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This year the celebration of Anzac Day will be muted. No marches, no large reunions, few speeches at war memorials. The soldiers and others who lost their lives in war will be remembered, however, as they should be. Indeed, the celebration will perhaps speak more eloquently because of its simplicity.
This huge, rarely mentioned and ongoing deeply shameful situation regarding the health and housing of First Nations people comes into unbearably sharp relief by the present crisis.
The question remains, however, is there a straight binary trade-off between granting the state power (to organise lock-downs, track its populace and coerce the people) and keeping its people safe?
Most people would agree that certain measures are necessary to both protect those who face the greatest health risks and so that our health systems don’t get overwhelmed. However, these astronomical limitations on civil liberties raise concerns.
The opacity of the Australian public service, and its disposition to secrecy, has left journalists in a bind. Leaks constitute the oxygen of the secret state, but publishing that material remains a dangerous affair.
Who knew that the greatest moral debate of our time would be whether or not to wear a mask? Having sewed my first mask many weeks ago, I’ve been following the millions of words written and spoken on the efficacy of masks, whether to wear them, who should wear them, how to use them, and how to make them. In a genre that is already bending my brain, there is a special sub-category of mask-shaming.
Already the ideological die-hards of neoliberalism are working out how the pandemic might be manipulated to lower wages and to snap back to the old economic normal. So now is when collectively we need to take over the framing and the forming of the future. Not to snap back but to spring forward.
We know that prisons are pressure cooker environments at the best of times. We can’t let them also become sites of mass infection, with potentially grave consequences, during the current COVID-19 health crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic came swiftly and without any warning to turn our lives upside down. But while many of us are living the routine of our lives very differently now, people who are homeless or those at risk of homelessness are experiencing this pandemic in an acutely difficult way.
While there have been endless social media posts, political campaigns and the like about staying safe by staying at home, I have been concerned about the many people who are not safe at home and what this may mean to them. What will this mean for the woman who’s been living with a domestic violence perpetrator for years?
The long queues outside Centrelink and the crashes on the website have fuelled the fears of many people, including myself, that one wrong sentence in the application means we will be denied relief, or worse, that even if we are eligible, the money could take weeks to come in, way past the point of financial solvency.
In Australia, every politician from Canberra to the Northern Territory is insisting on isolation measures and avoiding close contact, keeping to distances of 1.5 to 2 metres. When it comes to the very practice of democracy and political representation, the social distancing imperative has been approached with confusing inconsistency.
61-72 out of 3025 results.
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