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We must ask: are our police forces keeping us safe? All of us? Poverty, discrimination and disempowerment cannot be solved with more policing. What if we took the money that is currently spent on policing and spent it on supporting the community?
I've been watching Stateless, the ABC drama about Australia’s immigration detention system, with some reluctance. Not because it is poor, but because it is so powerful.
I’d never heard of McKenzie Funk until I came across his marvellous review essay, 'Smoked Out'. I eagerly read on beyond the genial opening paragraphs and almost immediately, I found myself on familiar, if deadly, ground.
From the minute we enter the education system, we experience barriers. We are segregated when we arrive at primary school, placed in 'special' units or classes. Here our needs are subsumed into the collective needs of the group. From the outset our educational outcomes are at the whim of the people who are in the position of power.
Due to this stance, immigration is arguably not being leveraged to actually benefit the country, including its flailing economy. This is despite a government report released last year stating that immigrants increase GDP and helped avoid the 2008 financial crisis.
Any Australian who believes in four seasons is engaged in a form of climate denial. Spring, summer, autumn and winter are colonial constructs, not an objective truth. I recently visited a school which has the largest Indigenous student population in Melbourne. The kids made a mural depicting the eight seasons of greater Melbourne.
The scene I have described was more than purely peaceful. In these iron days, to write about or seriously discuss the world of nature and its phases and complexions can be a political act, 74 years after Orwell wondered about that very same point in 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'.
It may seem paradoxical that one of the most effective ways of imposing silence is by imposing noise. The Romans did it with bread and circuses. More modern totalitarian regimes have done it with military processions and massive rallies. Governments in contemporary democracies do so by controlling what is fed to the media.
The Pope's speech was newsworthy because in Australia sentences to a lifetime in prison without parole are becoming less contentious and more used. His approach to prisoners and their criminal behaviour is in such strong contrast to strands of Australian culture in which exclusion and the denial of hope are an instinctive response.
These strikes aren't solely sites of protestation but rather a chance to step out of the individual grey loneliness to come together for our collective future in intergenerational solidarity. There is something powerful and visceral about putting your body on the street, in the public forum, with other bodies and being vulnerable together.
Anyone at Friday's climate strike couldn't help but notice just how much the terms of the debate have shifted in recent years. The crisis is one of being. Climate change denialism isn't simply a political position anymore. To deny the science is to embrace nihilism; it is to be complicit in one's own extinction.
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