cam: Excellent Find: I have put that link into a side box, presumptously entitled Abundant Democracy. They need to do it as an RSS feed, so sites like this can pick up changes without having to go to the laborious task of clicking and looking for it.

The appropriations process in the US is dreadfully broken. Having that tax clause in a bill is a massive embarrassment and comes from the house leadership trying to ram legislation through without dissent. IMO if they arent reading the legislation, then they arent doing their jobs.

One of the benefits of direct democracy is that it would simplify the language of law, as well as require it to be read first. No specialists and party mafia ramming it through without debate or true consent.

Great diary.

cam

cam: RSS and Bills: Just emailed the webmaster of the parliamentary section of the website with the suggestion that the bills be syndicated through RSS, with the complete bill being accessible in this manner.

cam

avocadia: RSS: I emailed as well. I provided a link through to the RSS2 spec; hope they aren\'t Dave Winer haters :- )

monkeymind: I still want a bill of rights: Here Here!

As one who was at Uni during some of the worst excesses during the Joh era in QLD, I know that despite the usually good level of personal rights here it does not take much for them to be removed.

The main problem with QLD politics is there is no upper house any more; the labour party voted it out in the \'20\'s. Once you have power, it\'s no holds bared until the next election.

I always have a level of discomfort with a party have the numbers in both houses federally.

I also have no illusions that the problem can only come from the right. The labour government that was defeated by the Country Party a few years before Joh took up the helm for 18 years was as bad, if not worse than what the Nationals would become.

cam: So if you were Joh: ... and King of Queensland. What would the Bill of Rights you wanted include/be?

cam

cam: I Added "Parliamentry Bill Watch" topic: ... under diaries/articles. It has a little blue pic of new parliament house. That is now the logical place for any commentary on bills that are being reviewed, enacted, thought about etc.

cam

avocadia: Congress make no law respecting the mumblemumble:

That\'s hard. I sat down and tried to do it and ran into a brick wall on the first right. The New Zealand Bill of Rights has the right not to be deprived of life. New Zealand also has legalised abortion. The bill of rights doesn\'t even try and reconcile these two concepts with something like a clear cut definition of when a fetus becomes a New Zealand citizen with rights. Which leaves you with a vague right. Vague rights are Bad.

ranomatic: Declaration of Rights: A good starting place might be the first bill of rights.

avocadia: I think...:

...that the Virginia Declaration of Rights is an iteresting lesson in how to overwrite it. Article V uses 92 words to dictate term limits and short durations of parliament. And then turns around and mandates what is effectively a property requirement for suffrage. And it is vague; "at fixed periods" Come on, take a stand, my fixed period isn\'t necessarily the Third Reich\'s fixed period.

Does point IV rule out the idea of intellectual property (an exclusive priviledge)?  Article XI is just overwhelming in it\'s support for trial by a jury of one\'s peers, isn\'t it. Preferable :- )

I would like to have my Bill of Rights be completely unvague. If a right can\'t be boiled down to a simple statement, then it is probably breaking the Single Responsibility Principal and needs to be re-factored. Term limits and parliament durations belong in a section of the Constitution describing the mechanics of government, not a statement of the rights of the individual. To mine, they should be distinct documents.

ranomatic: An Interesting History: The document was written to express inherent rights that were not at all obvious in the sixteenth century.  I would expect that a more modern expression might enumerate some different rights, but the bones are there.  A simple example of modernization would be including women among the people who have rights (man = human-kind).

You are in a quandary - desiring a list of rights that is both simple and precise.  I don\'t think they are both possible (or even desirable) in the same document.  You should attempt to write one and post it here as a diary.  It would make for an interesting discussion.

Your comments on the declaration underline the difficulty of the task.  I know a little about the intent behind Mr. Mason\'s declaration.  This gives me a different interpretation of the articles you highlighted as examples of problems.

Did you actually count the words in Article V?  You are patient.  In any event, it\'s not about term limits in the modern sense. It about you having a right to expect that people in government are not there in perpetuity.  Governing laws (i.e. a constitution) control the actual duration.  It\'s also about holding regular elections.  Again, governing laws determine the time, place and method.  These are desirable rights.

Article IV is not about IP in any way. It is in the declaration to prevent the formation of a Virginia nobility.  A \"noble\" goal in its day and still at least somewhat relevant today.  In the US Constitution, the corresponding amendment never passed.  Sad, really.

Article XI is (at least in my mind) one of the more strongly worded sections. It calls trial by jury \"sacred.\"

Food for thought...

avocadia: No, I didn\'t count them...:

...I copy pasted them into a text editor and let it count them for me.

The Rights may not have been obvious in the sixteenth century, but by the eighteenth century it was not a new and novel idea that Man should have rights as an individual.

I read Article 5 as partly the same as the Chartists wish for Parliaments of short duration (and thus regular elections), with a requirement that one person cannot sit in the assembly forever; which in effect - I thought - was a term limit.

Article IV may not be about IP in any way, but it can certainly be interpreted that way. IP is a privilege given to the owner. We\'ve now got federally imposed speed limits on highways being constitutional because of the commerce clause, I don\'t see any problem getting a ban on IP laws out of Article IV.

It calls it sacred, and that trial by jury is preferred, but it doesn\'t out and out guarantee it. If a Virginian really really wanted to they could demand trial by some other means; which I assume means duelling. Burr should have demanded they go to Virginia!

I\'m at best at the note jotting stage of any sort of attempt at a Bill of Rights. It\'s very hard trying to walk the same path as mental giants like Jefferson and Mason.

cam: They looked at the abuses of the day:

I\'m at best at the note jotting stage of any sort of attempt at a Bill of Rights. It\'s very hard trying to walk the same path as mental giants like Jefferson and Mason.

Such as tyranny from the executive, no taxation without representation. Howard and Bush have given us many arbitrary government actions to negate explicitly in language and protect against those abuses.

cam

avocadia: Regular revolutions:

Protecting ourselves from the abuses of the government of the day leaves us in the position where we really do need to tear the whole thing down every twenty years.

cam: I have no problem with that: ... though I think it should be twenty five years the constitution gets rejuvenated, that is a generation. That way the constitution represents each generations wishes. Rather than what some incompetent monarchical, bearded racists from the 1890\'s wanted.

As to abuses; in the US the Bill of Rights was deemed a privilege only for citizens, then even that was taken away with Padilla. Hence explicit language like; \"The Bill of Rights pertains to anyone under the jurisdiction or care of the government\", so that there are no exclusionary cases.

Universal suffrage is another. Make it so every Australian remains on the electoral roll indefinately. Make it so anyone under the jursidiction of the government has a say in the laws they are required to respect (Eureka Charter), hence add suffrage for all under the government\'s jurisdiction (above 18), rather than just taxpayers or citizens.

Another is that everyone on the electoral role must reside in an electorate that is represented in parliament. Hence the electorates would have to be outside of Australia to catch the diaspora.

Since the government has abused the right to detain people, then it will be given; 4 hours between arrest and charge; given one month after charging and before sentencing; and absolutely no denial of habeous corpus in civil or military trials. This is for anyone, including refugees.

Absolutely no torture of anyone under the governments jurisdiction, civil or martial.

Freedom of speech and the liberty not to have someone speak for you without your consent.

Freedom of association. This pertains to privacy laws as well. No government arm, including ASIO/etc can exist without direct accountability and auditing to the people. Secrecy in government is a sign of tyranny and despotism, and consequently I would make it so that any department not adhering to freedom of information act rules can be brought to criminal trial for it.

The right to petition the government and have your grievances heard.

A bill of rights is to protect the consent of the people, and hence the legitimacy of government, it does so through limiting government arbitrariness and coercive power by stating the absolute minimums of individual political freedom.

There are probably plenty of other things the government has done that warrant an explicit protection at the constitutional level. I also have no problem with the Bill of Rights being an additive (rather than static or subtractive) document. As the government fumbles again and again, proving their susceptibiliy to corruption and power, then I dont see an issue with another explicit political freedom being added to the Bill of Rights.

cam