A tragic indicator of increasing poverty and unemployment is the suicide toll. There are various contributing factors to suicide but almost without fail when there is a pronounced economic downturn, the economy in recession or in depression, life stressors accumulate and the suicide toll spikes. Despite the global financial crises Australians were told we’d get […]
May 2017
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 […]
Dear mom and fellow members of the human family, I love my 77-year-old frugal, hardworking, self-sacrificial Han Chinese Singaporean mother, so when Trump’s military/government dropped what they nicknamed the ‘Mother of All Bombs’ ( MOAB ) on Achin District in Afghanistan, I knew I had to do something about this psycho-social disease of ‘war’. I mean, […]
In the windows of time much can be seen, peace is possible, love can be above all, hate is intense, that hate can decimate all hope, windows of harmony, civil strife, meaningfulness, warring, redemption, barbarities. The mind’s eye translates what the eyes see and what our ears hear but for many much is lost […]
During the last hundred years terrorism has been used as a primary means in the express purpose to entrench fear and to subordinate people to fear. Terrorism is intentional in its indiscriminate violence. Ideologue, whether political, religious, whatever the exploitative force cannot justify terrorism. It is often argued that who one describes as a terrorist […]
It is a given that there will be ‘constitutional’ recognition of the First Peoples of this continent – of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It is a given that the ‘racialised’ clauses will be deleted from the Australian Constitution and stains – diabolical and cruel – cleansed from the nation’s imprimatur and from our […]
In a just society human rights must remain inalienably universal but for 40,000 Australians this is not so, with Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme denied to them. Incarceration is a situational trauma that degenerates into a constancy of trauma with the majority of former inmates coming out […]
More Australians suicided in the one year, 2015, than in any other year and sadly it may soon be reported that just as many or more suicided in 2016. Though I pray I am proven wrong it is likely that in the years to come that the harrowing toll of 2015 will be exceeded in […]
The ruins carpeted the city market, rippling outwards in waves of destruction. Broken beams, collapsed roofs, exploded metal shutters and fossilized merchandise crumbled underfoot. In one of the burnt-out shells of the shops where raisins, nuts, fabrics, incense and stone pots were traded for hundreds of years, all that was to be found was a […]
There is more disseminated today than ever before about suicide. However understanding suicide prevention is still a journey to be had for the majority of Australians. The most important understanding is that more people are needed on the ground to support – in person – the critically vulnerable. The narratives that culminate in suicidal ideation […]
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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