The Melbourne Newsroom

While voting has assumed centre stage now the Federal election has been called, electoral choice is ‘biased’ towards powerful and wealthy interests according to Dr Joo-Cheong Tham from the Melbourne Law School.

The role of the social sciences as the poor relation to science and technology, and their continued threat in the Australian higher education system, is the topic of a new book authored by the University of Melbourne’s Professor Stuart Macintyre, which will be launched by Sentator Kim Carr tomorrow.

Professor Gerry Simpson is the Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law at the Melbourne Law School, and is a Professor of Public International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  In this piece, he analyses how the 2010 British Election could unfold.

You can read more about Professor Simpson at http://bit.ly/cWR9pj

The philanthropist and Jewish community leader Richard Pratt will be honoured with an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree by Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s President, Professor Menahem Ben-Sasson, during the 2010 Pratt Memorial Oration this Thursday, 29 April.

The former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser will be speaking in a public lecture at the University of Melbourne tomorrow evening, Wednesday 31 March.

Australia is still a lucky country.  Our per capita income is higher than that of many affluent nations, including  Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom.  On the broader Human Development Index, which includes health and education levels alongside our material standard of living, we rank second, with a score virtually indistinguishable from that of the top-ranked Norway.  We reside in some of the world’s most livable cities.

The emergence of ‘hate crime’ as a socio-legal construct and its relationship to recent Australian incidents of violence against international students, particularly Indian students, will be the subject of the John Barry Memorial Lecture in Criminology at the University of Melbourne tonight, Wednesday 21 October at 6.30pm.

Australia has a vital role to play in the region in campaigning against the death penalty, says Fr Peter Norden AO.  "I dont think it's enough for Australians to say it's not an issue in this country.  We are based in a region where many countries execute their citizens and we are host to many overseas students studying in Australia from these countries.

"We need to engage with those students while they are studying here to be more creative in their thinking, because they're going to be the leaders in those countries when they return."

Dr Pradeep Taneja says that while communism in China is dead 'practically', the 60th anniversary of the creation of the People's Republic of China is particularly significant.  "It comes about a year after China hosted the Beijing Olympics, so there's an added significance that China has demonstrated to the rest of the world that China is an important country and one that has achieved remarkable success in its economic development and modernisation."

The following is the full text from the 2009 Law Week Oration by Professor the Hon Gareth Evans QC AO, held at the Melbourne Law School on 22 September 2009, in conjunction with the Victoria Law Foundation. 

Video of the lecture can be accessed at http://live.unimelb.edu.au/episode/law-week-oration-2009.