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Author: John Falzon

  • AUSTRALIA

    Stronger futures, stolen futures

    • John Falzon
    • 02 July 2012
    4 Comments

    • We passed this law in the night time of your mourning. We listened but you said nothing. We watched but you did nothing for yourselves.• Today we are crying but today and tomorrow, we are ready to take back the future you stole from us. But not with all the love in our bodies and our skies will weever be able to take away the shame from you.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Aboriginal solidarity with refugees

    • John Falzon
    • 18 June 2012
    8 Comments

    The words spoken by the people forced to the edges of Australian society are born from a strong and positive vision for Australia. They speak with authority and their message emerges from their collective wisdom and experience. None of us can learn what is right if we fail to listen to what is wrong. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget leaves baked beans for Struggle Street

    • John Falzon
    • 10 May 2012
    6 Comments

    The Budget confirms one thing that both sides of politics agree on, and that's their belief in the existence of an undeserving poor. There's nothing wrong with bringing home the bacon for middle Australia. But the people living at the rough end of Struggle Street are trying to get by on baked beans.

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  • RELIGION

    Easter manifesto

    • John Falzon
    • 06 April 2012
    10 Comments

    The Easter motif of suffering and resurrection comes alive in movements of social change, when people who have been treated as nothing proclaim by their collective dreaming we are everything. For those who hunger for justice it is a sin to be disorganised, when the misery we confront is well organised.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Picking the scab of colonisation

    • John Falzon
    • 02 March 2012
    7 Comments

    The wound of colonisation is not yet healed. The so-called Stronger Futures legislation, which will extend and deepen some of the worst aspects of the NT Intervention, is built on the falsehood that the wound does not exist or is an Aboriginal problem. But it is an Australian problem. It is our problem.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rights for kids at Christmas

    • John Falzon
    • 22 December 2011
    7 Comments

    Democracy has been described as 'the intrusion of the Excluded into the socio-political space'. Children and young people figure prominently among the excluded in our society. When you start to wonder why, you begin to re-evaluate the strength of your democracy.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Unemployment angels and demons

    • John Falzon
    • 19 October 2011
    8 Comments

    Recently I received an email from a young man in Queensland. He was writing to thank the St Vincent de Paul Society for the stance it takes on the side of people who are demonised for being unemployed. He told me his story. Here are some bits of it.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Admiring the homeless

    • John Falzon
    • 14 June 2011
    8 Comments

    Far from being demonised, people living rough on the streets should be respected and admired for their tenacity and inventiveness. This week a group of business and community leaders will seek to learn from the people who live in the guts of our greatest social problem.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stories from the Struggletown Library

    • John Falzon
    • 25 May 2011
    10 Comments

    There was a liberal use of corporal punishment in my school. We were seen as a loutish bunch of lads who needed a firm hand. It did nothing to help my education. You don't create a smart and confident Australia by taking to people with a stick.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Social change based on the 'view from below'

    • John Falzon
    • 22 December 2010
    3 Comments

      Dylan Thomas wrote that 'A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe.' Our 'good poem' is the listening to, and learning from, the people on the margins. But it will only be a 'good poem' if these whispers are translated into collective action.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Vinnies' revolutionary president

    • John Falzon
    • 17 December 2010
    4 Comments

    Syd Tutton, national president of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia, died on Sunday. He was a fighter for social justice, uninterested in personal recognition, making light, for example, of the Papal Knighthood he received in 2009, threatening to ask the Vatican for a horse to go with the title.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The problem with prosperous Australia

    • John Falzon
    • 18 October 2010
    5 Comments

    There's something disquieting about quietness imposed from above in the heart of a democracy. Anti-Poverty Week is a good time to reflect on how, as a nation, can hear the revolutionary stories of the oppressed and abandoned in our midst.

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