Richard Downs is a spokesperson for the Alyawarr people from the Ampilatwatja community in the Northern Territory. Last year, he travelled the country on a speaking tour to publicise the situation for Aboriginal people in the NT since the 2007 NT Emergency Response legislation (known as the NT intervention) was brought in by the previous Coalition government. Under the intervention laws, the military was sent into Aboriginal communities.
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When, after destroying Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberal Party took a surprise turn and embraced Tony Abbott as leader, there were those on the left who greeted the news with combined incredulity and glee.
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There can be no National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy tests in 2010. The Australian Education Union’s national conference in January reaffirmed that, if NAPLAN data was used by the media to publish league tables, teachers would not co-operate in implementing the tests this year.
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Increased interest rates, declining working hours and stagnating wages are still chipping away at working people’s living standards, despite small falls in the official unemployment rate in November and December.
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On February 2, opposition leader Tony Abbott released the Liberal-National Coalition’s climate policy. For the Coalition, just as for the Rudd government, there’s one thing that’s irrelevant to climate policy — climate science. In Abbott’s 30-page document, the global warming crisis doesn’t rate one mention.
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In the lead-up to “Australia Day” on January 26, former TV host Ray Martin restarted a debate about the need to change the Australian flag.
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On July 14, 2009, the Alyawarr people from Ampilatwatja, three hours’ north-west of Alice Springs, walked off their community and set up a protest camp on their traditional homelands.
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The Australian Greens announced an “interim carbon price proposal” on January 21, whereby carbon would be taxed essentially within the framework of the federal Labor government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).
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Climate change minister Penny Wong has announced a target of a 5% cut in Australia’s carbon emissions by 2020, relative to emissions in 2000.
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The actions of loan shark Sam Tomarchio, revealed on January 15 by the Australian, do not justify the expansion of “welfare quarantining” to the Aboriginal people affected.
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Immigrants to the developed world have frequently been blamed for unemployment, crime and other social ills. Attempts to reduce or block immigration have been justified as necessary measures to protect “our way of life” from alien influences.
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The letter from Clare Sambrook last week on the detention of children (GLW #823) mistakenly said the writer was from Scotland. She is in fact from England. Scotland has, in fact, stopped detaining children and Scots Parliament is doing a good job