It's time we devoted less concern and media space to human rights abuses in other countries like China, and looked at Australia. Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights says "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, including the right to hold opinions without interference and to seek to receive and impart information and ideas through any media...." Article 20 says "Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."

The public assaults committed on citizens trying to attend the meetings of a properly constituted political Party, namely One Nation, amount to flagrant human rights abuses and nothing less. The fact that they are not committed by government is irrelevant. Government law enforcement agencies are standing by watching while it happens, and since governments are responsible for the actions, or inaction, of those agencies, governments are aiding and abetting human rights violations by organised violent mobs masquerading as 'peaceful demonstrators'.

By failing to curb the violence of the anti-Hansonists, Australian governments, federal and state, are condoning human rights abuses right here in Australia, and we should stop kidding ourselves that it is anything less. It is time for Howard and state premiers to either put a stop to it, or be hauled before the International Court of Justice to explain themselves.

Graham Strachan.

Subject: Media

"The Nation" has a worlwide campaign to bust up the media monopoly, and also a ww campaign for a 'Living Wage'.

George Soros has a ww campaign to keep the net as free as his 'Open Society'.

The 'International community' of the rich and powerful obviously use Oz as a social laboratory, so if they want to disarm the plebs., then Oz cops it first, or, if legislation to ban porn on the net fails in the USSA, then they try it out in Oz as a lever to the USSA.

Now I might be against poofters, Christians, porn., football, or a whole raft of dislikes, but history tells me that once some bloody do-gooder manages to convince some obsequious politicians to ban something, then this lever is used to ban something else, and so on and on towards that dictatorship that Plato spoke of: " Dictatorship naturally arises out of Democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."

I would say the extreme liberty spoken of here could be better equated with Economic Rationalism and Laissez Faire, than porn., and that the 'democratic' vote to ban porn., is the ilk that leads to the dictatorship.

Ormond