![]() Reflecting on the unfolding events, now more than ever we need to listen, learn and understand. Today Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are significantly overrepresented in the justice system, we can, and we must do more. Since then more than 400 Aboriginal people have died in custody. ![]() In 1991, a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody made 339 recommendations, to date almost none have been fully implemented. You might think that as a nation we’ve come a long way since then, but sadly, you’d be wrong. ![]() It was built on the dispossession of land, and the removal of children from their families. Australia was built off massacres and murders of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. While commenting on the unfolding events in the US it is impossible to ignore the fact that white Australia has a black history. The fact is when police come for the journalists, we don’t know what happens next. The unprecedented use of force against protestors and continued attacks on the media is astonishing and abhorrent. Much like the uprising’s decades ago, this is not just about inequality, it’s about police brutality. 51 years since the Stonewall uprising, a new movement is taking place, protesting the deeply institutionalised racial prejudices and injustices that still exist in communities around the word. As a member of the LGBTQI+ community, I owe my freedoms to the gay rights movement, people who stood up to police at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, and those who marched in the 1978 Sydney Mardi Gras among many others. ![]() Like millions worldwide I’m angry and I’m upset – racism and police brutality have no place in America, nor anywhere in the world.Īs white male, I am extraordinarily privileged, but as a gay man I understand what it’s like to feel unequal. The murder of George Floyd is the latest in a long history of growing racial violence and police brutality in the US. Watching the unfolding events in the US my heart breaks. ![]()
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