Peter Fam; Human Rights Lawyer (Maat's Method)

Earlier this year Peter spoke with Natalie Cutler-Welsh from @rcr_nz on all things empowerment, law and living with truth. This snippet gives insight into his passion, purpose and big goals ahead for Maat's Method. Thank you for being in this community - the fearless and uncompromising advocates for truth. Listen to the full episode: https://realitycheck.radio/replay/peter-fam-human-rights-specialist-lawyer-on-empowerment-law-and-living-with-truth/

Laws pass all the time. Many of those laws are corruptible. The Digital ID issue is not done and dusted just because a law has passed. It was always likely to pass. We must decide - what actions are we going to take on a daily basis? How are we going to employ our ability to choose? Our inherent power is not diluted by external parameters and rules and regulations, it is always there. What happens in the communities that we live in is ultimately just a numbers game. Will enough of us band together to protect and promote what is truly important? Or will we compromise for the sake of the illusion of safety, or for the perceived comfort of life? It is the same question whether you’re talking about digital ID or pharmaceutical poisons or silver iodine or fluoride or genocide…what decisions will you make in the context of your own life; and do those decisions align with your duty to be True? If enough of us make the right decision enough of the time, no evil can befall us, no matter what...

If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We are constantly confronted with cases where police have used force when it was not needed and when such use of force only served to escalate the situation. The training, culture and practice of policing in Australia is broken, and more than 90% of police want to leave the force as a result. If you have had an encounter with police that was unnecessary or over the top, feel free to get in touch. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13406005/judge-liz-gaynor-county-court-slams-police-violence-Covid-lockdown-protests.html

Queensland Police sacking their ‘First Nations Advisory Body’ because they wouldn’t sign a gag contract is ironic for two reasons. On the surface, it shows that implementing the body was merely about perception rather than anything genuine. On a deeper level, it points to the issue of first nations groups trying to work with a system that has already shown itself to not even be interested in the wellbeing of non-first nations people, let alone the first nations people it has been consistently and directly attacking for two and a half centuries. Original people here have their own Law and in truth it supersedes the authority of Queensland Police. It’s just that Queensland Police have guns... #irony #truth #maatsmethod https://nit.com.au/07-05-2024/11245/queensland-polices-first-nations-advisory-group-sacked-after-refusing-to-sign-new-contract-with-gag-clause

Queensland Police sacking their ‘First Nations Advisory Body’ because they wouldn’t sign a gag contract is ironic for two reasons. On the surface, it shows that implementing the body was merely about perception rather than anything genuine. On a deeper level, it points to the issue of first nations groups trying to work with a system that has already shown itself to not even be interested in the wellbeing of non-first nations people, let alone the first nations people it has been consistently and directly attacking for two and a half centuries. Original people here have their own Law and in truth it supersedes the authority of Queensland Police. It’s just that Queensland Police have guns... #irony #truth #maatsmethod

David McBride strolled out of Court yesterday full of life, smiling and with his head held high. These are signs of a man who knows that, pursuant to his own deeply set values and principles, he has done the right thing. As a lawyer, it is encouraging for me to see other lawyers make decisions based on their convictions. From an indigenous lens, that is what a law man or woman is supposed to do. Whatever they do to David, it will not negate the fact that he has exposed some of the corruption in some of the institutions that desperately don’t want the public to know about it. He will move past this, and he will reap the rich reward that only integrity can bring – peace. *** Image source: https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/war-crimes-whistleblower-begs-leniency-as-prosecutors-seek-jail-time/ar-BB1lW71v?ocid=socialshare

The Digital ID Bill still has to pass the House of Representatives!🏛️ If you want your MP to Vote No to the Digital ID Bill – you need to let them know! 🗣️ Tell your MP to ‘Vote no to the Digital Identity Bill in the House of Representatives, it must go back to the Senate for Debate!’ 📣 Here's what you can do: 1️⃣ Share this message far and wide! 📢 2️⃣ Respectfully comment on your MP's social pages! 💬 3️⃣ Make your voice heard loud and clear by calling your MP or writing them a personal letter! ☎️📝 Find your MP here > Search members www.aph.gov.au/senators_and_members/members 🌐 The House of Representatives sits next week. Please Share! 📡

We are witnessing a great battle unfold before us. The internet, the primary means by which humans share ideas in 2024, is increasingly being subjected to regulation and legal limitation. Read the full blog, "The Misinformation Misnomer: why censoring the internet is the dumbest move yet" here: https://maatsmethod.substack.com/

In a previous post, I outlined an important shift that needs to occur if we are going to maintain our autonomy and power as human beings. That shift is: we should stop thinking of ‘human rights’ as something that exist outside of ourselves. Even the term ‘human rights’ is misleading, because it suggests that human rights are something that somebody has the authority to give to us or to take away. Most human societies looked at Truth, not ‘Rights’. This makes things a lot more straightforward, because we all have a pretty good tether to what’s true, based on our own feeling and personal experience. Processed foods, sedentary lifestyles, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, mainstream media: all of these have negative impacts on our wellbeing and on our ability to fully express ourselves as human beings, and we know this because of our experience of how they make us feel - they sap us of our energy and our power. Therefore, we can all agree that all of these are incompatible with the truth of who we are. We should also agree that any person or corporation that encourages, produces or defends those harms is our enemy. Such encouragement or production is an abuse of not just human ‘rights’, but of our humanity itself. Using this framing to determine what is and what isn’t okay in our society is much more likely to lead to widespread agreement than an amorphous debate on what does and what does not constitute ‘human rights’. In my appearance on the Stojafy Podcast, I explain this way of thinking in a lot more detail. If you’re interested, give it a watch, and consider sharing it around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pok_lIJ0WgE

In 2021, refugees in a camp in Kenya were given an ultimatum: ‘𝘙𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘳 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘦𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴’. The refugees were sceptical. They knew that, technically, they had broken several Kenyan laws by virtue of their flight from war. Registering their fingerprint could very well be a shortcut to a dusty cell in Kisumu; and a permanent entry into a system that would forever recognise them for their criminality. Then again, they were also fucking hungry. Digital ID is a very complex topic. The phrase “Digital ID” doesn’t really do it justice. It’s not the “ID” that we should be focussing on, it’s the infrastructure that houses it. It’s the 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮, and how it could be used. Silvia Masiero’s excellent paper, ‘Digital identity as platform-mediated surveillance’ delves into these complexities. Digital identity schemes, Silvia says, are “meant to match subjects with their entitlements”. That is their function. To determine whether somebody gets access to something. If the dangling carrot of digitisation is indeed gobbled up by the rabbits around us, the platform that we will all be subject to will be a one-stop-shop for determining our access to anything created by the maker of said carrots. Of course, these days, we’re all pretty tangled up in their danglings. Banks, grocery stores, centrelink payments…all of us have some level of dependency on our access to these. With digital ID, and more importantly, the infrastructure underpinning it, our access to these will be 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘧𝘧. Indeed, the whole point of digital ID is to switch it off for anybody deemed ineligible. Such great power we seek to grant our illustrious politicians and bureaucrats. Late last year, I wrote about the Digital ID Bill in Australia, pointing to how, as a matter of statutory interpretation, and despite assurances otherwise, it is not voluntary. This is unsurprising: a voluntary digital ID system is a huge inconvenience. Banks and large corporations do not want to maintain multiple systems at once. It is expensive and administratively difficult. So if it’s not voluntary, and if it is designed to determine whether you have access to core goods and services, the question must be: 𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬, 𝐨𝐫 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟? Full article here: https://maatsmethod.substack.com/p/017-the-reason-i-dont-trust-digital