- The Guardian
- Issue #2078
“Violence against women is a national crisis,” says Kate Fitz-Gibbon from Monash University’s Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre. “These deaths represent the tip of the iceberg of violence against women and children in Australia. Australia’s National Plan commits to ending gender-based violence in one generation. To achieve this, we urgently need increased action, funding, and political attention on the insecurity of women and children in their homes and workplaces. Intimate partner femicide is preventable. These acts of fatal violence are not inevitable in the Australian community. A sustained and long-term commitment to tackling the underlying drivers of violence against women – gender inequality and other forms of oppression – is essential. If we do not invest fully in prevention, we will continue to see the horrific impacts of this violence for generations to come. The status quo is not delivering the transformational commitment to end gender-based violence in one generation. An escalation in efforts and an increase in funding is urgently required.”
Here’s a request to you dear reader from activists Lock the Gate. Please send a message to the PM, Chris Bown, and/or NSW Premier Chris Minns salong the following lines:
Coal seam gas (CSG) proposals put land, water and culture at risk, and have been rejected by local communities in north-west NSW, including Gomeroi Traditional Owners and farmers. CSG will turbocharge climate change and cause more droughts, floods and fires. We know the path forward for NSW isn’t more gas, but less. Victoria and the ACT both have plans to get off gas by electrifying industry and homes, but NSW does not. We can make dramatic reductions in gas demand in NSW by supporting households and businesses to switch to renewables which would reduce energy costs and help with the cost of living, perpetually. We don’t need the Narrabri Gas Project or the pipelines that go with it – all it will do is drive up energy bills and destroy our region. Stop CSG projects planned for the Pilliga forest and our food bowl on the Liverpool Plains, and associated pipeline infrastructure that will stretch across the Hunter and north-west NSW – harming land, water and culture.
(Readers who don’t live in NSW, don’t worry, Climate Change will affect all of us, so don’t let that stop you writing!)
PARASITE OF THE WEEK: Britain.
Some history of Australia’s AUKUS partner. The retreat from the French port of Dunkirk is commonly presented as a heroic rescue of the British and French armed forces that had been ignominiously defeated by the Nazi army when it overran France in WW2. Dunkirk was one of those events that has been dressed up as a glorious retreat. In fact, Britain shirked the fight with the Germans, deserted its French allies and fled for the English Channel. On the beaches, officers abandoned their men. French troops trying to escape were booted off ships. Yet Dunkirk went down in British history as a peculiarly beautiful episode with hardy Kentish fishermen saving British soldiers while the Germans strafed the sea. All a load of rubbish. There were hardly any small boats. And when the troops got to England they ran amok, causing parts of the south east to be cordoned off. There followed PM Churchill’s speech to parliament in 1940 about fighting the Germans on the beaches. The BBC wanted him to broadcast it but he said he was too busy, so they got an actor to impersonate him, recruiting Norman Shelly, whose line of work was playing Larry the Lamb in the Children’s Hour program.
