Canberra

Newsletter date: 15 May 2012

Upcoming Aboriginal rights events around Australia
- 32 events from 15 May 2012

Click on the links for details of the events ...

Event: Wed 16 May 2012: Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane
National Day of Action
in solidarity with the people of Broome
"250 police have converged on Broome, Western Australia,
as the WA Government attempts to crush peaceful
community opposition to a proposed industrial complex
at James Price Point on the pristine Kimberley coast."

by Catherine Mpofu On Thursday May 10th thousands of men, women and children from the peaceful, deeply spiritual and ancient race of Hazaras; a minority of Afghanistan, gathered from across Australia in our nation’s capital to have their voices heard.

They gathered to protest against the systematic and ever increasing genocide that is being committed against them particularly in Quetta Pakistan and also in Afghanistan. More than 700 hundred Hazaras have been killed for past several years in Quetta. Many of their influential individuals such as politicians, sportspersons, writers, doctors and social activists have been brutally targeted and murdered. Canberra’s protest joins the rolling worldwide protests by Hazaras in all major cities in the last month including London, Stockholm and Hamburg. http://www.hazarapeople.com/

Gerry Georgatos
If you want to know the hearts and minds of a nation, of its consciousness, of its legislators, then day and night look into our prisons.

The two century old modern day prison experiment is failing, that is if we look at the spiralling incarceration rates, adult and youth, and if we look at re-offending rates, the recidivism.

My PhD research argues that people who enter the prison experience, who are incarcerated for relatively short or long terms leave the prison experience worse than they came in.

Gerry Georgatos
Australia-wide Aboriginal organisations, communities and rights advocates are more than just apprehensive of the consolidated push by State and Territory governments for the introduction of Criminal Association Control Bills better known as anti-association laws – in Western Australia, the Criminal Organisation Bill 2012 appears that it will be passed and within days.