Mixed progress on Closing the Gap
Bridget Fitzgerald: Closing the Gap is an agreement. It's a promise between peak Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups and governments to address the political exclusion and institutional racism that's led to entrenched disadvantage among First Nations people. And while the failings are clear, so too are the successes.
Catherine Liddle: In amongst it there's always, always pockets of light.
Bridget Fitzgerald: Catherine Liddle is the CEO of SNAICC, the national advocacy group for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. The Productivity Commission's latest Closing the Gap report has found that only four out of 19 targets are on track to be met. With the rates of adult incarceration, children in out-of-home care, suicide rates and childhood development likely to continue to worsen. But Catherine Liddle says the areas that have seen improvements, including employment, preschool enrolment and land and sea rights, are the product of genuine government commitment and engagement with community.
Catherine Liddle: Change is possible and that happens when you truly commit to the national agreement and those things that change the way communities are able to work with you. That's investing into community controlled approaches, listening to communities about the services that they need.
Bridget Fitzgerald: The report found that nationally the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander incarceration is increasing and the target of a 15 per cent reduction by 2031 isn't on track to be met. Of the jurisdictions where Indigenous incarceration is getting worse, the Northern Territory had the largest increase. Selwyn Button is the Commissioner of the Productivity Commission and a Goongarrie man from southwest Queensland. He says there's a direct correlation between tough on crime policies, particularly in the NT, and poor Closing the Gap outcomes.
Selwyn Button: You can't actually arrest your way out of an issue, but it's thinking about the different approaches to doing things. And if investment goes into early intervention, if they're investing in programs, working alongside community control organisations to think about diversionary activities, to think about therapeutic services, I think we'll get a far better response.
Bridget Fitzgerald: Dr Hannah McGlade is an Associate Professor at Curtin Law School. We
Dr Hannah McGlade: are seeing systemic racial discrimination in laws and a failure to implement important inquiries that we've had into these issues.
Bridget Fitzgerald: Malarndirri McCarthy is the Minister for Indigenous Australians and Senator for the Northern Territory. She says it's clear high rates of incarceration, particularly the over-representation of youth offenders, continues to be a problem.
Malarndirri McCarthy: I'm not saying that if you commit a crime you don't do the time. You must do the time that's equivalent to the crime. But we have to have a look at the statistics to ask why is it that we see so many young people before these courts who are in watch houses, who are in overcrowding.
Bridget Fitzgerald: Meanwhile, the Federal Parliament has backed a motion today from Independent Senator Lydia Thorpe to acknowledge the recent death in custody of 24-year-old Warlpiri man Kumunjai White and extend sympathies to the families of 602 Indigenous people who've died in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
Nick Grimm: Bridget Fitzgerald reporting.
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News.com.au
an hour ago
- News.com.au
‘May the best woman win': JK Rowling weighs in on Giggle v Tickle discrimination case
JK Rowling has thrown her support behind the founder of a women-only app currently appealing a Federal Court ruling that she had unlawfully discriminated against a transgender woman. Sall Grover was ordered to pay $10,000 in damages last August after she was found to have indirectly discriminated against transgender woman Roxanne Tickle when she removed her from her social media app, Giggles for Girls. AI software designed to filter out men from the women-only app had cleared Ms Tickle, but Ms Grover removed her from the app herself after seeing her profile in 2021. The landmark case resulted in Federal Court Justice Robert Bromwich ruling that Ms Tickle was excluded from the app for not looking 'sufficiently female', and therefore was indirectly discriminated against. Ms Grover filed an appeal against Justice Bromwich's judgement in October. The first hearing of her appeal was held on Monday. Ahead of the hearing, Rowling – who has been outspoken in her criticism of what she sees as an assault of women's rights coming from transgender activists – issued a message of public support to Ms Grover. 'Good luck, Sall,' the Harry Potter author wrote on X. 'May the best woman (haha) win x.' Rowling also shared a post of Ms Grover's on the social media platform – a screenshot of an article by The Australian about Monday's hearing. Ms Grover captioned the screenshot of the article – headlined 'Trans women 'should have legal protections available to pregnant women'': 'This is how insane gender ideology is.' Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brisbane in October, Ms Grover insisted 'somebody's biological sex is immutable' and it was a 'natural human instinct for us to be able to tell this'. 'And if you are then being told that you cannot acknowledge that really basic instinct, you have lost the ability to recognise one of our most basic skills,' she said. 'If you just look to the person sitting next to you right now, you can tell if they are male or female. Now imagine if you can't do that anymore because you've got to ask, 'Do you have a gender identity?'. And if you don't acknowledge that and give meaning to that then you're breaking the law. It simply doesn't work.' Ms Grover added 'we are told constantly that trans rights are human rights, but human rights cannot be rights that take away other people's rights'. 'That's not how it works. And it's not only that they're taking away our rights, we're actually being coerced into giving up our rights,' she claimed. It's not the first time Rowling has weighed in on an Australian court case related to women's and transgender rights. In December, she congratulated Moira Deeming's defamation win against John Pesutto, following a ruling from Federal Court Justice David O'Callaghan that Mr Pesutto had defamed Ms Deeming as a Nazi sympathiser after she attended a rally critical of transgender beliefs. 'The 'right side of history' is racking up a hell of a lot of losses recently, isn't it?' Rowling wrote on X at the time. 'Congratulations Moira Deeming.' She similarly celebrated Britain's Supreme Court's decision in April that a woman is defined by her sex at birth, in a major blow for transgender people in the UK. The case came about because the Scottish Government had argued trans women with a valid gender recognition certificate (GRC) could be afforded the same rights as all women under the Equality Act. A GRC can be issued by the UK government to people who are living as a different gender to their biological sex so long as they have been doing so for at least two years, have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and medical reports from two doctors. Campaign group For Women Scotland fought the Scottish Government's decision in the Scottish courts and lost, eventually bringing the case to Britain's Supreme Court. That court said Edinburgh's 'interpretation is not correct'. While someone might possess a certificate saying they live as a female and they assert that gender, that 'does not come within the definition of a 'woman' under the Equality Act 2010', the ruling said. The Equality Act, the judges said 'makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man'. It means a trans woman with a GRC cannot claim she is being discriminated against if she is barred from female only spaces like, for instance, domestic violence shelters and toilets. However, Lord Hodge said trans people were a 'vulnerable and often harassed minority', who 'struggle against discrimination and prejudice as they seek to live their lives with dignity'. The Supreme Court also stressed that 'trans people are protected from discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment'. Ms Rowling, who lives in Scotland and is an ardent campaigner against trans rights, lauded the outcome. 'It took three extraordinary, tenacious Scottish women with an army behind them to get this case heard by the Supreme Court and, in winning, they've protected the rights of women and girls across the UK,' she wrote on X.
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Why Do We Protest?
JUSTICE STALMAN, PROTESTER: My first involvement in activism, I think I was about 16, and it was around the Adani coal mine in Queensland. Honestly, I was really scared and also disappointed, realising that the people in power, the, the adults, weren't always necessarily going to do what's right and what's right for young people as well. CALE MATTHEWS, REPORTER: Justice has been involved in protests for almost a decade. JUSTICE STALMAN: In the beginning it was a lot of like campaigning. The first group that I was involved with was AYCC, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, and we had a lot of focus on, like, consulting with governments and, and doing campaigns that way. It was just young people trying to be heard and have meaningful conversations. But yeah, it didn't feel like that really led to a lot of change. PROTESTING: People, power! Power, people! Last year she travelled to NSW to join Activism Group Rising Tide, who were attempting to block coal ships from entering the Newcastle port. POLICEMAN: To ensure your safety, you must comply with this direction. Here, she was arrested. JUSTICE STALMAN: It feels like often protesting, I guess the legal ways, the polite ways, is still not seen and or often ignored, and we see little change come from that, but when we move into things that are more disruptive that demand your attention, you can't look away anymore and change does happen. PROTESTER: Show me what democracy looks like! You've probably seen protests pop up in the news a lot lately. NEWS REPORTER: The march on the Harbour Bridge garnered attention all over the world, even in Gaza. I mean, almost 100,000 people marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge is pretty hard to miss. Data suggests the annual number of protests across the globe tripled from 2006 to 2022 and through the 2020s, that trend has continued. DAVID MEJIA-CANALES, HUMAN RIGHTS LAW CENTRE: Protest has been a really, really important feature of how we've achieved really good things like marriage equality and First Nations land rights, and I know there's still a lot of work to do there, even just the right to vote, the right to vote for women. The right to vote for Aboriginal people. All of these things were not gifts that were given by politicians or parliaments. These were things that were demanded and protested for for a long period of time. David is a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre. He says protests have a long history, but now they're a lot more visible. DAVID MEJIA-CANALES: Before we had smartphones and the Internet, you had to kind of run into a protest to know that it was happening, whereas now there's a lot of really high profile protests for things like protecting the environment, for ending war, and these things have actually got to a level that people are talking about them just in everyday speech, in schools, in workplaces. David says with increased visibility also comes increased scrutiny. In the last say 20 years, maybe 22 years, we've seen about 30 anti-protest laws being introduced around the country. So they make say for example, blocking a road, a crime and not only do they make blocking a road a crime, and blocking a road is a pretty normal feature of protest, but they attach a really, really high penalty for something like that. In NSW, blocking a road without police permission could get you a jail sentence of two years or a fine of over $20,000. Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Tassie and SA have all made changes to protest laws in the last few years. Increasing their penalties for disruptive protests. PETER MALINAUSKAS, SA PREMIER: Protest is welcome, but it's got to be done in such a way that is conscious of other people's rights within our community. DOMINIC PERROTTET, FORMER NSW PREMIER: We want people to be able to protest, but you should do it in a way that doesn't inconvenience people right across NSW. David says these changes have given more power to police at protests and right now, Australia is the world leader in arrests at climate and environment protests by a long way. DAVID MEJIA-CANALES: The police have a really important job to do, you know, keeping people safe and keeping paths cleared so that people can walk through them. But what we're seeing now is that police are actually taking more of a role in actually deciding whether to allow a protest to happen or not, and that actually gets into a really tricky situation where you're bringing people who might be in a bit of a heated moment into contact with police, and recently we've seen in NSW and Victoria and other places where there's been actual violence towards protesters and to police, and we don't want that. That's not the point of protest, but because the laws are so restrictive, it's actually pushing people to either do things that they might not otherwise do or do things that are a little bit riskier or actually bringing police into contact with people in a way that's probably not desired for police or protesters. South Australian grassroots ecosystem, or SAGE, is a community gathering that happens at the end of every month and it brings together a lot of community and activist groups across the state. Some young people here say changes to the law have made them more apprehensive. VOX: I'm so often hearing people say "I'm really concerned about my job prospects. I don't want to get involved with climate protests. I don't want to risk anything." VOX: People are getting more worried about whether they're actually allowed to protest, whether they're going to is a safe event and stuff because people are worried about these laws. People don't want to get caught up in the law by just expressing their views on the climate. Dr Lucy Bird is a researcher at Flinders University who has been looking into whether a feeling called 'political despair' is causing people to stop protesting. DR. LUCY BIRD: So it's this emotion based on how you're feeling about sort of the status quo and how things are happening socially and politically. So it could be climate change, people, a lot of young people in particular, are feeling despair about the fact that what we're seeing is really unjust, like we should be seeing changes, but we're not. She says about 60% of climate protesters feel political despair, a feeling that nothing is changing. But she also says it's not turning them away. DR. LUCY BIRD: Well, that's what we originally thought it would. We assumed that it would mean that people do step away because you just can't handle it and it's not nice to feel despair. But what we actually found is that even though people were feeling despair, they were continuing to act. People are pretty complex. We feel multiple emotions at once and often people feeling anger and despair at the same time you know. You can have really conflicting ideas about 'nothing's changing. Nothing's working,' but also having this belief that it can change. Emma Thomas is a professor of social psychology in the same lab as Doctor Bird. She says changes to how people can and can't protest can have a couple of outcomes. I think that the legislative changes have had a dampening effect on protests and I think that they've had a dampening effect on collective actions primarily in the context of climate protest. We did a really quite complex computational simulation actually of what happens when you repeatedly repressed protest over long periods of time and what then happens. What happens at a population level and we show that you know you can create really apathetic populations when you repress protest too much, which is very bad for democracy because our democracies are healthy and vibrant. Where we have a political, a politically engaged populous. But you can also radicalise a lot of people. So you can have these two extremes which are very undesirable I think for healthy democracies of a group of people who are disengaged, and a group of people who are radicalised and prepared to use violence because the authorities have signalled that they're not prepared to listen to conventional forms of protest. JUSTICE STALMAN: I feel more apprehensive in some ways of course, I need to think about my future, but at the same time, I think the cost of inaction is so much higher than any fine that you could be given, and ultimately, I don't think that people can be bullied or intimidated out of standing up for what's right. Justice says she still often feels like her voice isn't being heard, but that's not gonna stop her protesting in the future. JUSTICE STALMAN: Protest works. That's why we do it. Protest is why I can vote as a woman. Protest is why we have, you know, working rights. Ultimately, I know that all the rights that I have now I have because people have protested in the past, which is also why I protest because I want people in the future to have rights that I don't have yet now.
Sydney Morning Herald
an hour ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
A $200 billion boost to the economy – but it may mean losing your job
A combination of artificial intelligence and better use of our personal information could deliver a $200 billion boost to the economy over the next decade, the Productivity Commission has found, while warning it may cost some Australians their jobs. As the nation's second-largest company slammed a proposal from the commission that would increase its annual tax bill, the agency urged Anthony Albanese to reject calls from within his government to impose binding regulation on AI, saying it could leave everyone worse off. In its third report before this month's economic roundtable, at which 23 hand-picked experts, business and union leaders will map out ways to lift the country's productivity growth rate, the commission said data and digital technologies were the modern engines of economic growth. Likening the possible gains from AI to the way steam engines helped begin the industrial revolution, the commission said the emerging technology could underpin a surge of productivity over coming years. Loading It said productivity by workers could grow by 4.3 per cent, which, based on the current size of the jobs market and working hours, could lift economic output by $116 billion over the next decade. Benefits from allowing businesses and individuals to access and share data that relates to them, such as making better spending decisions, could potentially add another $10 billion a year through higher productivity. Commissioner Stephen King said new technology had driven productivity growth since the 1960s, which had improved living standards threefold since. 'With the right policy approach, AI technology and innovations in data could help Australia get back on the path to growth,' he said.
