat of idealism and the triumph of opportunism. The Latham Diaries is not just the story of the Labor Party in the last years of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, but a sobering account of the state of Australian democracy 100 years after Federation.


COUNTERCULTURE DREAMS

COUNTERCULTURE DREAMS

Author: Gerard Charles Wilson

Publisher: Gerard Charles Wilson Publisher

Published: 2024-01-01

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1876262559

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The cultural revolution of the long 1960s (1960-1975) brought in one of the greatest cultural shifts the world has known. Music, dress, moral ideas, social manners, and political attitudes were turned upside down. The war generation hardly knew what motivated the post-war generation. Across Western Society a social fissure opened. The leaders of the revolution were twenty-year-olds (‘Don’t trust anyone under 30) mostly from an educated middle-class background. Counterculture Dreams follows the lives of a group of young people in Sydney who navigate the changes, some grasping the changes, others resisting and even condemning them, and still others making disastrous choices. The story centers on Danny Williamson and his younger sister, Angela. Danny ends school, innocent of the traps in society that others, including Angela, see. He forms a relationship with clever Cathy Dunn who clings to her Catholic traditions. He begins university in 1963 with Cathy, though at different universities. Meeting outlandish counterculture leader, Ronnie Newell, whose audacity impresses him, disturbs his relationship with Cathy. Not fully aware of the influences around Ronnie and his crowd he gradually drifts away from Cathy. He does not see where he is heading, despite Angela’s and Cathy’s warnings. All the while Angela plays a mysterious game with Danny’s best friend, Max Gallagher. But is it a game? Nobody is sure until Prime Minister Robert Menzies announces a national service scheme to meet the threat of communism taking over Southeast Asia, beginning with Vietnam. Danny and Max are eligible for the call-up. Gerda van den Donker, introduced in TIMES OF DISTRESS and with a bigger role in IN THIS VALE OF TEARS reappears. Jannie de Kam, also introduced in IN THIS VALE OF TEARS, reappears in close company with Gerda van den Donker. The Sixties series will consist of eight connected but stand-alone stories. The themes of the ‘Goddess’, neo-paganism, and Gnosticism are threads through the stories. The historical, political, and ideological background is the cultural revolution of the long 1960s and the Second Vatican Council. The author who lived through those times recreates its atmosphere. Book 1 Times of Distress Book 2 In this Vale of Tears Book 3 Counterculture Dreams Book 4 The Counterculture Goddess (2025) Book 5 Love in the Counterculture (2025) Book 6 Dreams to Nightmare (2026) Book 7 The Castle of Heavenly Bliss Book 8 A Sense of Loss due 2026


Power Without Responsibility

Power Without Responsibility

Author: Anne Tiernan

Publisher: UNSW Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780868409818

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A raft of recent political scandals in Australia has generated widespread media and public interest in the role and accountability of ministerial staffers, and their impact on relations between ministers and their public service advisers. Such scandals include the notorious 'Children Overboard' affair and the more recent AWB imbroglio. In Power Without Responsibility Anne Tiernan describes the contemporary working environment of political staffers, their formal and less formal roles, the challenges they face, and the forces that have escalated the growth in their numbers and influence.


Mass Media

Mass Media

Author: James B. Martin

Publisher: Nova Publishers

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781590332627

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Mass media has become an integral part of the human experience. News travels around the world in a split second affecting people in other countries in untold ways. Although being on top of the news may be good, at least for news junkies, mass media also transmits values or the lack thereof, condenses complex events and thoughts to simplified sound bites and often ignores the essence of an event or story. The selective bibliography gathers the books and magazine literature over the previous ten years while providing access through author, title and subject indexes.


Sources of News and Current Affairs

Sources of News and Current Affairs

Author: Australian Broadcasting Authority

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13:

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A study to enable the ABA to gain a better understanding of the notion of influence, in light of Parliament's intent that different levels of regulatory control be applied across the range of broadcasting services according to the degree of influence that different types of broadcasting services are able to exert in shaping community views. To do this, it was necessary to survey both those who produce the news and current affairs, broadly defined, and those who consume them - the public.


The Right Not to be Criminalized

The Right Not to be Criminalized

Author: Dennis J. Baker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-24

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1317017773

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This book presents arguments and proposals for constraining criminalization, with a focus on the legal limits of the criminal law. The book approaches the issue by showing how the moral criteria for constraining unjust criminalization can and has been incorporated into constitutional human rights and thus provides a legal right not to be unfairly criminalized. The book sets out the constitutional limits of the substantive criminal law. As far as specific constitutional rights operate to protect specific freedoms, for example, free speech, freedom of religion, privacy, etc, the right not to be criminalized has proved to be a rather powerful justice constraint in the U.S. Yet the general right not to be criminalized has not been fully embraced in either the U.S. or Europe, although it does exist. This volume lays out the legal foundations of that right and the criteria for determining when the state might override it. The book will be of interest to researchers in the areas of legal philosophy, criminal law, constitutional law, and criminology.


2001

2001

Author: John Warhurst

Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780702233036

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