The recent call by the Australian Road Crew Association (ARCA)—including this piece on the ABC by Guy Stayner that highlights the appalling suicide rates in the live music industry—gave me pause to reflect on my previous career in music, mainly working as a roadie (doing FoH sound in the main) with rock ‘n roll bands [...]
I am wondering out loud whether the Royal Commission should proceed at all. Look at the mess we are in – Coalition and Labor can’t agree on the Commissioner(s), the Commissioner himself now appears in doubt, senior people – black and white – are calling into question whether a Royal Commission is justified and best way forward and indigenous leaders say they weren’t consulted on the terms of reference.
This appointment is wrong for all manner of reasons, and Aboriginal people in the Territory will not have confidence in the appointment of Brian Martin. As Chief Justice, he sat at the apex of the NT’s justice system. He presided over all judicial officers who sentenced young Aboriginal offenders to detention, and he knew them all: Olga Havnen, AMSANT.
"It would be an absurd result of the legislation if somehow more extreme force could be used in a case such as this, where a detainee is ‘at risk’, than would otherwise be the case in disciplining the detainee."
"Putting a 12-year-old in solitary confinement for nine days is tantamount to torture": WA Shadow Minister for Child Protection Sue Ellery
Begin by accepting that no one should be represented by an underpaid and under experienced lawyer, and no one in the arts should work to make your life brighter and richer for a pittance or for free, Koulla Roussos, Darwin 2016.
My two cents worth? When it comes to alcohol we should be helping troubled individuals instead of focusing on locking us all out or locking them up.
"I'm allowed to be here. I'm a fucking poet. I'm a poet. You cunts, I'm a fucking poet. Police brutality. I'm allowed to be here": Trevor Jenkins, Darwin Literary Awards, May 2014.
"Until the long arm of the law interfered, white men killed the black fellow because they were hungry with a hunger that must be fed with gold, having been trained in a school that for generations has acknowledged 'Thou shalt not kill' among its commandments." Jeannie Gunn, We of the Never Never, 1908.
The debacle that has been exposed in the past two years within the NT juvenile justice system shows quite clearly that by deliberate design and policy Aboriginal children in are treated in a barbarous, inhumane and illegal way. Multiple incidents within the juvenile detention facilities have revealed that the NT Government prosecutes policies against Aboriginal children which include spit-hooding, gassing, hand cuffing, shackling and extensive periods of unlawful solitary confinement.
