The Aboriginal Legal Services WA (ALSWA), and a number of Aboriginal advocates, have slammed police and other services as harbouring rogue cultures and sub-cultures of racism, directly targeted to Aboriginal peoples. The senior most ALSWA lawyer Peter Collins told a parliamentary committee that heavy policing of Aboriginal peoples was both a reality of life and […]
September 2013 – Page 2
Western Australia’s Banksia Hill riot debacle has generated an ongoing chorus of calls for changes to the State’s juvenile detention system. It has been eight months since the riot, with many of the children still languishing in an adult prison but the calls for change have not died down, indeed they are increasing and from […]
“Democracy thrives on the interplay of formal representative institutions and the energies of civil society and the voices and noise of the streets.” Seyla Benhabib For those of us who operate in the spaces of civil society, citizen led social action and social movements, Seyla Benhabib in an interview in Dissent magazine The Gezi Park […]
May delivery be easy, may our child grow and be well. Let him be happy from time to time and leap over abysses. Let his heart have strength to endure and his mind be awake and reach far. But not so far that it sees into the future. Spare him that one gift, O heavenly […]
I am a firm believer in if you want to know the future you need to look at the past. My daughter says that this is the long version and if she wants a ‘quick’ versions she sees her father. However I feel in this case mum’s version is the best. Aboriginal people in government […]
They are at it again, those eager policy makers keen to define what journalism actually is. To be a journalist, or not to be one, may well be the difference between punishment or protection under the latest discussions by members of the U.S. Senate. The Senate Judiciary Committee was busy last week coming to a […]
Western Australia’s juvenile detention problem continues despite some of the youth that have been displaced for months at an adult prison finally being shifted back last week to the repaired Banksia HIll juvenile detention center. More still remain at the adult Hakea prison but they are now being slowly returned to Banksia. More than 140 […]
The scene is the Provincial Hotel, a Melbourne pub in dinky Fitzroy. It was in Fitzroy that the WikiLeaks Party of Australia was officially launched, fittingly from a place filled with books. (A party of the fearless publishers, putting fearsome material out there.) It was in Fitzroy that this experiment in democracy should commune, be […]
Western Australia’s Karijini National Park is located in Banjima Country, and more of it now than since colonialism is back in the hands of the Banjima peoples. Karijini, is not only iron ore rich and a miner’s dream, it is also one of Australia’s great tourist and hiking destinations. Karijini’s landscapes are among the oldest […]
Suicides are rampant among the 150,000 poorest Aboriginal peoples but many are concerned that next to nothing will be done to address this contemporary predicament. Community leaders are saying that thirty years ago Aboriginal peoples did not endure the rates of suicide they do today. Many remote communities have been neglected by Govenrnments to the […]
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 […]
Join us on