The Black Lives Matter protests that filled the streets of Australia’s cities at the weekend made a powerful argument about tackling systemic racism here and in the United States. But they also raised a terrible dilemma concerning the balance between protecting public health and freedom of political expression.
Protests are increasingly breaking out around the world as people begin to chafe against lockdown restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
In the US, President Donald Trump is fuelling the spread of protest movements nationwide with tweets to “liberate” certain states. This month, car convoy protests were also held here in Australia, as well as in Poland and Brazil.
Prime minister Scott Morrison urges Australians to stay away amid fears a series of planned weekend rallies risk spreading coronavirus.
“If people choose to disobey the supreme court ruling and attend the planned protest regardless, they need to be aware they are doing so unlawfully and police will respond accordingly.”
Julia Baird writes that one of the more perplexing arguments made in recent days is that toppling, relocating or removing old statues amounts to the erasure of history. It is in fact the very opposite: it is history. To seek a fuller understanding of the past is not wrecking, but restoring, salvaging and deepening history.
There have been widespread calls on social media for the removal of monuments to colonisers, explorers and colonial administrators, including ones of Lachlan Macquarie and Captain James Cook in Sydney, which previously sparked widespread controversy.
An iconic mountain range in Western Australia's north will be renamed to remove the link to a former "tyrant" monarch responsible for the deaths of millions of people in Africa.
Indigenous Australians and their supporters have for over a century been perplexed about some statues and place names that make false assertions about white European achievement and celebrate the murderers and murder of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison asserted in a radio interview that “there was no slavery in Australia”.
This is a common misunderstanding which often obscures our nation’s history of exploitation of First Nations people and Pacific Islanders.
My grandfather was Moses Topay Enares. He was only 12 years old when he was coerced onto a ship, put in the hold and fed stodge, a flour-like substance, until he arrived in Queensland.
A stand-out feature of the protests in the United States has been the amount of police brutality caught on film.
In this era of social media, Americans have unwittingly recorded the single largest outbreak (and archive) of police brutality in US history.
A Victorian man has suffered a collapsed lung and broken ribs during what his lawyer described as a "brutal" and "excessive" display of force from police in a holding cell.
Do you know about David Dungay Jr? He was a Dunghutti man, an uncle. He had a talent for poetry that made his family endlessly proud. He was held down by six corrections officers in a prone position until he died and twice injected with sedatives because he ate rice crackers in his cell.
Dungay’s last words were also “I can’t breathe”.
An officer replied “If you can talk, you can breathe”.
Studying data collected over 10 years from over 11,000 people, academics at the Australian National University (ANU) found there was a "negative implicit or unconscious bias against Indigenous Australians across the board … which is likely the cause of the racism that many First Australians experience".
This week, Katharine Murphy speaks with Labor senator Pat Dodson about Indigenous deaths in custody and the Black Lives Matter protests being held across Australia. They discuss the underlying causes that give rise to First Nations people dying in custody, Dodson’s work on the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody 30 years ago, and the current movement for change
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults make up 2% of the national population but at least 27% of the prison population. Michael McGowan looks at the data behind one offence that drives the disproportionate incarceration of First Nations people.
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