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Narungga Elder Tauto Sansbury died 23 September after a lifetime of campaigning to make the criminal justice system just for Aboriginal people, among other matters. He and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trailblazers set a benchmark to which we can all aspire in the pursuit of positive change.
I'm a white man in a white man's world, his mother tongue the lingua franca everywhere. I may not be rich, but I am more or less free, and my calling has let me travel the world. It's easy for me, not having had to fight for mine, to ask us to go deeper than identity when we write. But when James Baldwin says the same thing, it compels.
The Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass has published a damning report of the use of isolation for children in Victorian justice centres. Those acquainted with the administration of juvenile justice in Australia will find nothing new in the report. Therein lies its scandal.
As an Aboriginal woman walking the streets at night, I am significantly more concerned about being brutalised by those charged to keep our streets safe — the police — than I am about any fellow lone wanderer on the streets. The case of Tanya Day and the response to it reinforced to me that my fears were well-founded.
In an age where destruction of eco-systems is occurring at a fast rate and sanctioned by governments, these absurdities are lethal for collective humanity. Non-Indigenous support for the Embassy and trees reflects a desire to reverse the absurd lie that human culture and nature are not in a continual, intergenerational relationship.
When devising policies for people on the margins, Australian governments seem always to settle on punitive measures. Although imprisonment has a place in penal policy, the focus should be on the persons who perpetrate crime and on those who are damaged by it. Penal policy is ultimately about ensuring just relationships.
Constitutional reform works at two levels. It would establish the institution of the Voice so that a future Parliament could not easily get rid of it. Doing so is also symbolic — but not merely symbolic. It recognises the place of Indigenous Australians within the Australian polity. This is not a divisive action. Rather it is inclusive.
The NAIDOC theme returns to the other side of the relationship between First and later Australians — that of unity within a single nation — and invites cooperation in a project that matters to all Australians. At stake is not simply the fulfilment of Indigenous hopes but shared pride in an Australian identity.
The power of this experience of place prompts reflection on the way in which young people who live in areas marked by multiple disadvantage relate to place. Many say they hate the areas in which they have grown up. This would be an understandable response to a world in which they have found neither opportunity nor beauty.
In Boochani's experience, Australians were homogenous and unreflective parts of a machine designed to dehumanise, cow and corrupt the people who sought protection. This report and the departmental response suggest that in on-shore detention the human destruction is not directly intended. It is seen simply as irrelevant.
It's long fascinated me that it tends to be the conservative side of politics that has delivered many of our Indigenous political firsts. Perhaps it's simply because Indigenous conservatives are, by virtue of their politics, no real threat to the status quo. Our Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt is a case in point.
As we will be asked to participate in a referendum on the issue within the next couple of years, each Australian needs to inform themselves of the facts about the proposal and the design process.
97-108 out of 200 results.