Data can be anything one can want it to be. We are told there are nearly 800,000 people who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders. Despite an increasing population of people who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders, nationally one in 8 have been to prison. From a racialised lens that’s the world’s […]
Aboriginal Specific News – Australia – Page 2
The Northern Territory government is sort of accepting the 227 recommendations produced by the royal commission into youth justice following the disgraces exposed to the nation by the ABC’s Four Corners. Recommendations and findings are a dime a dozen. The government is giving in-principle support to 91 of the recommendations. Whether it’s in-principle or substantive […]
After 10 years the Close the Gap report tells us that most of the gaps are not closing. Life expectancy, school attendance, literacy, and employment are still reflecting First Nations disadvantage. The entire campaign is said to be in need of “refreshing”. In fact, the reason for the failure of the Close the Gap campaign […]
Last week I reunited a 14 year old girl with her biological mother. She had been removed from her mother at 12 months of age. Children removed from their biological parents are among the most elevated risk groups to serious aberrant behaviour and to suicide. On the day of her reunification she called me to […]
The child prison population which is generally tagged as the youth or juvenile detention population will double by 2025. Nearly 1,000 children are incarcerated every night in Australia but by 2025 it will be 2,000 and the trajectory will increasingly steepen thereafter. Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory will continue to incarcerate children […]
There has been much chatter in recent times of racial bias in the criminal justice system. It’s the latest bit the chattering classes want to talk about while not doing anything about it; more claptrap. Racial bias is not exclusive to any particular bastion, it is in every institution, workplace, in the form and content […]
On average each year there are 3,000 deaths of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people, but many families cannot afford a funeral. The distress levels can damage families, displace anger, dishevelling people, condemning them to elevated risk to aberrant behaviours. Nationally, nearly half the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population lives below the poverty line, […]
There are more suicides today Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander than ever before. It is not just intergenerational trauma and the impacts of colonisation, or cultural deficits that are contemporaneously culprit to this crisis. Much more simply the culprits are the deplorable ongoing inequalities and direst poverty. The intergenerational trauma is compounded by betrayals, where […]
Three children together attempted to end their lives. Such was the despair they felt from a sense of hopelessness in an Australian community where no one completes school. Three children, aged six, eight and ten climbed a tree. Older children saw them and ran to them and held them up and saved their lives. What […]
I had not written a single word about 14 year old Elijah Doughty’s death. I have been supporting family members, since soon after this boy’s tragic death. On Friday, 21 July 2017, a 56-year-old Kalgoorlie man (who cannot be named for legal reasons) was acquitted of the manslaughter of Elijah Doughty and sentenced to three years […]
General News
- 5 Apr 2019
Public rental homes – ‘social housing’ – surprisingly to many only account for 4 percent of Australia’s 9 1/2 million households. There are only 400,000 public rental homes nationwide. Within these homes, after the homeless, live the poorest Australians. Only […]
(0) - 2 Apr 2019
We’re at the end of 2019’s first quarter and tragically the Australian suicide toll stands at 750 thus far. Suicide is the leading cause of unnatural deaths, yet suicide prevention is not a national priority. The Australian suicide toll is: […]
(0) - 1 Jan 2019
We rail against homogeneity while beneath it all, the ambience and veils of the eclectic, we long for homogeneity, at least in the name and form of equality. Critical class and race theories abound but all remain manifestations. Windows into […]
(0) - 1 Jan 2019
There is more homelessness than is reported. Youth homelessness is on the increase. It’s complex in terms of the spectrum of issues; complex life circumstance dynamics that led to homelessness, including family violence and/or neglect of the needs of children, […]
(2) - 30 Aug 2018
The death of a child is always heartbreaking but when it is by suicide it is as devastating as it gets, with long term negative psychosocial effects for those left behind. There is a whole different level of anguish and […]
(0) - 22 Aug 2018
Future generations will damn the present for its atrocities as we damn and indict the past for theirs. The offshore custodial predicaments that have degenerated to indefinite immigration detention will cast a dark pall of grimness and aspersions into the […]
(0) - 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 […]
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