More often than not, Indigenous disadvantage puts Australia on the international news media radar. Local commentators on the Tent Embassy protest have chosen to look away, writes Hamish Ford
On Australia Day in Canberra this year two stark effects of an intertwined political and mainstream media narrative were revealed.
First, that protests, no matter how small, are increasingly portrayed as security threats.
Second, the way the events were relayed at the time and then over ensuing days illustrates how historical and ongoing Indigenous disadvantage — despite being an international scandal — is treated here with a mix of dishonest platitudinal concern and “move-on” belligerence.
Escalating very visibly during the Howard period, rallies and protesters have increasingly been portrayed over recent years as either vaguely unnerving or as violent threats. When it comes to hosting big regional and international forums, this can be partially explained away as the government and PM of the day not wanting to be embarrassed in front of global leaders. However, why visible protest is embarrassing or dangerous for a purportedly freedom-of-speech-loving democracy — after all, we go to war against nations vilified for lacking such things — is never properly explained.
Last Thursday in Canberra, with no need to protect visiting dignitaries from the messy democratic spectacle of dissent, we saw the absurd limit point reached in the ‘protest as security threat’ narrative.
No wonder the spectacle of our first female prime minister being “saved” by a dashing security officer made international news. But people overseas — especially in countries characterised by much more rancorous and ideologically diverse extra-parliamentary political argument — may have been left confused by the story behind the dramatic images. Were Australia’s Prime Minister and Opposition Leader really fleeing a restaurant accompanied by a security detail just because a small and unarmed group of activists with a globally recognised cause had noisily decamped outside?
In addition to protest organisers disputing police and media claims that activists engaged in violence, an independent eyewitness has since written that the whole threat and behaviour of this small group was at best exaggerated or at worst an outright lie.
Some people undoubtedly wondered why the police reacted as they did, but excessive actions are crucial if protests are to be construed as real threats. Rather than a strange aberration, overreactions are also far from unfamiliar.
Yet rather than examining the behaviour of the cops and questioning whether the media got the story right on the day (as Ben Eltham did in New Matilda), the main emphasis in subsequent reporting remains on what the event means for the only game in town that matters.
And so we are told the restaurant rescue was bad for Gillard because she looked “weak” being ushered away. Media outlets then obsessed over the trivial and distracting he said/she said fight resulting from the Opposition’s claims of collusion by the Prime Minister’s Office and the risible demands for a Federal Police inquiry. (The AFP has responded that there is no evidence to go ahead with any prosecutions.)
But what about the absurdity of the two most powerful politicians in Australia fleeing a small gaggle of unarmed activists concerned about a serious, historically wretched and ongoing situation?
In many other countries, when Australia is in the news it is often in connection to the appalling situation in which many Indigenous Australians live. If our media only sporadically reports this international criticism, it virtually never mentions that despite some small improvements, this country ranks at or near the bottom of first-world nations in disparity of wealth and opportunity for the Indigenous population as compared to other citizens.
We also remain behind countries like New Zealand, Canada and Sweden when it comes to both successful mechanisms of political self-determination and a broad cultural reckoning with our history of colonial dispossession and violence.
Instead, Australians get fed entirely deceptive mantras such as, “we have thrown buckets of money at the problem”. When it comes to total government expenditure per head of the population, you are far better off not being a member of the most unambiguously disadvantaged (pdf) group of Australians. Better the comforting, self-aggrandising lie — which directly or by association basically means it is their fault — than the awkward and frequently awful truth.
For the likes of Tony Abbott, Bob Carr, and Mal Brough to imply or quite bluntly declare the Aboriginal tent embassy should be shut down because its primary cause has been overcome displays staggering dishonesty, patronising arrogance and knowingly insensitive timing. If elite voices and representatives, be they white or black, are embarrassed by the tent embassy, what then should replace it?
“Maybe Abbott is right and it is time for the tent embassy to go”, NSW Aboriginal Council member Roy RC said on the day, adding that in which case “it is time to erect a black Parliament with politicians we can choose”. Such ideas no doubt cause howls of “separatism” across large swathes of white Australia and on talkback radio. But when the grand total of Aboriginal MPs ever to sit in the House of Representatives or the Senate is three, it is clear that our established political institutions and parties have abjectly failed to include representative Indigenous voices in national decision-making.
As beneficiaries of a two-party system deeply unrepresentative of Australia’s actual population, that Abbott, Carr, Brough and others made their comments on what the unquestioned rulers of this land call Australia Day but which many Indigenous Australians and a notable minority of others call Invasion Day quite fittingly tops off the insult.
It’s bad enough that this country has been repeatedly censured by the UN for the entrenched disadvantage suffered by Indigenous people. This festering sore at the repressed heart of our nation also results in an increasingly absurd and disingenuous series of disavowals — and they are now gathering steam afresh in response to the very mild proposed referendum to recognise Aboriginal Australians’ unique status in the Constitution.
Australia Day 2012 marked only the latest chapter in this depressingly continuous story. It tells of how those directly affected by the nation’s desultory record — both through their everyday lives and a strongly felt sense of historical injustice — are treated, alongside non-Indigenous Australians outraged by the ongoing scandal, as threats to “national security”. In the most unattractively revealing way imaginable for this country, that is exactly what they are.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius stands next to President Barack Obama in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington in 2011. (CNS photo/Reuters)
WASHINGTON — A week after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told individuals and institutions who oppose contraception “to hell with you,” as one bishop put it, members of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy were mobilizing their followers to fight.
Bishops across the country — including Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory of Atlanta, Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond of New Orleans and Bishop Robert N. Lynch of St. Petersburg, Fla. — were preparing letters to be read at all Masses during the Jan. 28-29 weekend.
But one of the most strongly worded reactions to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' Jan. 20 announcement that religious organizations could delay but not opt out of a requirement that all health plans cover contraception and sterilization at no cost came from Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburgh, in a column titled “To hell with you.”
Sebelius and the Obama administration “have said 'To hell with you' to the Catholic faithful of the United States,” Zubik wrote. “To hell with your religious beliefs. To hell with your religious liberty. To hell with your freedom of conscience. We'll give you a year, they are saying, and then you have to knuckle under.”
He called on Catholics in the Pittsburgh Diocese to “do all possible to rescind” the contraceptive mandate by writing to President Barack Obama, Sebelius and their members of Congress about this “unprecedented federal interference in the right of Catholics to serve their community without violating their fundamental moral beliefs.”
Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of Peoria, Ill., enlisted the aid of St. Michael the Archangel in fighting “this unprecedented governmental assault upon the moral convictions of our faith.”
In a Jan. 24 letter to Peoria Catholics, he directed that the prayer of St. Michael be recited “for the freedom of the Catholic Church in America” during Sunday Masses at every parish, school, hospital, Newman center and religious house in the diocese.
The prayer reads in part: “Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil” and “cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits, who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.”
“I am honestly horrified that the nation I have always loved has come to this hateful and radical step in religious intolerance,” Jenky said in the letter.
“While it is primarily the laity who should take the leading role in political and legal action, as your bishop it is my clear responsibility to summon our local church into spiritual and temporal combat in defense of Catholic Christianity,” he added. “I strongly urge you not to be intimidated by extremist politicians or the malice of the cultural secularists arrayed against us.”
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“We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law,” declared Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix in a Jan. 25 letter.
“Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America's cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God-given rights,” Bishop Olmsted said. “In generations past, the church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same.”
The Catholic bishops of Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, said in a joint statement that they “cannot stand by silently” in light of what they called “an unprecedented and untenable abrogation of religious freedom in the United States.”
“This is part of a pattern in the United States that has degenerated from the recognition of religion as good and salutary in our society to religion being subjected to punitive discrimination,” said the statement signed by Bishops Kevin J. Farrell of Dallas and Kevin W. Vann of Fort Worth and Dallas Auxiliary Bishops J. Douglas Deshotel and Mark J. Seitz.
They urged the nearly 2 million Catholics in North Texas, along with “other people of good will,” to join them “by speaking out for the protection of conscience rights and religious liberty that are essential to the common good of our nation and in keeping with the basic human rights enshrined in our American way of life.”
Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron of Detroit, in a Jan. 21 statement, called on lawmakers in Washington to “step up, step in, and protect the rights of their fellow citizens from a government mandate that is truly unconscionable.”
“This fight against the federal government's overreaching exercise of its power is everybody's fight,” he added.
Aymond, who was in Rome for his “ad limina” visit to Pope Benedict XVI, said Jan. 26 that he had already sent a letter to members of Congress protesting the HHS decision and now expected the Catholic faithful to take action.
“This is a critical time and one that will call for us to engage in public dialogue,” he said. “We cannot stand by and allow this to move forward without speaking out.”
Aymond said Catholics “must be able to live the message of Christ in the U.S. and follow our conscience.”
“We are not demanding that others live our Christian values, but we should have the right to do so,” he added.
Although both Gregory and Lynch had announced they would write letters to be read at weekend Masses, the texts of those letters had not been made public as of the afternoon of Jan. 26.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal Jan. 25, Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the HHS decision rejected the “loud and strong appeals” by “hundreds of religious institutions and hundreds of thousands of individual citizens” since the comment period began last August.
He said it is naive to think that contraception and sterilization will be “free” under the HHS mandate.
“There is no free lunch, and you can be sure there's no free abortion, sterilization or contraception,” he wrote. “There will be a source of funding: you.”
Speaking that evening at Fordham University in New York, the archbishop told reporters that Obama had called him the morning of Jan. 20 “to tell me the somber news” before the HHS decision was announced publicly.
He said he felt “terribly let down, disappointed and disturbed” and found it difficult to reconcile the decision with what the president had told him during a meeting in November — “that he considered the protection of conscience sacred, that he didn't want anything his administration would do to impede the work of the church that he claimed he held in high regard, particularly in the area of health care, education, works of charity and justice.”
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23-12-2011 12:07 Men’s Health picked our Salute 34 as one of the TOP 5 PRODUCTS for 2012. Here is one of the many segments they aired on Fox News nationally.
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“Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” That was the headline last week on a blog posted by New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane. Brisbane is The Times’ ombudsman; his job is to hold the paper accountable to journalistic standards and to act as its readers’ representative.
18-01-2012 06:44 healthytimesarticles.com health articles, health news, health magazine So much of the content in current online health articles, health magazines and health news is written with an agenda that has nothing to do with health. This site is your online health magazine with health articles and health news that is genuine, original and written by health and wellness professionals.
According to government inspectors from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), strong psychiatric medications are often prescribed to individuals with dementia in nursing homes, but for off-label reasons. In addition, families of dementia patients in nursing homes should be vigilant about the care they receive. Drugs, such as Zyprexa and Seroquel, designed to treat individuals …
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The Mayo Clinic released its study of aging report today and announced that more than six percent of Americans, aged seventy to eighty-nine years, suffered from mild cognitive impairment (MCI). They also state that the data show more men are affected than women, and those with only high school education seem more affected than those with some level of higher education. MCI is an intermediary …
That is one hell of a dry spell, Tim Gunn. Celibacy and asexuality have been in the news a lot this week, and the sex-free lifestyle got another big q-rating boost this week with Project Runway‘s Tim Gunn’s announcement that he has been sexless for the past thee decades. Gunn’s sexual abstention is a bit [...] Tim Gunn Says He Hasn’t Had Sex in 29 Years is a post from: The Inquisitr
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Imagine you took Rahm Emanuel and split him into two people. One of the new Rahms was the pure political animal, the wartime consigliere, the tireless fundraiser, the maniac who jams steak knives into the table while calling out the names of his enemies
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Foreign minister Alain Juppé claims that France’s recent acrimony with Britain over Europe is finished, while mixed US data fails to signal recovery in the world’s biggest economy.
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Foreign minister Alain Juppé claims that France’s recent acrimony with Britain over Europe is finished, while mixed US data fails to signal recovery in the world’s biggest economy.
Moffitt Cancer Center and partners hosted the annual Men’s Health Forum on March 12, 2011, in Tampa. They offered free health testing to medically underserved and uninsured men in the Tampa Bay area. This video is from 100 Black Men of Tampa Bay, Inc., one of the exhibitors at the event, which was held at the University of South Florida.