You don't automatically go on the roll when you turn 18 or acquire citizenship.  You have to enrol by filling out a simple form and sending it to the Australian Electoral Commission.

Although a national election is imminent, an estimated 1.4 million eligible Australians are not enrolled to vote.

"A million votes could dramatically change the election outcome — a million votes could determine who holds the balance of power in the Senate, or who wins the key to the Lodge,'' says Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young.

In 2006, however, the Howard Government changed the law to close the electoral roll 3 days after the 'issue of writs' (which occurs 1-to-4 days after the PM calls a federal election), down from the 7 days previously allowed.

Nearly 80,000 first-time voters enrolled in the 7 days prior to the 2004 election.  A further 345,000 people updated their enrolment in that week.

At the 2007 election, by contrast, some 100,000 young people were denied the right to vote because they didn't get to enrol in time.

Reducing the time available to enrol after an election is called infringes Australians' right to vote.  The seemingly banal amendment of 2006 disproportionately disenfranchised young people, migrants, people in remote areas or experiencing homelessness or any other factor limiting their ability to respond quickly to close-of-roll deadlines.

It begs the question, would these groups be less likely to vote for the Coalition, and could their disenfranchisement have been the then-Coalition Government's goal?

The Labor Party, once in government, tried to reverse the amendment to the Electoral Act in 2009, but was defeated in the Senate.

If your address on the electoral roll may be out of date, check your enrolment here.

When asked in a recent interview, Zinn said he would like to be remembered as "somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before."

In that vein, friend and colleague John Dear recalls how, "after a lifetime of studying the history of US social movements," Zinn came to a conclusion:

"He said every major movement for social change in our history was hopeless.  Hopeless from the beginning, hopeless through the middle, hopeless up to the very end — people laboring toward a hopeless goal.

"But then, like a bolt out of a blue sky, a breakthrough.

"The key, he said, was that ordinary people kept at it despite all evidence.  Ordinary people doing their small acts for justice every day — here was the key. Over time peaceful acts add up to something big.  What the powerful fear most, he said, are the grass-roots movements that won’t go away.

"So our job is not to give up, give in or go away.  Take action, speak clearly as you can, and trust the lesson of history: . . . Truthful, nonviolent movements are destined to win."

Myth 1: The proposed Human Rights Act would shift decision making to unelected judges who should not have the power to decide what constitutes a breach of human rights.

The reality: Australian judges are indeed unelected, which helps to ensure that they are apolitical, independent and impartial.

There are several reasons why judges could play an important, but not overbearing, role under a Human Rights Act.  First, the judiciary can offer better protection to vulnerable minorities, who lack political traction.

Second, judges are accountable.  They must issue reasoned judgments, which are usually open to being overturned on appeal.  Judgments should be crafted according to arguments presented openly in court, or in public documents.  Judicial decisions are also generally based on precedent, and changes to the pre-existing interpretations are usually incremental and thoroughly reasoned.

Third, judges are less powerful than popularly portrayed: judicial decisions (other than those relating to constitutional law) can be reversed by legislation.  Under the proposed Human Rights Act, judges
would not be able to invalidate legislation and Parliament could choose to do nothing if the High Court declares that legislation is incompatible with human rights.

Fourth, under human rights legislation, judges would be able to address those situations where individuals may have been unfairly caught in the cracks of broad-brush legislation.

For example, Mr Al-Kateb was a stateless Palestinian asylum seeker held in immigration detention who was unable to be deported, even though he was willing to leave Australia, because there was no State willing to take him.  It seems doubtful that the Parliament had considered the possibility that an immigration detainee might be locked up forever despite a willingness to be deported.  In the absence of a Human Rights Act, the High Court ruled in 2004 that Al-Kateb’s detention was legal, even though that meant he might be detained indefinitely.

Published this year by Intermón Oxfam, Los Derechos Humanos is available online for about €14 from Altaïr, Casa del Libro, Libreria Compas and La Isla Libros and in all good bookshops.

Plus a new, improved English-language edition is imminent.  Thank you to all our readers for its success.

As Tutu says,

"I commend to you The No-Nonsense Guide to Human Rights as a call to question, to think, to act, and to contribute."

Here's an extract from his speech:

In an essay for The Monthly entitled 'Faith in Politics,' Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees:

“The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear.  The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst . . . We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day.  “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia . . . a tough line on asylum seekers.”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy?  The use of the term 'illegal immigrants' is both false and cowardly.  The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal.  International law is clear – they are legal.  And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island.  How shaming.  Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire.  But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe.”

Why isn’t this spelt out?   Why have weasel words like 'border protection' become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people?  Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

. . . One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time.  It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés.  They seem happy.  They are chatting and affirming and smiling.  They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.  There’s a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way.  I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass (right).  She went to live in and report from Gaza.  I asked her why she did that.  She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent.  Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable “looking from the side”.

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.

. . . Silences can be broken, if we will it.  In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.

. . . We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience.

It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate.  I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news.  In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem.  It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films.  What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong.  What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness . . .

May I share with you two things that have come across my desk this evening which have had a profound impact on me?

One is an 8-minute video by Oxfam about the life of a woman in rural Uganda facing the 'indescribable pain' of climate change.

The second is an article in the science journal Nature (brought to my attention by Duncan Green of Oxfam).  It suggests that climate change is but one of a series of hurdles we must clear if our species is to survive.

Johan Rockström et al. have "tried to identify the Earth-system processes and associated thresholds which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change.  We have found nine such processes for which we believe it is necessary to define planetary boundaries:

• climate change
• rate of biodiversity loss (terrestrial and marine)
• interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles
• stratospheric ozone depletion
• ocean acidification
• global freshwater use
• change in land use
• chemical pollution; and
• atmospheric aerosol loading.

"Humanity may soon be approaching the boundaries for global freshwater use, change in land use, ocean acidification and interference with the global phosphorous cycle.  Our analysis suggests that three of the Earth-system processes — climate change, rate of biodiversity loss and interference with the nitrogen cycle — have already transgressed their boundaries . . ."

The next review conference will be held at the UN in New York City in May next year.  This Japanese call from arms invites your endorsement:

Even now, in the 21st Century, world peace and security are still threatened by 26,000 nuclear weapons.

As the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki show us, nuclear weapons instantly destroy countless lives, torment people in future generations, and ruin civilizations.

The Hibakusha, the A-bomb survivors, continue to warn that humanity cannot coexist with nuclear weapons. Never again should we create more victims of nuclear weapons.

For the survival of the human race and for the future of our children, let us achieve a world free of nuclear weapons through our actions in solidarity.

Toward the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, the nuclear weapons states are called to honor the “unequivocal undertaking” of May 2000 to eliminate their nuclear weapons.

We call on the nuclear weapons states and all other governments to agree to commence and conclude negotiations of a treaty, a nuclear weapons convention, to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons without delay.

Sign it here.

Christian Activists enter restricted military area during live-fire exercises

Four nonviolent Christian activists have entered the Shoalwater Bay Training Area this morning to stop the Talisman Saber exercises.  Calling themselves 'the Bonhoeffer 4' after Kevin Rudd’s favourite theologian, Margaret Pestorius (44, social worker, Cairns), Jarrod McKenna (28, school peace educator, Perth) Jessica Morrison (33, university lecturer, Melbourne) and Rev. Simon Moyle (32, Baptist minister, Melbourne) are currently moving towards a live-fire area.  They call on the Australian and US forces to cease their involvement in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the undeclared war in Pakistan.

The group has released the following statement:

"In his article in the Monthly, Prime Minister [to be] Kevin Rudd called Bonhoeffer 'without a doubt, the man I admire most in the history of the twentieth century.'  We have taken the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, because he embodied a serious, costly commitment to peacemaking and ending injustice, 'a costly grace'. Yet Rudd’s $100 billion long-term military spending plan reveals the Prime Minister has forgotten his hero and is in need of some sisters and brothers to jog his memory.

"That is why we will put our own bodies on the line in order to stop the US/Australian Talisman Saber Military Exercises and jam a spoke in the wheel of war.  These exercises are implicated in killing and injuring our sisters and brothers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including untold numbers of civilians. This 'war without end', as George Bush put it, has no exit strategy and no end in sight.  We will not overcome the violent terrorism of the poor with the violent terrorism of the rich.

"Rev. Moyle has been in contact with the Defence Department about our plans for more than 7 months in order to build a relationship of trust and openness.  Air Commander Meier has stated in Parliament, 'If we know there is an unauthorised person [on] the Commonwealth land at Shoalwater Bay . . . the exercise is stopped.'  The Defence Department has been notified of our presence on the base.  We call on Air Commander Meier to keep his word to the Australian people.

"We plan to be inside the area for as long as possible, and are well prepared for a long stay.  We have released a red helium balloon from the base.

"As Rudd’s hero Bonhoeffer put it, 'The church has three possible ways it can act against the State.  First, it can ask the State if its actions are legitimate.  Second, it can aid the victims of the State action . . . The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.'  With our actions and our lives we plan to do all three."

Watch a 9-minute video of the Bonhoeffer 4 entering the restricted area and explaining their actions.

That afternoon Roberto Micheletti, of the same party as Zelaya (the PLH), was sworn in for a 7-month term as caretaker President, with elections due on 29 November.

On 1 July the Honduran Congress approved an emergency decree 'suspending' human rights including liberty, freedom of movement and association, and freedom from arbitrary detention.

Violations documented so far include excessive use of force, the arbitrary arrest of peaceful protesters and press censorship.

Some political allies of Zelaya's have been arrested and held in military bases, according to local media.

The military coup was led by General Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez (left), a two-time graduate of the infamous School of the Americas (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC) at which the US Army has "trained hundreds of coup leaders and human rights abusers in Latin America."  Velásquez was assisted by other SOA graduates, including Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, head of the Honduran Air Force.

US President Obama has said, without apparent irony, that he is "deeply concerned" about the coup and called on "all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms" and the rule of law.  Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says Hondurans should "resolve political disputes peacefully and through dialogue."

US officials had worked for several days to prevent the coup.  Obama has dismissed suggestion of military intervention.

The Obama Administration's condemnation contrasts with Bush's tacit endorsement of 2002's unsuccessful coup in Venezuela.

The United Nations' General Assembly has "firmly and categorically" urged all member states to "recognise no government other than" Zelaya's.

Honduras is otherwise a democratic nation of some 7.5 million people sharing a bloody history of anti-leftist repression by the military, linked to the CIA.  Vulnerable to hurricane and flood, Honduras is one of the region's poorest nations and hard-hit by the 2008 global food crisis.

Last  week's coup, at a time when the President was unpopular with all but the poor, was apparently precipitated by Zelaya's attempts, in defiance of Supreme Court rulings, to change constitutional limits on presidential terms.  He was 3.5 years through a 4-year term, and claimed it was impossible to address poverty in a single term of office.

Zelaya has appeared on Venezuelan television saying he intends to return to Honduras today, accompanied by several unnamed presidents of other countries in the region.  The Catholic Church in Honduras — said to be aligned with the new regime — fears such a move could cause a "bloodbath."  Zelaya says he will not seek a second term as president.

Honduras' new foreign minister has said Zelaya faces immediate arrest if he returns, on charges relating to drug trafficking, organised crime and constitutional breaches.

Join SOA Watch in calling on the US government to support the retoration of democracy in Honduras and close WHINSEC.

Appalled by the vicious carnage of Kristallnacht, the watershed pogrom of November 1938, Aboriginal leader Bill Cooper (right) led a protest walk from his home in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray to the German consulate in South Melbourne.

His deputation sought to present a petition to the consul — the first Australians to formally protest the onset of the Nazi genocide — but was refused entry.

Their petition was quoted in The Argus newspaper the next day:

"On behalf of the Aborigines of Australia, a strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany, and asks that this persecution be brought to an end. "

Cooper also agitated for the Australian government — which did not accord him full citizenship — to defend the Jews, writing to then-PM Bob Menzies.

The 'so-called civilised world' was silent to the plight of European Jewry, says Holocaust survivor Shmuel Rosenkranz, but "in faraway Australia, an ancient people still not recognized by the Western world as owners of the land that they live on raised their voice.”

Israeli Ambassador to Australia, Yuval Rotem, says Cooper "deserves to be remembered as a hero to the Jewish people and an inspiration to mankind."

Historians Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus believe Cooper's empathy for Jews was influenced by a teacher, Cornish missionary Daniel Matthews (1837-1902), who drew parallels between indigenous Australians' experience of persecution and that of the Jews of the Bible.

Similarities persisted under the Third Reich, with both Jews and indigenous Australians labelled according to their 'blood' ('half-Jews' and 'half-castes', etc.), intermarriage restricted by the State and these minorities confined to designated ghettos or reserves.

Geoffrey Zygier of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria agrees:

"Some of the connections between our peoples are obvious: the attachment to our native land, our spirituality and antiquity, and the genocide directed at our respective communities.  Others are not so obvious, but nevertheless very real: our mutual love of story-telling, of singing and dance, of ceremony, and especially our pride in our histories and communities."

A shearer, unionist and veteran campaigner for his own people's rights, the Yorta Yorta elder was aged 77 at the time of his 9km (5.5-mile) walk across Melbourne.  Four years earlier, Cooper founded the first Aboriginal organisation in Australia, the Melbourne-based Australian Aborigines' League (later renamed the Aboriginal Advancement League and still in operation).

Attwood and Markus have chronicled the activism of this important indigenous leader in their book Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines' League (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004).

Three hundred Jewish and Aboriginal leaders joined Ambassador Rotem, Australian government officials and the German consul in a ceremony in Melbourne on 6 December last year to mark the 70th anniversary of the petitioners' walk.

In Israel, 70 trees have been planted in the Martyrs’ Forest and the Australia-Israel Friendship Forest to honour the protest.  Eight of Cooper's descendants flew to Israel to attend the ceremony in April.  They brought with them river water and earth from Yorta Yorta land in northern Victoria to tend the young trees.