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The need to contain the spread of COVID-19 has led to a raft of emergency laws that have challenged us to deeply consider the appropriate balance between community and individual rights.
In Australia, we have long boasted of our unparalleled prosperity and strong economic growth. We have championed home ownership and the quarter acre block — after all our home is meant to be our castle. But for too many, the basic human right of having a place to call home remains out of reach.
Winter Raffle 2020 Winners. The Society of Jesus in Victoria, Jesuit Communications Winter Raffle 2020. Drawn on Thursday 16 July 2020 (Permit No 10155/20). Congratulations to the winners: 1st prize: P Fuller, QLD; 2nd prize: J Cunneen, NSW; 3rd prize: G Doogue, NSW. All winners have been notified directly.
Government attitudes towards universities, the humanities and the arts, are often a strange mixture of ignorance, blindness and misplaced priorities. It is almost as if their graduates fail to match the image of what the government would prefer Australians to be.
The past couple of weeks have seen the racism former Collingwood great Heritier Lumumba endured while at the club hitting the headlines. This is not the first time Lumumba’s allegations have been in the news, but on seeing Collingwood ‘taking a knee‘ in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement at their game against Richmond, he saw an opportunity to broach an hypocrisy which had long gone unaddressed.
Donations flooded the centre. Volunteers from across Melbourne arrived ready to support any way they could. Key volunteers came from Carlton and surrounding suburbs, mostly young African people were on the frontlines. They had used social media to reach out to friends, relatives and others locked in the housing estates to ask what they needed and then got to work.
For Victorians this last week has been taxing. It began with rising numbers of COVID-19 infections, moved to the lock-down of housing commission towers enforced by hundreds of police and has continued with the lockdown of the whole Melbourne area for six weeks and exclusion from other States.
Many of us, of course including residents of the towers, understand the exceptional response that COVID-19 has required, and that these lock downs form a part of the response. But when the situation has meant that people must, unless there are exceptional personal or medical grounds, remain house-bound for at least five days, we must be careful in the way we go about caring for the health of people.
The significance of having a sanctuary has been heightened during the last months of living with the threat of COVID-19, which starkly highlights the experience of those Australians who do not have a sanctuary, who do not have a home to shelter in.
Government must respect the human dignity of people who are often regarded as a burden on society. Seen from this perspective the JobSeeker allowance is deceptively named. It conflates two distinct though related responsibilities of government: to promote participation in the workforce by matching jobs available to people seeking them, and to provide for those who cannot work.
Ideology is a powerful presence in our lives. It works its way into our consciousness through the dominant discourses of government, media, institutional religion, legal frameworks, popular culture, advertising, all the means at the disposal of the powerful. Once we learn to recognise it we see it everywhere. If it feels like we were born into it, it is because we were.
People ask why it took the death of George Floyd to make so many Australians stand up. His experience mirrored that of so many Aboriginal people who have died while in custody. His dying words ‘I can’t breathe’ echo through our hearts, because this isn’t the first time a Bla(c)k man has uttered those words while being brutally arrested for a crime most white people would get a slap on the wrist for.
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