health

Julie Bishop’s recent support of the English demands to go after Russia over the alleged misuse of military-grade nerve agent to poison a known double agent on English soil demonstrates the double standards of Australia. Australian farmers and other sectors are using herbicides and pesticides with chemical components similar to high-grade military poisons, e.g. DDT, 2-4-5-T & mustard gas, which is used to kill weevils in grain silos and rabbits in warrens. These toxins leach into the soil and our river systems and when rain comes they drain into our aquifers. [node:read-more:link]

The United Nations has described Australia's lack of progress on Closing the Gap as "woefully inadequate", saying the over-incarceration of Indigenous people is a major human rights concern. Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples Ms Tauli-Corpuz said it was unacceptable that despite two decades of economic growth, Australia had not been able to improve the social disadvantage of its Indigenous population. She urged the Federal Government to establish a treaties and truth-telling commission. [node:read-more:link]

'Aboriginal Peak Organisations of the Northern Territory', and their members have received widespread concerns about the debilitating impacts that CDP is having on its participants, their families and communities.

Onerous and discriminatory obligations applied to remote CDP work for the dole participants mean they have to do significantly more work than those in non-remote, mainly non-Indigenous majority areas, up to 670 hours more per year [node:read-more:link]

A new report suggests Aboriginal people are facing enormous pressure to lose their traditional culture in order to be successful in Australia.
"Daily I'm juggling with who I am, how I talk, how I act and look and whatever," an anonymous respondent in the study said. "So you get it from the whitefella's, you know, that you can't talk good English, and then these blackfella's: 'Why are you acting white, talking white?'" [node:read-more:link]

From 1998-2004, the Australian federal government used thuggish, racist tactics in a failed attempt to impose a national nuclear waste dump on Aboriginal land in South Australia. The government's subsequent attempt to impose a dump on Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory was even more thuggish and even more racist. But that also failed. Now the Australian government has embarked on its third attempt to establish a nuclear waste dump and it has decided to once again try to impose a dump on Aboriginal land in SA despite clear opposition from Traditional Owners. [node:read-more:link]