Australia and China negotiated a treaty on mutual assistance in criminal matters in 2006. Vic Adams considers the treaty and its possible implications in the light of China’s record on the death penalty. The treaty lacks safeguards to ensure Australia is not implicated in executions and could be in breach of a number of other...

Peter Andren MP, the Independent member for Calare, considers the impact of the recent changes to media law on media diversity in rural areas. The laws, which will allow a single owner to control both television and newspapers in a particular market, will see, he says, an end to local content in rural areas.

In the wake of the latest increase in the printing allowance for federal MPs, Norm Kelly of the Democratic Audit of Australia, criticises both the accumulation of incumbency benefits and rules that allow the use of parliamentary allowances for partisan purposes.

A J Brown of Griffith Law School reviews Australian laws on public interest disclosures. He finds significant variation in the scope of whistle-blowing law between the different States and Territories, and calls for a 'second generation' of law throughout Australia. He ranks legislative provisions on a scale of 0 to 3 and finds Queensland comes...

One of the major concerns about a parliament controlled by the Executive is that the passage of legislation is poorly scrutinised in a process that has commonly been equated with the functioning of a sausage machine writes Liz Young.