It is an abomination – moral, political and otherwise – when one in three deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders aged 15 to 35 years is a suicide. Suicide is this age group’s leading cause of death. It is an abomination when Australia, one of the world’s elite high income nations, stands idly by […]
February 2016
Conissa is five years old, and her smile jags joy into her parents’ lives. Mum says, “Conissa has the biggest smile, it’s contagious.” On her mum’s side, Conissa is Kamilaroi and on her dad’s she’s Wiradjuri. But Conissa also has a battle and it is up to all of us to lend a hand. She […]
Social and political debates about racism rarely include the voices of the oppressed and are instead a prescription or stricture within the narrowest discourse. Australia’s major institutions and think tanks are not just in a hostile public denial of this nation’s knee deep racism despite the racism being self-evident, but are ruthlessly hostile to any […]
Filling jails with the traumautised – whether simple, multiple or complex traumas – should make no sense to anyone. We are filling prisons with the mentally unwell and not the criminally minded. Dr Richard Di Natale is right on the mark on the ways forward with the decriminalisation of the victims of illicit drug use […]
The mass incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders should be a civil rights issue, one of the pressing issues of our generation but our Governments – one after another – continue to fail to translate this pressing issue as a national priority. The incarceration rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is an […]
In terms of racism, nothing should surprise me in Western Australia, Australia’s backwater, but every once and a while I am surprised. The Western Australian Government has betrayed the tragic memory of the 22-year-old Yamatji woman who died in a police watch house cell in South Hedland. There is no doubt that racism dished a heavy […]
A study by Justin Farrell titled Corporate Funding and Ideological Polarization about climate change confirms what many have argued- that behind climate change scepticism and denial is corporate money. These findings are not surprising to many people. Advocacy and environmental groups have exposed this connection before (here, here and here). However, Farrell’s study is one […]
2015 saw a surge of leftist and radical movements and the rise of anti-austerity forces across Europe. So it is interesting to see this week’s launch of DiEM 25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), a new left-wing cross-European progressive movement to democratise Europe and present alternatives to austerity and authoritarianism. The purpose of DiEM is to act as […]
In a recent article in The Sunday Times the Australian Liberty Alliance announced with some considerable fanfare that Dr Marion Hercock was to be their new senate candidate. Dr Hercock is an academic at the University of WA. I am on one of the UWA’s Equity and Inclusion committees and immediately raised the matter with […]
Poetry is often born out of the harshest of circumstances. Periods or events of extreme adversity can lead writers to cogitate and reconsider their positions in respect of the mundane and elevate these to the status of the sublime. And so it is for S Nagaveeran or Ravi as he is better known. Ravi is […]
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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