The Australian media, collectively, does a dismal job of telling the story of our silent apartheid, the space between black and white Australians.
The new assimilation, well underway in the Northern Territory, has the same intent as government policies of past eras, still aiming to change Aboriginal people, restrict the importance of their law, language and cultural practice, and move many from their ancestral lands into new housing estates that, we are promised, will materialise magically in great little Aussie growth towns.
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The worst thing about the Labor government’s proposed carbon price scheme is that it’s a diversion from real action on climate change.
Riz Wakil, an Afghan refugee, arrived on Ashmore Reef in 1999 and was held in Curtin detention centre for nine months. Now a permanent Australian resident, he runs a printery.
In June 2010, GetUp! won a charity auction prize — a surfing lesson with opposition leader Tony Abbott — and donated it to Wakil. Abbott and Wakil finally met for the surf lesson on May 8.
Green Left Weekly’s Rachel Evans spoke to Wakil about the encounter and Australia’s refugee system.
What did Abbott say during the lesson?
When the Tasmanian state government forced a bridge through the kutalyana site as part of the Brighton bypass, the Aboriginal community responded by placing a ban on conducting Aboriginal heritage assessments.
These bans are being upheld by all Aboriginal Heritage Officers and the archeologists who work with them. They are intended to remain in place until the legislation that protects Aboriginal heritage is improved.
The first major project to be affected by this is the proposed asylum seeker detention centre at Pontville, near Brighton.
The Western Australia Liberal government recently said its lucrative prisoner transport contract with private security firm G4S would end in July. Another private company, the British-based conglomerate Serco, will take over. The move came after a long campaign against G4S and the WA department of corrective services over the death of Aboriginal man Mr Ward, who died of heat stroke in a G4S van during a 360 kilometre trip in January 2008. The state coroner said G4S was directly responsible for Mr Ward’s awful death.
For more than five long and horrendous years, David Hicks was locked up in the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where he was subject to countless inhumane forms of torture.
Melbourne’s only Indigenous specialist school, Ballerrt Mooroop College (BMC), is again under threat from the state government.
The Baillieu Liberal government plans to shift the Glenroy Specialist School (GSS) onto the site, which would push the BMC onto one third of the land it has occupied since 1995.
The government provided $18 million to GSS to relocate, but the BMC received just $750,000 to upgrade existing buildings.
It is clear that the Baillieu government is pitting disadvantaged schools against each other.
Members of Defend WikiLeaks Perth organised a series of banner drops across the city on May 26 to call for the release from prison of US private Bradley Manning.
Releasing the Mid Year Financial Report in February, Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings said savings required over the next three years would be the equivalent of 2300 jobs. She said she couldn’t rule out forced redundancies in the public service or cuts to frontline services.
On May 26, Giddings released a statement to parliament that said: “We have now lost a total of around $1.5 billion in expected GST revenue and state taxes.”
Save the Children recently released its annual “State of the World’s Mothers” report, which, using a wide range of statistics from 164 countries, ranks the best and worst places on earth to be a mother, a woman and a child.
More than 100 people attended a meeting to commemorate Mulivaikal Remembrance Day on May 22 — the second anniversary of the day the Sri Lankan military crushed the Tamil Eelam struggle in northern Sri Lanka in 2009.
The gathering, which included guest speakers, multi-religious prayers and children's cultural performances, was organised by the Australian Tamil Congress.
Chairperson Maree Klemm noted two particular aspects of the Sri Lankan civil war — the attack by government forces on the civilian Tamil populaton, and the lack of international intervention to stop the violence.
“To continue this revolution, Egypt must go to Palestine.”
These were the words of Akram Ismalii, a student from Cairo University who marched along side his classmates in downtown Cairo for the Third Palestine Intifada rally on May 15. The day marks al-Nakba ("the catastrophe"), as Palestinians call the anniversary of the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948.
It was rumored it would be a 1 million-person march, but the protests led by pro-Palestine demonstrators may have disappointed in size, but delivered in passion.
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