Saturday August 13 2016 On Wednesday the Guardian published the Nauru files, which reveal in staggering detail the scale of abuse and trauma of children in Australian offshore detention. It is said that a picture paints a thousand words and so it was when the Four Corners programme revealed that horrendous footage of the boys being…
Category: Australia’s Shame
In light of the so-called “Nauru files” questions are naturally being asked. However the questions being asked by decent minded people of conscious are decidedly different from the ones being asked by the government and our immigration minister Peter Dutton. While those of us who would prefer our nation didn’t behave like a sub-branch of…
Source: An LNP Refugee Backflip, is it even possible? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The dry, disengaged language of the leaked reports makes an endless cycle of crises seem mundane. The cache of documents is both horrific and banal
Exclusive: The largest cache of documents to be leaked from within Australia’s asylum seeker detention regime details assaults, sexual assaults and self-harm
Three Australians who taught asylum seekers on the island say the offshore detention regime is engendering illiteracy and robbing children of their childhood
Source: Nauru teachers speak out for children: ‘We don’t have to torture them’ | News | The Guardian
These thousands of cries of anguish strip away the secrecy shrouding offshore detention. And without secrecy the refugee gulags are done for. Australians won’t stand for this brutality much longer
There is now footage from inside Australia’s offshore detention centres. It’s as distressing as the NT images that triggered a royal commission.
Source: Stop the bastardry of Australia’s offshore detention centres
Manus – Australia’s dirty policy deal finally comes unstuck
In an open letter to readers Amy McQuire, Michael Brull, and Samah Sabawi call for strong ties across communities to counter the rising tide of racism, wherever it comes from. George Fredrikson was the Edgar E Robinson Professor of History at Stanford University, and his academic specialty was racism. He observed that in late 19thMore
Source: Australia’s Racism Problem Is A Growing Emergency – New Matilda
Human Rights Commission president tells Q&A treatment of teenagers at Darwin detention centre is a manifestation of wider acceptance of detention practices
Shocking video showing a 17-year-old boy being strapped into a mechanical restraint chair in the Northern Territory in March 2015 is obtained by Four Corners.
A Royal Commission into abuse within the Australian Navy has heard graphic claims that cadets were forced into sexual abuse including raping each other and details of a teenage girl who committed suicide following a sexual relationship with an instructor. The abuse has been described as a “rite of passage”, which included violent initiations rituals including “blackballing”, which involved putting shoe polish on genitals and a “royal flush” which put people’s heads in a used toilet and flushing it.
Suicide rates for Aboriginal people in remote WA are among the worst in the world and are set to double, a report finds.
The opposition leader tells the Q&A audience he supports a treaty with Indigenous Australians, prompting surprise from the host and audience
Aside from revealing his own party’s hypocrisy, Turnbull’s decision to start taking about boat arrivals proves the Coalition is very worried about July 2. And with good reason, writes Ben Eltham. It was always likely that the Coalition would turn to asylum seeker policy at this stage of the campaign. Strident rhetoric about border security andMore
Source: The Coalition’s ‘Border Security’ Lies Are Coming Undone – New Matilda
A republic is inevitable. And then the Union Jack will have to go, too.
We think we’re more generous than we are but we’re downright miserly.
The New York Times has run a full-length op-ed in its Monday edition which labels Australia’s offshore refugee detention policy as cruel and dehumanising. Regular columnist Roger Cohen wrote that Australia’s treatment of refugees “follows textbook rules for the administering of cruelty”.
Source: Australia’s asylum seeker policies criticised again in New York Times | SBS News
Our government spends four times more on the cruel offshore detention of asylum seekers than on indigenous health. Australians should be dismayed at the waste and inhumanity.
Source: Australia’s disgraceful inhumanity to people seeking asylum
It’s no accident. There’s a science to this.
Source: No Shame: The Science Behind Why Most Australians Feel Okay About Tormenting Asylum Seekers
Peter Dutton today displayed either the worst case of cynicism I have seen in politics – which, believe me, is saying something – or a sad tendency towards self-delusion. Another refugee has set themselves on fire. Take a moment to consider the first word of the previous sentence. Another. This time it was a young Somali woman, Hodan Yasi. This time.
Australian minister accuses refugee advocates of inciting self-harm after second incident of self-immolation in a week.
Source: Refugee sets herself on fire at Australia’s Nauru camp – AJE News
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton says Nauru has room for the 850 men who must be moved from the Manus Island detention centre.
The PNG High Court declares the Manus Island detention centre illegal – and the government scrambles for a solution. Courtesy ABC News 24.
The boats have stopped but detention centres and dodgy deals with dubious regimes have created new problems that must be solved.
Source: Australia’s Pacific detention centres force it into moral compromises
“I wish those people could also have been charged, but sometimes some countries are very powerful and they can protect their own people from being charged.” — Benham Satah, Manus Island detai…
Source: Mild Punishment and Exoneration: the Killing of Reza Barati
Imagine if a royal commission was held into a matter of national shame, and it spent tens of millions of dollars, produced a vast report, but the headline indicators of that shame actually went backwards.
A PNG couple were jailed for five years for causing the death of their unborn child, in a case that raises serious questions about Australia’s decision to send a Nauru rape victim there for an abortion.
Source: Fears for Nauru refugee’s safety after couple jailed for abortion in PNG
A look of frustration has replaced the Cheshire grin on Malcolm Turnbull’s face. As his priorities and principles are gradually squeezed out of him, the once decisive prime minister is beginning to look defeated.
The rates of imprisonment of Indigenous people in Australia are soaring. So, too, are suicide rates in the general Aboriginal community. Have we learnt nothing?
Two detainees received medical treatment following an alleged riot involving children at the Nauru detention centre overnight, in a dramatic escalation of tensions on the remote Pacific island.
Source: ‘They are hitting us’: frightening video emerges of overnight riot involving children on Nauru
The death last month of a 10-year-old Indigenous girl in a remote WA community intensifies the need for a clearer approach to suicide prevention.
Source: Australia’s Indigenous youth suicide crisis | The Saturday Paper
Nader Galil discusses Adam Goodes’ fight for a tolerant multicultural Australia and argues that if we can get this right, our reward will be an identity that will stand firm.
Source: Racism or placism?
Broadcaster Kyle Sandilands says ‘get over it, it’s 200 years ago’, but it’s everything that has happened since that is the real problem
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy launches petition to recognise and remember ‘those Sovereign Tribal Original People who were slaughtered during the colonisation of Australia’.
Source: Petition calls for official Frontier Wars Remembrance Day | NITV
Treaty, yeah! Treaty now! Liam McLoughlin makes the case for supporting a treaty with the mob. In 1832, Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, George Arthur, said it was a “fatal error… that a treaty was not entered into” with Aboriginal people. In 2016, Opals star Alice Kunek used blackface to testify to the truth of Arthur’sMore
While Australian Border Force officers hover in hospital corridors waiting to spirit away infants into offshore detention, political leaders continue to argue that these egregious acts are somehow necessary. Sometimes the reason given is border security, prompting critics to ask whether the government fears an invasion of babies. More often, the mistreatment of these childrenMore
Source: How To Overcome The Major Argument Behind Australia’s Refugee Policies – New Matilda
There is an important statistic missing from the Closing the Gap report and its absence masks a major crisis facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families
No substantial reform has been delivered in any target area of the Close the Gap goals and intervention itself scores only four out of 10 for human rights, the Castan Centre says
It’s no accident. There’s a science to this.
So our Immigration Minister, Peter Mutton, is considering denying a visa to Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh and planning to send some babies to Nauru or Manus. Excellent, I say and not just because this Daryush guy has a funny, foreign-sounding name. Valizadeh, or “Roosh” as he prefers to be called, is the figurehead of the controversial group,…
Source: Respecting Those Who Tell It Like It Isn’t! – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Now that the High Court has decided that the offshore detention of asylum seekers is lawful, reports suggest that the Turnbull Government is considering returning 234 asylum seekers to Nauru along with the 33 babies of these asylum seekers born in Australia. Given what everyone knows about the spiritual, psychological and bodily ruin that accompanies indefinite detention on Nauru, if the reports turn out to be true this will be a genuinely monstrous act which will outrage millions of decent citizens.
Review of Rosie Scott and Anita Heiss (eds.), 2015, The Intervention, ‘concerned Australians’, 272 pp. “Intervention” derives from the Late Latin interventionem, literally meaning “a coming between…
“As much as I love this country,” David Bowie says, “it’s probably one of the most racially intolerant in the world, well in line with South Africa. I mean, in the north, there’s unbelievable intolerance. The Aborigines can’t even buy their drinks in the same bars-they have to go round the back and get them through what’s called a ‘dog hatch.’ And then they’re forbidden from drinking them on the same side of the street as the bar; they have to go to the other side of the road.”
Health authorities in NSW must do more to protect Aboriginal children in remote communities from “diseases of poverty”, a coroner has warned. Kia Shillingsworth was four when she was rushed to Brewarrina Hospital in the NSW far northwest on October 29, 2012. Kia had been active that morning but by the afternoon was coughing, wheezing, lethargic and running a temperature. By 9pm, Kia was coughing blood and specialist crews were rushed to her hospital bedside by midnight. She was pronounced dead around 2am.
Source: Aboriginal kids die from poverty diseases | SBS News
East Timor’s most senior leaders accuse Australia of committing a crime and acting immorally after a spying scandal that rocked the relationship between the two countries.
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