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In South Sudan, hate speech broadcast on a local FM radio station earlier this month led to the slaughter of hundreds of innocent civilians in a massacre based on ethnicity. Local UN officials are now calling on authorities to 'to take all measures possible to prevent the airing of such messages'. Meanwhile in Australia, the Government is attempting to give legal sanction to the kind of hate speech that incited to the South Sudan massacre.
The South African experience suggests racial discrimination begins with the appropriation of wealth and power by one racial group and its consequent suppression of other groups in order to extend its wealth and power. If we are to address racial prejudice and discrimination we need to examine the way in which wealth and power are distributed and protected in society. In Australia, they are being concentrated increasingly in fewer hands.
I said my own private goodbye almost two years ago, when I visited Robben Island on a trip back to my homeland of South Africa. That journey across Table Bay, towards the tiny green cell in which you lived for much of your 27-year incarceration, took me not so much to an outpost of apartheid as to the birthplace of democratic South Africa.
View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.
Last week a letter circulated among freelance writers that called out Crikey's online arts daily, The Daily Review, for its decision not to pay freelance conributors, despite being a commercial, advertising-driven enterprise. The death this week of British writer and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing speaks further to this issue of whether writers should be paid for their work. The way she lived her life could not be disentangled from how and what she wrote.
Tony Abbott has explained Canada's decision to boycott the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting over human rights concerns by saying that 'different countries have different national priorities'. In other words, securing Sri Lanka's cooperation in 'stopping the boats' is more important to Australia than putting an end to human rights abuse in Sri Lanka.
Following the abuse received by Adam Goodes from a teenage spectator in the AFL's Indigenous round, and the subsequent remarks made by Eddie McGuire, the country became embroiled in a debate about racism in modern Australia. Meanwhile, the Northern Territory introduced its Mandatory Alcohol Treatment Bill which, if passed, will see more Aboriginal people incarcerated. We were too busy describing the modern face of racism to notice.
As social commentary Elysium clearly has in mind any country that receives 'unwanted' arrivals of refugees. But it seems particularly timely in Australia, where the political response to asylum seekers who arrive by boat is simply to stop them. The response by the fictional bureaucrat Delacourt, to blow the smugglers' ships out of the air before they reach Elysium, certainly takes the 'stop the boats' mentality to its extreme.
'Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term, as a stop-gap measure. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There’s only one thing worse than shock and awe; that’s shock and awe that doesn’t work because you haven’t done your homework.' 43rd Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, Trinity College Theological School, 14 August 2013.
The PNG solution includes permanent exclusion from Australia in a small, poor and violent country already unable to accommodate the refugees from West Papua whom it hosts. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus claims it complies with international law. A quick glance at the much put-upon Refugee Convention suggests this is may be a rather optimistic assessment.
We seem to think it is okay to publish pictures of Kim Jong-un with Mickey Mouse ears or refer to his late father Kim Jong-il as a 'pygmy'. Insulting a proud people, no matter how weird we think the regime is, does not win friends. The west would do well to remember this if it is to engage the regime in meaningful dialogue.
181-192 out of 200 results.