Ms Dhu lost her life on August 4, 2014 in a Western Australian police watch house. Ms Dhu must never be forgotten. On that fateful day I received distressing phone calls from her family. In listening to the family, I sunk with sadness in understanding that if West Australia had a Custody Notification Service that […]
Human Rights
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 human narratives have justified the unjustifiable, legislating wrong-doing and muddying the human journey, polluting it […]
Steven Caruana writes on the prevention of abuses in detention through the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. Today, December 10, is International Human Rights Day. The infamous Don Dale Youth Detention Centre has in recent times come back into the public spotlight with the anniversary of the Royal Commission’s findings and an unfortunate […]
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 countries. More than 150 volunteers, the majority retirees, are rostered to manufacture the wheelchairs at […]
Last year in Western Australia an ill female prisoner was denied every dignity and carted naked, handcuffed, in the back of a prisoner transport vehicle to a hospital. Last year in South Australian prisons pregnant inmates were still being shackled. Why are common sense, basic dignities and courtesies denied? The prison experience, as Don Dale […]
On Thursday, January 11, the sixteenth anniversary of the opening of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was marked by a coalition of 15 human rights organizations gathered in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House in Washington, DC. An interfaith prayer service was followed by a rally featuring song […]
By Ken Hannaford-Ricardi It is a dream come true being back among friends in Kabul! Streams of dented Toyotas (They are all Toyotas!) with windscreens cracked like bolts of lightning still jockey for position on roads where traffic lights and common sense hold little sway. Carts of vegetables drawn by donkeys or dragged by men without dreams continue clotting […]
From Kabul, by Ken Hannaford-Ricardi The number of visitors passing through the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ (APVs’) Borderfree Nonviolence Community Center in Kabul is incredible. Each afternoon, nearly sixty high-school-age students attend free classes to prepare them for the rigorous KanKor test, required of every Afghan desiring to attend public university. By 8:00 this morning, women […]
No, Mr Dutton, you are not entitled to your own facts! “We just need to call it for what it is. Of course it’s African gang violence.” And “people are scared to go out to restaurants of a night time because they are followed home by these gangs”. Those are the words of Minister Peter […]
There is more poverty on this earth today than ever before, with both absolute and relative poverty guaranteed to accelerate their increasing trend. 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. Abominable […]
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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