While protest is vital for our democracy, its importance isn’t well understood, and our protest rights aren’t properly protected in Australian law. It’s time this changed. Because while Australia has a proud protest history, we also have a history of governments trying to suppress protest.

The medical and humanitarian crisis in Australia’s offshore detention camps in Nauru and Manus Island keeps escalating, with the bearers of our government’s harsh policies being the bodies of the people who have been held captive for nearly six years.

The government keeps playing politics with innocent people’s lives but the public mood has shifted. After almost six years of unmitigated cruelty to innocent people, Australia is finally rediscovering its moral compass. There’s a palpable sense that this has all gone too far, for too long.

Our justice system is supposed to represent the best of us: principled, fair, equal and incorruptible. Underpinned by centuries-old common values that bind and protect us all. But 2018 has exposed a chasm between what is officially said, and what is officially done.

We need a game changer - It’s time to put power into the hands of the people, to give us the tools to hold our governments to account, writes Lee Carnie.

The public vote on marriage equality for LGBTIQ Australians was a bruising time. This anniversary comes with mixed feelings, with wounds that have only just begun to heal for some, and many more psychological scars may last a lifetime.

Over the past five years we have seen children on Nauru go from being playful and curious little kids to listless, voiceless, hopeless bodies on a mattress, unable to eat or speak. We’ve seen their spirits slowly dissolve and the brightness slowly fade from their eyes.

The Australian Government should immediately end its engagement with Myanmar’s military and impose sanctions on abusive military generals, the Human Rights Law Centre and the Australian Council for International Development said in a joint statement at the UN Human Rights Council overnight.

“As the Australian Government sits here on this Council, professing its commitment to human rights, it is indefinitely imprisoning 102 children in its offshore refugee camp on Nauru,” Daniel Webb told the UN Human Rights Council.

​​​​​​​For too many of us in the LGBTIQ community, we know what it feels like to be mistreated because of who we are or who we love.

It’s 2018 and women’s voices are still ridiculed, disregarded, dismissed and put down. But there’s no doubting that our voices are out there, loud and clear and they are increasingly more difficult to ignore. Our voices are out there and this is a good thing. But not all women’s voices are heard.

On Friday, the people of Ireland will vote on whether a divisive constitutional ban on abortion should end. Ireland's abortion laws are some of the most harsh and archaic in the world – only since 2013 have abortions to save a woman's life been legal.