Telling the truth said Paolo Coelho is better than telling a lie and making someone smile. Only from an informed context can there be a legitimate political reality engaging with the ways forward in the name of the common good. Our days on this earth are however many they will be and in those days […]
September 2015
I think it is fair to say that in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull we have a progressive and forward thinking person in all the areas that his predecessor was not. Advocates in the areas of refugee policy, republican positions, Aboriginal relations, marriage equality and other areas are waiting to see where this man will take […]
Wheelchairs for Kids is a one of kind charity that thus far has helped nearly 33,000 children in 71 countries – the project is sustained by more than 150 retirees – volunteers. I have enjoyed a ten year association with Wheelchairs for Kids, including volunteer managing their Foundation arm for a couple of years, so […]
The majority of Australians do not realise the extensiveness of large homeless families on our streets. I have met families of up to 13 children – homeless, but fighting to stay together rather than be torn apart by government departments. If only our governments spent on the homeless and on public housing what they spend […]
If the sun drowns in a sea of clouds And extends a wave of darkness onto the world And vision dies in the eyes of the vigilant And the road is lost in lines and circles O shrewd traveler in straight lines and in circles, You have no guide but the eyes of speech Ahmed […]
Last week I wrote this piece about attempts by Transfield Chair Dianne Gander-Smith to silence Anglican Priest Rod Bowers whose tweets and signs outside his church in Gosford (about Transfield’s alleged culpability and involvement in the abuse and mistreatment of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru) had angered and upset the Transfield Chair. The Transfield Chairperson sought […]
“Victims and their families have been fighting for recognition and justice for decades and great victories were achieved when the Victorian Inquiry and the Royal Commission were established. But ‘for what’ they say.” Judy Courtin The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is after 2 years, at its halfway mark. The Commission […]
There are many things that the United Nations does that cause me to shake my head in disbelief. I have to say that their latest feat leaves me completely nonplussed. “States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear”. – Raif Badawi (about Saudi Arabia) To set the […]
The presumption that Australia’s modernist racist past is being whittled away has long been a fallacy and every once and a while shows its hand. The modern Australian nation arrived on the back of invasion, apartheid, genocidal policies – justified by the worst forms of racisms. The invaders continued on as oppressors and wrapped racist […]
#Enough! Fatima needs food and proper medical care, not war! Kabul—Some days ago, at the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ Borderfree Center, I met Jamila, the mother of a little girl, Fatima, who comes to the Street Kids School, a program designed to help children working on the streets go to school. Jamila, a young mother of […]
General News
- 8 Jun 2018
It’s been many a year since I reviewed my position in so far as an Australian republic is concerned. I know that from my arrival here 43 years ago I have always felt extremely uneasy about the fact that the […]
(0) - 3 May 2018
Over the last five or six years I have written extensively about the sheer discrimination that is present in our migration system here in Australia. That discrimination is not on the basis of race (that is another angle altogether – […]
(1) - 24 Apr 2018
Many reckon they understand the accumulation of life stresses hurting those who live below or in close proximity to the poverty line. Poverty and suicide intersect. Poverty and incarceration intersect. Incarceration and homelessness intersect. The layers of stresses and the […]
(0) - 22 Apr 2018
Wheelchairs for Kids is one of those one in a million charities where everyone is a volunteer, where no one draws any form of remuneration. In its three decades since establishment, it has donated rough terrain children’s wheelchairs to 73 […]
(0) - 17 Apr 2018
Seven million Australians live in rural and remote Australia. There are also 1,000 remote communities, the majority with few or no services. Australians living rural and remote have shorter lives, with more than half of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders […]
(0) - 17 Apr 2018
There have been millions of casualties as a result of the catastrophes in Syria, with a half million dead, with millions of refugees, with collective human consciousness diminished and reduced to the aberrant. It is said that no lie lives […]
(0) - 14 Apr 2018
There is an under-reporting of poverty and homelessness. The horrendous lie of our generation is the one that poverty is being reduced right around the world. In fact it is increasing but there are diabolical efforts to mask this. Poverty […]
(0) - 11 Apr 2018
Racism so deep, that it’s structural, institutional. In 1983, I wrote that despite an increasing number of overseas born culturally diverse Australians, that they and their Australian born children did not reflect in the demography of the nation’s parliaments and […]
(0) - 9 Apr 2018
Nearly 60,000 Australian children have been removed by child protection authorities into “out-of-home-care”, with over 17,000 of the removed children comprised of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children. Australia’s child removal rates are among the world’s highest. From a racialised […]
(0) - 3 Apr 2018
The funding for child protection totals $4 billion and we have a predicament where state and territory governments spend only 17 per cent of it on family support services. Child protection and family services should focus on assisting vulnerable families […]
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