Aboriginal suicide rates are at record levels, with Aboriginal youth suicide the world’s worst. In response the Federal Government has launched a national strategy to ‘address’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicide – but the strategy is inadequate. The Government strategy is built on the presumption of early intervention “with the aim of reducing the […]
May 2013
Suicide among Aboriginal peoples is disproportionately higher when compared to non-Aboriginal peoples. Western Australia and the Northern Territory have the most horrific suicide rates. Recently, following outcries of the high Aboriginal youth suicide rates, Western Australia is once again found to be lagging in the face of this crisis. There is a rising rate of […]
Racism is substantively part and parcel of the Australian public domain and it is not limited to so-called inadvertent ‘jibes’ and ‘gaffes’ by 13 year olds and by football club presidents. My expertise in understanding the various myriad veils and layers of racism is not the lone-hand result of my two Masters and PhD research […]
The song “The Talking Leaves” appears on Johnny Cash’s twentieth album Bitter Tears: Ballads of American Indians, recorded in 1964. Bitter Tears is one of Cash’s most obscure and overlooked albums, but is considered by many to be one of his masterpieces (a view I share). The album documents the historical struggles and the emotional, […]
Over the last week or so the statement that forms the title of this article would probably qualify as the most used phrase on talk back radio and television in Australia. Overwhelmingly and extremely depressingly, caller after caller came on air and the venom and hatred towards Adam Goodes and his handling of the racist […]
A society that had become desensitised to violence against women is now demanding change. Apart from changes in policing and laws training in self-defence can empower women and also build up trust with the police. “Agitation is the marshalling of the consciousness of a nation to mould its laws”, remarked Robert Peel. The sheer brazenness […]
Juvenile homes remain an opaque and closed world, with little accountability and unmonitored performance. Judicial reforms pertaining to these have been relegated to the bottom rung. Is it because children are a non-franchised group and their voices get muzzled easily? A system designed to serve the children who are in need of care and protection, as […]
Australia has a history since colonialisation of racialised violence and hence racialised imprisonment. Aboriginal peoples deal the with the worst of Australia’s racialised imprisonment – throughout the criminal justice system – from sentencing regimes to the effects of having become the world’s most incarcerated peoples. A dark thread of racism underwrites Australia’s national consciousness […]
Victoria has experienced an unprecedented spate of prison deaths this year and this has led to calls for the Ombudsman, George Brouwer to head an inquiry – into why 12 prisoners have died in custody since the beginning of the year. 12 deaths so far in Victoria is startling when compared to four prisoner deaths […]
Kabul–Since 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence has maintained a grim record we call the “The Afghan Atrocities Update” which gives the dates, locations, numbers and names of Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces. Even with details culled from news reports, these data can’t help but merge into one large statistic, something about terrible pain that’s […]
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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