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How is Australia’s system unfair?

If you get caught speeding in Australia, you will be fined with a flat-rate traffic fine. Exceeding the speed limit by 12km/h in New South Wales earns you a $361 fine, whether you are on government benefits or a billionaire. This is not a fair system.

What about the principle: same offence, same price?

If you earn $50,000 a year, a $361 fine is equal to more than a third of your weekly salary. If you earn $200,000, it is less than 1% of your weekly salary.

So, while a speeding fine is nothing more than annoying to a wealthier person, someone on a low-income might have to choose between paying the fine and a medical bill or food.

A minor fine left unpaid can lead to a vicious circle of accrued debts, leading to a loss of licence and further loss of income. In some cases, it can even lead to jail time. Unpaid fines are in fact one of the top concerns for people seeking legal aid.

Australia Institute research shows that a proportional traffic fine system, as is in place in Finland, would be much fairer. In practice, the Finnish system calculates a fine based on the driver’s disposable income and whether they have dependents. Same offence, same proportion of income.

Introduction

Tips and an example checklist for community organisers about planning and promoting an event such as a town hall. This resource comes from a conference session called Town Halls and Turning People Out in 2024.

The conference—FWD+Organise 2024—was held by Australian Progress in Naarm | Melbourne. The session was run by Carly Robertson from the Australian Conservation Foundation and Caitlin Gordon-King from Huddle.

In the session, Carly Robertson, a community organiser with the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), shared lessons about ACF’s ‘organising playbook.’

ACF Community Groups

ACF uses a decentralised organising framework and has 43 groups (as of Dec 2024) around Australia. (See Map) The community groups are a network of independently organised, volunteer-run groups in the ACF community and are supported by paid community organisers. The community organisers provide support by:

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

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Text originally posted Nov. 18, 2024

As far as I know, the only institutional reaction from American law schools to federal results from the 2024 election has been to tell foreign law students to get to campus before Trump's inauguration, part of broader warnings from universities and colleges. I can find no record of law schools holding conferences on how to teach law when all three branches of the U.S. federal government will be controlled by officials and judges expressly opposed to rule of law and the design of the U.S. Constitution. There is no news of curricular overhaul to meet this moment, no reports of revamped legal ethics courses considering how, if at all, ethical attorneys can practice law in this environment. The Association of American Law Schools, U.S. legal education's main professional organization, has not issued any statements about what "excellence in legal education" might require when the federal legal system is about to be controlled by fascists.

In January, 2020, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was ratified, per the procedures specified in Article V of the U.S. Constitution. As with all U.S. law, the U.S. Constitution is the paramount authority on the law of amending the U.S. Constitution. So, when Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to ratify, the Amendment was lawfully ratified and it became part of the U.S. Constitution. Where was the fanfare? The celebration? Why was a woman's constitutional right to abortion relitigated in 2022 as a question of due process rather than a question of women's equal right to choose their own medical care and to bodily autonomy?

Since the election, some legacy media, Democratic electeds, and formerly anti-Trump commentators have been quick to appease Donald Trump and to normalize his proposed nominees and policies. This is sickening. It is craven, unprincipled, and dangerous.

Those of us committed to opposing Republican Fascism must identify and support actors who gathering courage and resources for the struggle. As I find people, causes, and organizations that get it, I will share them here at Heidi Says. I have two so far: Marc Elias and his organization, Democracy Docket; and Biden Publish the ERA, a coalition of groups working to get Biden to direct the U.S. Archivist to publish the Equal Rights Amendment.

Marc Elias is a long-time leading attorney for voting rights and ballot access. I have been acquainted with him and his work since 2008, and he is one of the smartest, shrewdest, and most committed lawyers I know. After a successful career with Perkins Coie, he started his own law firm to dedicated to voting rights and founded Democracy Docket. Yesterday, Marc wrote:

About once a decade, I need to consult the Charter and Bylaws of the Democratic Party of the United States. As a rank-and-file Democrat - registered to vote as one - this is always remarkably difficult. That tells you much of what you need to know about the relationship between the rank-and-file and the Party: the Party is a private organization, with no obligation to disclose its organizational documents to people just because they are registered Democrats.

This time around I went hunting for a copy of the latest Charter and Bylaws, which is from 2022, because somebody asked me how we rank-and-file Democrats can encourage the Democratic National Committee to make Ben Wikler its chair. Currently the Chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Wikler would be a great national Chair. But that's a topic for another day. Today is for explaining why it is that rank-and-file Democrats have no real way to influence who becomes an officer of even the most local Democratic Party organization, let alone the Chair of the National Committee.

It isn’t that I don’t have anything to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving in America in 2024. I am seated before a stunning view, only partly captured in the photo accompanying this post. I have dear family and friends. Over the course of the past year, I left an institution I had thoroughly outgrown and moved to a wonderful new state. I could list more. But the problem with many of the things I’m thankful for is that they are too small. They are about me, my narrow life. On better Thanksgivings, I have had larger, broader things to be thankful for. I have been able to feel thankful to be part of a country actively working to realize constitutional democracy and a rule of law to underpin it. Thanksgivings where I could be thankful that more Americans had access to healthcare than ever before, where women had gained legal protection for their right to equal pay, where federal tax rates were adjusted in favor of lower personal income earners, where the Environmental Protection Agency was held to have an affirmative legal obligation to regulate greenhouse gas pollutants, where Americans as a whole seemed to be moving away from racism and homophobia, where U.S. military power was used to protect democracy and human rights in Europe. I could list more. Certainly on those Thanksgivings there were many aspects of American law, politics and culture for which I was not thankful. But overall my thankfulness easily ran beyond my own narrow well-being.

Jack Smith today moved to dismiss federal criminal cases against Donald Trump, cases meant to hold Trump accountable for his efforts to overturn the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections and for his mishandling of classified documents. Smith is deferring, not to the scandalous Presidential immunity decision handed down by the Roberts Court last terms, but to U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) policy against federal criminal prosecution of sitting Presidents. Smith wrote in today’s motion to dismiss the election overturning charges: “After careful consideration, the Department has determined that [Department of Justice] prior opinions concerning the Constitution’s prohibition on federal indictment and prosecution of a sitting President apply to this situation and that as a result this prosecution must be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated.” Whether or not DOJ past opinions are legally sound or prudent, Smith’s decision to drop the federal criminal prosecutions is wholly unsurprising.

We have to read news and commentary quite selectively these days. In both, reliability is essential. But we also need to avoid overwhelming ourselves. Here are three items I recommend. (Publication links go to archived web pages. No paywalls.)

“Pam Bondi’s road from Four Seasons Total Landscaping to AG pick should alarm America” by Will Bunch

I spent today unwinding, catching up on life administration, meditating, knitting, and thinking. The thinking was meandering, creative, and constructive. Confronting the state of law, politics, and government in the U.S. is going to call for more days like this. It can be very hard to slow down and introspect in the face of the cataclysm the country now faces. It can feel like one must always be doing something on a larger scale, either specifically about the political and legal dangers or at least to distract oneself from them. Contemplation and a quiet pace can seem like they will only create room for fear, anxiety, disgust, and horror. Taking time for stillness and thought can seem unresponsive to the pressing need to help the country.

What I am sure of, though, is that inner strength and great imagination will be necessary to the fortitude and ingenuity that it will take to fix the country and help those most immediately suffering its brokenness. These projects will be ongoing for years, probably decades. There will be days and months when we will be agitating, campaigning, and otherwise operating at a rapid clip. But effectiveness at that pace depends upon underlying wells of deliberation and upon reserves of toughness.

I woke up today thinking about how fascists don’t always call themselves fascists. The Republican Party today is no different in this respect from the fascist National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ) of 1920-45. In Italy, in contrast, the fascist party of the same period called itself, straightforwardly, The National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista). Nomenclature was on my mind because I have been writing about Republican Fascism for a while now, using that term. And to the extent that my writing ever draws the attention of the Republican Fascists soon to be in control of the U.S. federal government or the attention of their supporters, they will object to my terminology. I already got a taste of this when I called the U.S. Supreme Court Court Justices in the Dobbs majority rogue and lawless. This flipped out Fox News commentator and George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley who wrote about it for The Hill. (I’m deliberately not linking. You can find his commentary easily). Manhattan Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro complained in the Wall Street Journal about my characterizing the Republican Party as a combination of a cult and criminal syndicate, and thus not a legitimate participant as a political party in U.S. constitutional democracy.

There are political and legal commentators who I read and learn from. Some, like Dahlia Lithwick of Slate and Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic, have written edifying, if absolutely alarming, pieces since November 5, 2024. But for the most part, commentary isn’t what we need now. We do need to keep track of planned and performed Republican Fascist maneuvers, at the federal level and in the states they control. We also need trusted expert information about the logistics of these. But then, what we most urgently need are people’s thoughts about how to confront these maneuvers.

In the aftermath of the 2024 U.S. elections, I’m trying to develop and strengthen habits and practices that help me maintain an even keel and to prepare for the Trump regime. Here is what worked for me over the weekend, in no particular order.

A long, somewhat challenging hike with my spouse, which included some good conversation and stretches of companionable silence.

Setting up this blog and starting to write it.

Proposing and starting to operationalize the idea of in-person gatherings of like-minded folks around the country. More about this at the thread on Mastodon that starts here.

Catching up with a friend via a long phone conversation.

Buying some yarn and knitting needles and signing up for a class to learn how to use them.

Refraining from trying to write a scholarly essay on a legal topic, even though I’ve promised the piece. I have to find a way to write about law-related topics that is constructive but realistic about the current state of American law. Legal scholars and lawyers must not do their work as if business is usual. More on my thoughts about this at the Mastodon threads that start here and here.

Plenty of time with my cats.

I began my public online presence in 2007 with a small blog intended to keep interested friends about the volunteer travel I was doing for Hillary Clinton's primary run. That blog gained more notice than I ever could have anticipated, and I kept it going for a number of years. Eventually, the online world turned to social media. I stopped blogging and got active on what I will only refer to as the bird site. When that got bought by a fascist, I switched to Mastodon and the Fediverse, where I've been active ever since (you can find me there via @heidilifeldman@mastodon.social). Now, with the election of a fully fascist government at the federal level in the United States, I'm also going to blog again, here.

My first priority will be to gather some of the thoughts I've put on Mastodon since the 2024 U.S. elections. I will also selectively share links to others' writing that I think especially constructive or useful.

After that, I will use this blog to share my thinking about how to get through the Republican Fascist regime as it takes hold and how to resist and oppose it. I'm sure that the blog will have more than one incarnation but that's the plan for now.