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Let’s be perfectly clear. There have been deals done behind closed doors, trips taken in Adani’s private jet, lavish receptions and gifts given by Adani in order to buy the Queensland and Federal Governments. The CSRIO has been bullied to acquiesce to the company’s inadequate and scant environmental plans. It categorically refused to guarantee the plans' integrity or safety. Anyone who has been to India knows that the environment comes last in this company’s business plans. Compensation and regeneration and environmental protection are unheard of. So lets call it for what it is: The Queensland Government, in particular Annastacia Palaszczuk, and the Federal Government have ensured the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and the sacred lands belonging to the Wangan and Jagalingou people who are the Traditional Owners of the land in Queensland’s Galilee Basin And have rejected the plan. They have betrayed the reef in exchange for a handful of silver. They have betrayed traditional owners who understand the land better anyone. As the next few years pass and we watch the reef die, what will we tell our children? That we didn’t care enough to save it? What kind of country have we become? Preethi
Today I affirm my feminist resolve. Today I promise to call it what it is. Today I encourage my sisters to stand together and say it has to end. This hatred of women This litany of male entitlement This perpetuation of the myth that women are victims It must stop with you It must stop with you Preethi It must stop today It must stop There is a howling in my heart For the woman you were For child you were, bright eyed and thirsty for knowledge For the years I spent with you I am stunned This time I know the face Smiling at me from papers and on screen A smile I knew well A face I loved There is a rage building in me A wave so huge it could engulf the world I will cover myself in steel Take my shield onto my shoulder And stand against the men who did this to you Not just one man But many Puny little men who think the world owes them Nasty little men who think women are beneath them Men with no respect. Their days are numbered. Starting today. It all must stop with you. I've been quiet lately.
Overwhelmed by the weight of suffering which media is able to leak out to Australians with consciences. The clock is ticking on us as a nation. The generations to come will be ashamed of us. They'll wonder why we did so little and why some found excuses to perpetuate the horror. Did we choose this? 'We can stop this horror — we, the ordinary people from all across the nation, who say enough with your hubris, selfishness and rancour — get these children off of Nauru now or face our wrath at the only place many politicians seem to care about: the ballot box.' Susanne Legena chief executive officer of international child rights agency Plan International Australia. "Most of us would never justify the torture of a child because they are not 'one of us'." — Susanne Legena. (Supplied) Dr Vernon Reynolds spent two years as a child psychologist on Nauru. He told the ABC children on Nauru are giving up on life: some have stopped eating, drinking and talking. He holds grave concerns that soon, children will die. Already, the children are self-harming. One child poured petrol over herself, another child ate metal wire, and another took a deliberate overdose. These children were aged just 10 and 11 years old. The unsettling fact is that at a young age, these children have come to realise the only way they can escape this hell is to make themselves so ill that they are removed. This is an unfathomably desperate situation. Just last week, a 12-year-old child was evacuated to Australia after refusing to eat for 20 days. An evacuation order that the Australian Border Force reportedly tried to block. ABC NEWS The next Federal election will reveal who we truly are. Will we be revealed as a nation who condones and perpetuates child abuse? Or will enough of us stand together to tell all governments IT'S GOT TO STOP! Ask yourself how you would feel if someone else had the right to decide for you - about your life, your death, who you leave your property to, whether you can ever get married and be offered the same protections under the law as every other Australian citizen?
You pay the same amount of tax as every one else. You have fewer rights. Surely you shouldn't be expected to pay for rights to which you are not entitled. You are watching ads on TV which declare you a threat to family. Yet you are family, have families, care for children, elderly parents, your neighbours.... You want to ask the people on TV and in the churches -If marriage is sacred then how are divorces possible? Annulments? Where are the protests about reality TV programs where couples marry the day they meet? Where are the sermons about marriages which enslave women and force them into lives of domestic violence and servitude? You know that those who rejected you are now deciding your future. How does this make you feel? A YES vote cannot put at risk the rights of churches to discriminate. Their rights are enshrined in law. They cannot be forced to marry those they choose to deny. But a YES vote can ensure every citizen and tax payer of this country is equal under the law. Equal. That's all. Isn't that what we'd all want?  Last night I was lucky enough to see Gillian Triggs' final speech as the Commissioner of Human Rights.
Thank you for being the voice for those who struggle to be heard. For staying strong when you were vilified by men who have little empathy and no wish for equality. Millions are grateful for your compassion. Women across the country look to you for inspiration and hope. We needed you Gillian. And we will need voices like yours until our politicians see reason. Thank you! Removing Women and Children from Detention may Restore Australian’s Faith in their government.10/31/2015
 I am a woman, who, like many, hears the rhetoric of overwhelmingly male politicians telling me they act on my behalf. As though I was a child. As though they know better about my body and my hopes and my struggles than I do. It doesn’t wash with me. We are judged on what we do. All of us. And we must hold the current government, the current prime minister to account. This government continues the cycle of rape, torture, deprivation and degradation inflicted on the most helpless of this planet; women and children. It threatens doctors, counsellors and social workers who speak out about their suffering and torture. Australian doctors. Australian social workers. Australian psychologists. This government is threatening its own citizens for doing their jobs! (as it did the Human Rights Commissioner) It debases and dehumanises those who begged us for help – no different from the Nazis and the treatment of Jews, of foreigners, of people whose skin colour is anything but white. The world has been watching. And the panic we see now is a panic born in the hearts of the desperate that they must run, now, before the world closes its borders to them as Australia has done. We, the luck country, are responsible for the bodies washing up on shores around the world. We began this climate of ‘turn backs’ – this turning our backs on the suffering of others. If Malcolm Turnbull wants to set his government apart from the mean-spirited and morally bankrupt policies of his predecessor, Abbott he must ACT TO REMOVE WOMEN AND CHILDREN FROM DETENTION. Nothing else will send a message to the women of Australia that he is listening. Otherwise the women of Australia will know that their voices count for little in the face of arrogance and male privilege. And it is those two things which see more than an Australian woman a week killed in domestic violence. Release women and children from detention now. To wait will cost more lives.  Make no mistake. Australia is responsible for the dead children washing up on European shores.
The world has looked to us for leadership and followed suit. Close the doors. Punish the desperate. Render them stateless. Torture them behind razor wire on god- forsaken islands in the tropics. Leave them to the mercy of brutal guards, paedophiles and rapists. Forbid them human rights and its commissioner. Forbid government accountability. Smother us in secrecy. We are the Dehumanists: Europe has watched us turn towards Hitler and his ‘solutions’ with impunity. They will follow suit. And the stark white bodies of children will blind us In this great dark night of our soul |
siobhan colmanShining a light in the darkness. Archives
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