My overall and continuing project is advocating social democracy and personal liberty. This is the theoretical possibility I explore in my Doctoral Thesis, the work I engage in the world of practical politics.
I have a modest involvement in this issue as the current Secretary of the Aboriginal and Torres St. Islander Affairs Policy Committee of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party. I have been a member of that committee since 1997.
Less than twenty four hours after the 'Tampa Crisis', I began an email list entitled Labor for Refugees. Since then almost three hundred Labor Party members and friends have subscribed (some dropping off of course), with similar groups springing up in Queensland and New South Wales.
The email list, or so I've been told, has been an invaluable contribution to asylum seeker advocacy, networking with similar groups and providing news summaries both for Victoria and interstate. Furthermore I've also engaged in the fundraising within the ALP for RAC, travelled to Woomera as part of the RAC bus-trip and taken up volunteer work with the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre.
I am currently making plans to visit East Timor during the handover of authority from the United Nations to the new Timorese government and hopefully move there by the end of the year performing some useful function, probably in a higher education faculty.
In past years I have been fairly active on East Timor advocacy issues. From 1997-1999 I organised two public meetings on East Timor issues with state MPs as speakers from the Australian Labor Party and CNRT representatives along with a consistent letter writing campaign to the Indonesian embassy highlighting specific human rights abuses through involvement from the East Timor Human Rights Center. I also had some involvement in changing ALP policy on East Timor at the 1997 National Conference.
Site scripted by Lev Lafayette. Last update June 16, 2003