Launceston

Gerry Georgatos
Ali Jasmin was 13 years old when the Commonwealth of Australia locked him up in an adult prison for being a deckhand on a boat of Asylum Seekers, and hence for assisting people in the safe passage of Asylum to our shores. International maritime laws and the various United Conventions and protocols asserting the rights of those seeking Asylum would cast this young boy as a hero, and rightfully so however not the Australian government and its institutions.

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.

Gerry Georgatos
Kabi Kabi Elder, and Bundaberg campus coordinator Nulloo Yumbah at Central Queensland University, Cheri Yavu-Kama-Harathunian said she is devastated by the rising disenfranchisement of Aboriginal youth, and the world's highest suicide rates - of Australia's Aboriginal children.

"Across my desk came a study that reported 'the number of completed Indigenous suicides (in the Kimberley) last year exceeded the Australian Defence Force fatalities in Afghanistan'. I cannot comprehend this statement. It is too much," said Mrs Yavu-Kamu-Harathunian.

Gerry Georgatos

The compassionate left wing screams for social justice and argues for our governments and society's institutions to have a heart and help people from the bottom end up, and to desist with the proposition that they can achieve for the downtrodden by working from the top end of town and down.

The bona fide left wing is fractious and forever splintering and yet it calls out for groundswells of people power to coalesce in mass social movements which will give rise to cultural waves.