It’s NAIDOC Week 2019 this week, with the theme VOICE. TREATY. TRUTH.
NITV has a timeline for the development of NAIDOC and there is more at Wikipedia. Seems that a Day of Mourning was initiated on 27 January 1937 as a protest against 150 years of callous treatment and the seizure of land through British colonisation. It was initiated by a letter written by William Cooper on behalf of the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association, an umbrella group for a number of Aboriginal justice movements. The practice developed of having a day of mourning every year on the Sunday before Australia Day. Continue reading Weekly salon 7/7→
1. Bullying bosses behaving badly, and it’s not cricket
The New Daily sport editor James Willoughby’s article Cricket tour of South Africa cancelled over pay dispute is typical of the coverage. The players want everyone to be treated fairly, and want the grass roots to be looked after. Seems Cricket Australia wants the same, but with a different way of carving the pie. The chasm is so wide people are talking about an Ashes tour being junked, and worry about the future of the game.
Yet most of the reporting and commentary misses the main point – Cricket Australia refuses to attend mediation or offer any genuine flexibility in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) negotiations. They simply will not deal with the Australian Cricketers Association. Continue reading Saturday salon 8/7→
Cardinal Pell is to come back to Australia to face “historical sexual assault offences“. There have been and will be many words written about Pell, but I liked Sean Kenny at The Monthly. Kenny is worth reading on the current political follies, but he says the Pell case reminds us that there are more important changes happening in society.
Charging someone so senior in the Catholic church would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Sexual abuse of minors is finally being taken seriously. Continue reading Saturday salon 1/7→
Abbott’s fall and Turnbull’s ascension was the first news we got from home, via a text from our son.
I must admit I didn’t see it coming. I’d written Turnbull off as unacceptable to the Liberal Party. Now suddenly he’s there and Shorten looks like a dead man walking.
Craig Emerson in the AFR lifts the lid on what is really going on with the Chinese free trade agreement and the right to bring in their own workers on projects worth more than $150 million. Continue reading Saturday salon 5/9→
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared in March last year with 239 passengers and crew onboard. Now 16 months on, what appears to be the wing section of a plane has been found washed up at Reunion, a small French-owned island east of Madagascar. Continue reading Saturday salon 1/8→
On Wednesday, prior to COAG on Thursday, our political leaders held a summit or retreat to dicuss taxation and the future of the federation. By all accounts they enjoyed the talkfest – Jay Weatherall said it was “very positive” and that “in my sense and my operation in COAG over the last five years, this is probably the most constructive I have ever seen”.
Despite that there is no evidence they actually decided anything except lowering the threshold at which the GST applies to offshore online purchases. Continue reading Saturday salon 25/7→
Climate change, sustainability, plus sundry other stuff
