The number of refugees, asylum-seekers and IDPs reaches an all-time high http://t.co/UeOUhwnONr pic.twitter.com/QZeZ3gyFtO
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 22, 2015
Markets & Justice
Freely operating markets yield a just outcome?
White Australia Has A Black History
Tuesday, 30 June 2015
The flight to refuge and links to war ... and some of this is war that Australia has participated in
Monday, 29 June 2015
The Bishop came seeking reassurance ....
On the last Sunday of June each year in the church calendar, we remember the giants of the Christian tradition, Peter and Paul. There are many churches name for one, other or both men. As Advocates will understand, we are named for St Paul. The Editor of this blog picked up this morning the Facebook post from St Peter's, Eastern Hill in Melbourne - one of that city's oldest churches. St Peter's website tells us this about themselves:
St Peter's is a place of soul-stirring liturgy, challenging preaching, fine
music,
concern for issues of justice and peace - and it is a place of warm care
and welcome: a community gathered in the name of the Lord.
concern for issues of justice and peace - and it is a place of warm care
and welcome: a community gathered in the name of the Lord.
So The Editor wondered on Facebook if an old friend from St Peter's, West End in Townsville had a comment to make. She did. Below is the Facebook post with Jenny's comment.
Savouring the moments at yesterday's St Peter's Patronal Festival . . .
Three things are important from Jenny's comments:
- The importance of children in the congregation. The presence of children means younger parents - not merely the presence of the aged and ageing.
- Things are dire in NQ. Well, Jenny, I won't contradict you there except to say that you are not alone. There are hosts of locations across this continent where the presence of Anglican Christians can be said to be dire - in churches and in communities.
- New wines need new wine skins. All communities - whether of faith or not - need regeneration and refreshing to be alive and survive and continue into new generations. Christians profess that they have a fresh message to give and to live - but how often do we seem to be trotting out the same old wine skins week after week; trotting out ancient platitudes instead of seeking new ways of speaking to the hearts and minds of the 21 Century.
Preach the gospel,
and - if necessary - use words.
Saturday, 27 June 2015
Motivators and mobilisers - Shiree Pilkinton
At left: Shiree Pilkinton in conversation with
Dr. Sundrum Sivamalia of the Ballarat Regional Multicultural Council Inc (BRMC)
Dr. Sundrum Sivamalia of the Ballarat Regional Multicultural Council Inc (BRMC)
There is a person in our Ballarat community called Shiree Pilkinton. She works here in #Ballarat at the Centre for Multicultural Youth. She does a lot of work with refugees. Shiree has a host of contacts and friendships across the community. When she is organising an event and needs some food - out goes the call from Shiree in the DM on Facebook calling for slices and other goodies and the food turns up.
Yesterday, the DM went a bit further than the need for slices and other goodies. Won't go into all the details but the gist of it was that a woman from an African country who is on her own with a number of children was in a bit of strife. The woman was behind in the rent and her cupboard was bare. Her money had gone back to Africa to help a relative. The money she wold have used for rent she had held back to feed the family.
Shiree's SOS went out with an AMAZING response. She now advises that the woman is so grateful. There is now food in the cupboard - at least to get her into next week. There is fuel in her car so she can get kids to schools. This meant she could release the money she was holding back and has now paid her rent.
It is a good thing to have lynch pins in one's community like Shiree. They are motivators and mobilisers. It is good to have responsive people in our community who move in with good will to enable someone like Shiree to place help where it is sorely needed. The woman Shiree and Co have helped is grateful to one and all.
Friday, 26 June 2015
The challenge of Papua New Guinea landscape makes travel to remote communities difficult
Accessing remote areas core challenge of
Anglican ministry in Papua New Guinea
Photo Credit: Anglican Board of Mission
Archbishop Clyde Igara highlighted in particular the need to travel to other diocese to visit clergy but also to gather clergy together for training and professional development.
“The clergy tell me in their feedback that they miss that a lot. They miss training or refresher courses and workshops greatly,” he said.
ABM is working with the Anglican Church of Papua New Guinea to support this need through the Archdeacon Training program in Popondota Diocese which has ten Archdeacons who have been selected to be trained for a month to better carry out their duties to assist the Diocese in providing pastoral care to each priest within its Deanery.
The project aims to allow clergy to do their pastoral work more effectively so that parishioners will respond positively in their Christian faith and ultimately build the faith of the Anglican Church of Papua New Guinea.
Travel to remote areas is also a challenge in other programs such as the Building Local Skills project in which local people build their skills and improve their agriculture and community infrastructure, and education.
Jeffrey Kaka, one of the Program coordinators said, “Up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea that’s where most of our adult literacy activities are implemented, only apart from walking, you can only fly into some of the areas where the schools are implemented.
“So you either fly or you walk for a few days. So that is some of the challenges of working in the program; geographical remoteness of some of the locations where activities are being implemented, so you have to be pretty fit,” he said.
In Papua New Guinea only 59 per cent of females are literate and ABM is a supporter of Anglicare PNG's work which strengthens literacy rates through classes.
Learn more about the work in Papua New Guinea on the ABM website.
Getting to the nub of the matter. Constitutional Recognition might not be the answer but a thorough-going Treaty could be.
The post below comes from Yinarr Yarning: Life, Love, Laughing, Politics and People
- the blog of Natalie Cromb.
It is re-posted here with Natalie's kind permission
and is cross-posted with The Network.
and is cross-posted with The Network.
***
Constitutional Recognition? Treaty First!
Between the Recognise campaign and Noel Pearson’s latest support for a conservative campaign for Declaration of Recognition, one thing is certain, constitutional recognition is on the agenda. Despite noted Indigenous support, these campaigns are looked upon with suspicion mainly because of the fact that the question remains over whether it would affect the sovereignty of Indigenous people, especially with respect to land rights.
In order to effect the changes suggested by the constitutional recognition campaigns, we would need to have a referendum. This would not be our first referendum.
On 27 May 1967 a referendum was held to seek a determination of two questions. The first question, referred to as the 'nexus question' was an attempt to alter the balance of numbers in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The second question was to determine whether two references in the Australian Constitution, which discriminated against Aboriginal people, should be removed.
The Constitution was changed, giving formal effect to the referendum result, by the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967 (Act No 55 of 1967), which received assent on 10 August 1967.
The proposed changes put forth by the Recognise campaign are:
· The removal of section 25 which states that the States can ban people from voting based on their race;
· The removal of section 51(xxxvi) which can be used to pass laws that discriminate against people based on their race;
· The insertion of a new section 51A to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and to preserve the Australian Government’s ability to pass laws for the ‘benefit’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
· The insertion of a new section 127A recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages were this country’s first tongues, while confirming that English is Australia’s national language.
A new proposal for recognising Indigenous Australians drafted by Constitutional conservatives Damien Freeman and Julian Leeser supports a separate declaration of recognition as opposed to a symbolic preamble to the Constitution or a new Section 51A. This approach is supported by Noel Pearson.
The Constitutional conservatives are against the Constitution containing any racial discrimination prohibition on the grounds that it would diminish the power of the Parliament.
Most constitutional law experts who have expressed their support for constitutional recognition have also expressed their support for Treaty due to the fact that they consider that the changes to the Australian Constitution merely redress the many racist provisions within the nation’s founding document and the issue of sovereignty must be conveyed in a Treaty.
Megan Davis, an Aboriginal and South Sea Islander woman who is the Director of the Indigenous Law Centre and a UN expert member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, has stated “constitutional recognition—whether amendment of the race power or a non-discrimination clause—does not foreclose on the question of sovereignty. The Australian legal system is a system that was received from the Imperial British Crown. Aboriginal people have never consented nor ceded. Sovereignty did not pass from Aboriginal people to the settlers” following the Expert Panel on the Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in 2012 however, there still seems to be concerns within the community regarding the threat to land rights.
These concerns are real and relevant and those in positions of power to effect change, ought to make steps to liaise with community leaders to address concerns.
Without seeing the wording of the proposed changes, I cannot form a view on whether I am for or against but currently, without information - I cannot support it in good faith.
Further, I am an unapologetic advocate FOR Treaty FIRST.
The discussion surrounding treaty, for me, is inherently frustrating. There are so many obstacles to treaty; from the lack of awareness of non-Indigenous Australians as to what a Treaty is and why on earth Indigenous people would want one; the political factions (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) competing between Treaty or Constitutional recognition as if it is a one or the other dilemma; and ultimately, the political machinations of how a treaty would be put together functionally to ensure maximum support of the Indigenous people and the government.
Despite many attempts to rewrite and sanitise history, we know that, under English law at the time of Governor Philip’s claim, there were three legal regimes under which a colony could be acquired:
1. Settlement – where territory is uninhabited and the ‘settlers’ brought English law with them;
2. Conquest – where territory was inhabited and the native laws survived provided they weren’t discordant with laws of the crown; or
3. Cession – where the territory was inhabited and the sovereignty was ceded to the Crown and the applicable law would be determined by agreement, but in the absence of any agreed changes, local law would continue to apply.
The prevailing legal doctrine is that Australia was acquired through settlement despite the presence of an Indigenous population because the English common law contained a definition of ‘uninhabited lands’ which considered lands uninhabited if they contained peoples ‘uncivilised’ by the 18th century English norms.
Ultimately, through the doctrine of terra nullius – Indigenous people were subverted as savages and this was integrated into the Australian Constitution which was drafted on the premise of Indigenous people being so inferior as to not garner a mention and considered to be a fading race in any event.
Terra nullius was a deliberate social construction designed to enable settlement, parcel of land at a time to enable expansion of colonial settlements and to do so without any compensation to the lawful owners.
The illegality of the actions of the Crown was clear even as far back as 1832 where the Chief Protector of Aborigines at Port Philip, George Robinson wrote;
I am at a loss to conceive by what tenure we hold this country,
for it does not appear to be that we either hold it by conquest
or by right of purchase.
for it does not appear to be that we either hold it by conquest
or by right of purchase.
This is not new to Indigenous people, we know that this country was not ‘settled.’ We know that sovereignty was not ceded. It is this disparity of understanding between what we know and what white Australia is told happened that we need to overcome.
This is a critical point to the success or failure of any cause – the truth and the wide acceptance of truth as fact. The average Australian simply does not know about the fight for equality and rights that the Indigenous people have been waging for 227 years.
They don’t know that Indigenous people were the subjects of forced and violent dispersals from their cultural lands; they were the victims of massacres and murders; rapes and retributory attacks to any resistance; there were genocidal policies based on pseudoscience of Indigenous inferiority; there were sinister attempts to murder countless Indigenous people when the introduced diseases weren’t killing enough Indigenous people to the white man’s liking and there was a pervasive mindset of the Indigenous people being sub-human.
Some Australians may recall the 1967 Referendum and all of the hope and positivity surrounding the concept of equality in the lead up to the vote and think that following this purportedly momentous event in Australian history that the Aboriginal people then had the equality they fought for.
We know that is not the case, however, there are many generations - especially the younger generations, that are simply not taught about the history of this nation, that are not taught about the Indigenous culture beyond boomerangs and spears, they do not know that statistically we have the highest Indigenous incarceration rate compared to non-Indigenous people in the world, they do not know of our appalling mortality rates, they do not know about the welfare indicators that demonstrate Indigenous people are the lowest on the socio-economic pyramid.
This is not an indictment on the Australians that do not know, this is an indictment on the education system and those that draft the curriculum that perpetuates the ignorance that pervades our country and it is an indictment on main stream media for failing to report on the real issues, on the brave men and women agitating for the very thing that Australia hangs its hat on: A fair go!
A fair go cannot be achieved without a Treaty.
A Treaty would be the basis upon which the sovereign Indigenous people of Australia and the Government could negotiate the terms of rights to land, minerals and resources and the self-governing of communities. It would be a binding agreement that would have sanctions that would deter breaches of the terms of the treaty.
Whilst I advocate for treaty, I am not flippant in thinking that getting a treaty is going to be easy because it is the least palatable option for Governments because it holds them to a set of obligations that they ordinarily would not live up to.
Treaty is essential because 227 years after colonisation we remain at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid; because after 227 years children are still being removed arbitrarily from Aboriginal families; because after 227 years racism remains rife in society and none more so against Aboriginal people; because after 227 years we are still being subjected to cruel punishments including water being switched off, communities being closed and being forced into work programs that provide less than the minimum wage and then having to buy groceries in government run shops that charge $6 for a kilo of flour.
To arbitrarily decide the fate of our people without our consultation and agreement will always be met with resistance.
And for those who champion the Recognise campaign and its intent to change the constitution to recognise Indigenous people, I say:
We have the benefit of hindsight and know that constitutional recognition, will not change the mortality or incarceration rates of our people. It will not stop the removal of children or turn the water back on in remote communities.
Constitutional change is symbolic, it is not a cure all.
A treaty is vital to the future of this nation, of this I am certain. But again, I do know that it is not a cure all.
A Treaty is the first meaningful step in ensuring that there is engagement of all in the success of its outcomes. It will leave Indigenous people empowered and part of something positive in history as opposed to disillusioned and disappointed at the millions of broken promises and setbacks we have suffered over the last 227 years.
The two critical elements to bridging the cultural divide, in my mind, are empathy and education.
In my mind, one cannot achieve true empathy without an education that sets the context for empathy. Education is critical and the education of this nation’s black history will provide the major shift in consciousness that we yearn for.
People need to learn about Indigenous history and culture and do so with an open mind and pure heart. Once they know and truly understand and consider the impact such devastation would have on their lives, their well-being, their resolve to fight another day – only then will we really be able to have a meaningful discussion about what it is going to take to heal hurts and have hope for a future our ancestors would be proud of.
Treaty is the insurance policy we need that we can hold the government accountable for their actions so real gains can be made for the Indigenous people of Australia.
Thursday, 25 June 2015
Ramadan: what it means, what happens.
Currently, our Muslim friends are celebrating Ramadan. For all that you ever wanted to know and forgot to ask about this important and impressive fasting and feasting period, please read the document below.
Wednesday, 24 June 2015
Grandmothers Against Detention of Refugee Children - from Ballarat and from Melbourne Ports : World Refugee Day, City Square Melbourne.
Life last week was very busy - keeping up, or trying to keep up
with the wonderful round of events for Refugee Week in Ballarat.
Refugee Week culminated for The Editor in joining
The Grandmothers Against Detention of Refugee Children - Ballarat
with the wonderful round of events for Refugee Week in Ballarat.
Refugee Week culminated for The Editor in joining
The Grandmothers Against Detention of Refugee Children - Ballarat
for the World Refuge Day event on Sunday 21 June at City Square Melbourne.
Grandmothers ready to train to Melbourne - The Editor is on the left.
For more pictures of the wonderful event at City Square, please go here.
Below is an embedded post plus an extra link to the Billy-Lids song.
This song comes to us from Grandmothers Adrc - Melbourne Ports.
Great song. See who you can recognise. To me, Margaret Roadnight's voice is instantly recognisable.Thanks to Brigid Walsh for introducing me to this group of Artists.
Posted by Denis Wilson on Tuesday, 23 June 2015
And there is another interesting site for the song here
Friday, 19 June 2015
POPE FRANCIS SPEAKS IN LAUDATO SI' - PRAISE BE TO YOU - ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME
The latest papal encyclical was released to-day, 19 June 2015 AEST - 18 June in The Vatican. The encyclical will take time to read closely and carefully, to digest it, and comment thoughtfully upon it.Advocacy is indebted to Crux in providing the encyclical in a number of formats to make it easily accessible to people. Advocacy has embedded the encyclical in this post where it can be read on-line or downloaded. However, it is also available on Crux here in linked chapter by chapter outline for easy access and reading. Linked here is the encyclical as it was posted on The Vatican website. Crux also contains recent commentary.
Comment
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)