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 […]
Aboriginal Specific News – Australia – Page 3
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 […]
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 […]
Australia not only dished up the White Australia Policy, the Yellow Peril threat and ratcheted up xenophobia and misoxeny, but contributed its own brand of apartheid with missions and reserves, curfews and segregation. Many reckon apartheid is a past wrong that’s dusted but the gaols tell a different story. Australian gaols scream of racialised imprisonment […]
Sinister undermining is leading to the beginning of the end to some of Eddie Mabo’s legacy – native title rights. One of the biggest Black stories has not been carried by any of the nation’s major media nor but for scraps has it been picked up by Black and independent media. The fast approaching […]
At the invitation of the Mabo family I am attending the quarter century commemoration of June 3, 1992 High Court win that Eddie Mabo did not live long enough to see. I find myself in Townsville where Eddie’s journey began and culminated in the political landscape being changed. I have reflected on native title, on […]
As we celebrate the courage and the achievements of Eddie Koiki Mabo we all walk in his determined footsteps in our hope for a brighter future. The Mabo family asked me to paint you a picture of how Australia can offer an example to the world, if we achieve what that passionate man dreamed […]
Whatever the Australian people are presented in a referendum as proposed amendments to the Australian Constitution, the majority of Australians will vote yes. Most Australians are not deeply racist. Most Australians do want to live in harmony, do want all their brothers and sisters to live with opportunity and hope. The majority of Australians do […]
General News
- March 9, 2021
Australia’s governments must end health discrimination in its prisons. An incarcerated child must not be a second-class citizen. Nor any adult. We must ask, why are our governments dishing the vulnerable jailed, second-class healthcare? When evaluating the nation’s carceral system, we are […]
- February 2, 2021
When will the cries of the homeless be heard? Is there some sort of grotesque caste system in Western Australia? The anti-humanism is a brutal public spectacle. On the last day of January, the Western Australian Government actuated five days […]
- December 3, 2020
West Australia is the nation’s backwater. It is the mother of injustices, inequalities and the draconian. West Australia and the Northern Territory leave the have-nots that far behind, for many their lot appears irreparable. If there is a Mason-Dixon line […]
- September 22, 2020
There are many faces to homelessness. A 51-year-old woman walked into my Perth office. She has lived thirteen consecutive years street-homeless. Not long ago, she spent eighteen months sleeping her nights in the same park. She is weary, harrowed by […]
- September 3, 2020
Often beleaguered by international aid work I have lifelong been involved in; the increasing unmet needs, the mongrel injustices, I have argued the horrendous lie of our generation is that poverty is being reduced around the world. There are countries […]
- March 10, 2020
Gerry Georgatos – In 2014, I disaggregated to the Kimberley’s First Nations peoples, the nation’s highest suicide rate, one of the world’s highest, at over 70 suicides per 100,000 population (First Nations), thereabouts seven times the national rate. Fortunately, although […]
- February 18, 2020
Gerry Georgatos – More than 51 months ago I wrote an article on the imperatives of forgiveness and redemption. This remains true. We journey together in one form or another, we can either salt the earth or jag the road, […]
- January 29, 2020
By Gerry Georgatos – Trae lost his eleven-year-old brother to suicide. Nine months later he lost his mother to suicide. Trae was the last to see his brother. Half an hour later he went looking for his little brother. In the […]
- January 21, 2020
Gerry Georgatos – Children as young as 9 years have been lost to suicide, three in fact in recent years. Australians should ask, why? Proportionally, more children aged 14 years and less have been lost so far this century compared […]
- December 10, 2019
Gerry Georgatos – A mother suicides, a father suicides, their child was a suicide. Not once has this occurred but untold times. Over the years I have warned of mothers and fathers that would be near certain lost to suicide […]
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