Tag Archives: Australia and children

Australian Politics

Our children still not eating enough in God’s country

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So, as we all party at the removal of our very own theocratic government, what has the last month ushered in?

Lots of lovely symbolic gestures, lots of baby steps to restoring Australia’s reputation as a great place to live, a great place to bring up children.

Over a hundred years ago, in 1915, British Army officers were impressed when they saw the Australian troops disembark. They were taller and heavier than their home-grown ‘brothers in arms’, and many were proficient with weapons and even horses. They looked healthy and confident, and many proved themselves in the dark days which followed.

How would our current crop of children look if they were unloaded on a British dock today?

Not that great, I reckon. If last year, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began to affect the price of everything, the United Nations estimated that 16% of Australian children under the age of 15 lived with an adult who was food insecure in 2017. (The Conversation-July 9, 2021).

It is impossible these days to calculate how many more are struggling today. Prices go up daily, rents are ridiculous, MPs collect their indexed pay rises, and middle class families struggle to pay fresh food prices.

One would automatically assume that, no matter the good intentions of that caring adult mentioned above, children were going hungry. That is around one in every six children, going to bed hungry, or not sure if there will be any breakfast.

All such figures are revolting. There is no shortage of them. Governments have been papering the walls with such reports for decades, and stupid, populist politicians continue to pander to those in Australia who still think that poverty is the fault of the poor. How much suffering will assuage the righteous anger of the middle classes towards the unemployed, or even more disturbingly, those unable to work?

There is no way that reports which show children going hungry in Australia is ever, in any universe, or under any government, acceptable. We know how to fix this problem. Give the poor a pay-rise.

No-one in Australia knows how Morrison and Frydenberg stumbled on the solution, but stumble on it they did. In some totally random way those arch monetarists took a leaf out of Keynes’ playbook, and doubled welfare payments.

I strongly suspect they regretted the move, but it served the purpose of stimulating the economy, and if a few hundred thousand were benefitted, so be it. Something like the need to break eggs to make omelettes.

For the first time in years, people on welfare were able to have food on the table, AND to pay their bills. No impossible choices: They could eat, and maintain a shred of dignity.

For health reasons even many of the visible homeless were housed. Who would have guessed that, in the midst of an overwhelming pandemic, Australia would do something for its neediest? We accidentally became Finland, and then we woke up?

Of course the ‘honeymoon’ was destined to end. The neo-liberal gene asserted itself, and these measures were stopped. No transition, no stepping down of benefits. Lots of talk about things not being free forever, and the old “pay your own way” crap.

Disappointing, but not surprising. Frydenberg, who believes in ‘trickle-down economics’, decided to do a little experiment. If he gave billions of dollars to undeserving corporate hacks, would any of it trickle down to the poor and needy?

Well, no. His experiment was a failure. All the big corporates, and the private colleges, the fossil fuel parasites, all continued to rack up profits, and the children went back to going to bed hungry, or wondering if the electricity would be cut off tomorrow. If you happened to be black, and living in your ancestral lands, you might even have the spectre of being jailed, from the age of ten.

So when we have people of the calibre of Peter Dutton talking about protecting women and children from sexual violence, what about protecting them from something as immediate, and as dangerous-hunger and homelessness. The solution is obvious.

This country is drowning in its own callous narcissism and ignorance. It deludes itself, and has the effrontery to decry any criticism directed at it. From a nation which made its own democracy and institutions into something admirable, we have sunk down the ranks in everything worth measuring.

Inequality is everywhere you look. There is no difference in whether a Liberal or a Labor minister looks out upon the land, and spies hunger, homelessness, meaningless ‘gig economy’ jobs, tax rorts for the rich, public schools being robbed to pay the private colleges subsidies. The list is long, and time is of the essence.

I can live with the sceptre of Geelong Grammar getting another computer lab, or another perfectly manicured cricket oval, but I draw the line on starving my fellows, and their children in this, one of the wealthiest countries on earth.

Care of your vulnerable is conservatism as it should be. Preserve what you have, and improve it. Do not create whole classes of land developers and spivs, think tank ‘scholars’ and rentiers, who spend more on reducing their taxes than they actually pay, in taxes.

There is something rotten if both sides of politics don’t get equality, but something especially rank if the Labor Party ducks its core responsibilities. Pick them up, and the celebrations might resume.

Australian Politics

Inequality leads to starving our children

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Australia has had a chequered past, when it comes to looking after our most vulnerable. The history of our treatment of the First Australians is dark, and shameful. But in what could be an exercise in ‘black humour’, we now have a non-discriminatory policy towards all who are poor.

This means that we have Government policies which, either consciously or not, treat those who are of Aboriginal descent, the aged, those who are disabled, those who are addicted, those who suffer from mental illness, those who are homeless, and those who are either unemployed, or underemployed, as second class citizens. Now that is equal-opportunity discrimination. Consider the millions of Australians who fall into any of these categories.

The most recent example has been the vaccine rollout. Who missed out, from the beginning? All of the above. Aboriginal people are still lagging in the area of vaccine coverage, even after being identified as especially vulnerable. Catching up now, but an after-thought. The disabled? Forgotten, until now.

We are at close to 90% of first doses, and yet this Government has not bothered to include regional and remote communities. I live in a regional town, only 70 kms from Melbourne, and last Wednesday, October 13, we had a visit from a vaccine bus. The first visit, mind you. I don’t have the figures on car ownership where I live, but plenty of people did not, because they could not, travel to Kilmore for their first shots.

Many of the older residents were hesitant to get the jab, because the ‘communicator in chief’, aka Mr Morrison, an alleged marketer, stuffed up the rollout, by not buying enough supplies, and by then bad-mouthing the ‘product’ he was supposedly trying to sell to the public. No wonder he kept getting the sack from his previous jobs.

We will never know how many deaths were caused by his, and his Government’s, sheer incompetence, but we all know they got their shots first. We know that the recent lockdowns were caused by Government inaction on vaccines, because now that we have mostly caught up, state governments feel they can open up again. Cause and effect can be an elegant equation.

Let us move on, to hunger

As part of the Morrison Government’s response to the economic effects of Covid-19, we saw them respond, reluctantly and late, by providing economic support to those who needed help. They even doubled the unemployment benefit. This action saw millions of Australians able to pay their bills, able to find accommodation, even able to feed their children, and themselves.

Their additional spending helped to power the temporary economic revival. The majority of our economists applauded the targeted assistance. Of course they were unaware that the poor were not the only recipients of Government largesse. Billions of dollars also flowed to hundreds of ineligible companies, which, opportunistically and cynically, paid executive bonuses, and even dividends to shareholders with their ill-gotten gains.

But then, as expected, the Morrison Government’s bastardry and adolescent hubris kicked in. They sent the poor back to where they belong, poverty-stricken and abandoned. They sent Australian children into a situation where

“An estimated 1.2 million children in Australia went hungry in the past year, while one in six adults also faced severe food insecurity, a new report says.

Foodbank’s annual Hunger Report, released on Wednesday as part of Anti-Poverty Week, suggests the number of people going hungry in Australia has increased since the coronavirus welfare supplement and jobkeeper payments were withdrawn.” This report was cited by Luke Henrique-Gomes, in the Guardian Australia.

There are many solutions to reining in spending, especially if the Government you elected is stupid and venal, as this one is. But causing our children to starve is unforgiveable. This result is a direct consequence of neoliberal thought. Someone tell me where markets will fix food insecurity, when we export over half of what we grow. This Government needs to be replaced, at the ballot box, as soon as possible.

You can see how conflicted and useless they are. They cannot even agree on mitigating climate change. In the area of providing adequate nutrition for our future, aka our children, you would think they were at least able to see the harm they are doing. Starving children is very un-Australian. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Vote these idiots out, first chance you get. They are dangerous to us all.

Australian Politics

In Australia we still jail children, some as young as 10

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Federal Member for Mayo Rebekha Sharkie introduced a Private Members’ Bill last year, to put pressure on the Government to follow a United Nations recommendation, and raise the age of criminal responsibility in Australia from 10 to 14 years. This would re-align us with most of the developed world.

In November 2019, then Attorney-General of Australia, Christian Porter, was of the opinion that the current system was working well. He went on to state that the bill was highly controversial, because it would mean there would never be any circumstances where a person aged ten to 14 could be held responsible for their actions. That opinion appears to be, at best, wilfully blind.

It is worth noting that a spokesperson for the current federal Attorney-General, Michaelia Cash, said the issue was one for states and territories to decide. Quite a backward step from the Commonwealth, and from the first law officer in the nation.

Porter had worked previously as Attorney-General of W.A. where he must have known that almost 40 per cent of Western Australian youth in detention have fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and almost 90 per cent have a neurological impairment.

We are desperate for change, but the Attorneys need more time

This is hard to believe, but in Australia, today, there are over six hundred children, aged between 10 and 13, who are in jail. It is a fact that about 65% of those children are of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) heritage.

If you wanted to consciously set about handicapping a person for life, what better way than to lock them up, separate them from family and friends, take them out of the classroom, and impose the rigors of life in an institution on pre-pubescent children.

This reeks of another ‘stolen generation’ disgrace, and we can’t blame ‘redneck’ police, or consciously racist bureaucrats for this. No, this state of affairs sits squarely on the shoulders of our federal and state attorneys-general.

One of the cornerstones of criminal law in Australia, and other Common Law jurisdictions, is the concept of “mens rea“. The phrase means a guilty mind, and it must be present, to prove intent to commit a crime.

We all know that these children are legally ‘infants’. They cannot vote, or marry, or drive a car, or sign a contract, or consent to sexual activity, but they can commit crimes? We should consider improving their lives, rather than jailing them.

Think back to when you were ten years old. How did you rate when it came to weighing up your options, the consequences and rewards of your intended action, and your willingness to accept the outcome, if there was one. Did you know the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’? How about lawful and unlawful?

The attorneys-general of this great nation have been in a bit of a bind, because they feel that they have not had enough time to consider the matter of whether it is appropriate to continue to lock children up in detention. That is not to mention the 600 who are already there.

In mid-2020 they indicated that more work needed to be done on alternative forms of punishment before they could make their recommendations.

They have just completed another full year of ‘deliberating’. They refuse to answer questions as to what specific work has been undertaken, and by whom, in the past year, to identify adequate processes and services for children who exhibit offending behaviour.

Reasons why change is necessary, now

Professor Judy Cashmore, of the University of Sydney Law School, lists five reasons why it would be a good idea to lift the age of criminal responsibility in Australia:

  1. Most children who offend at these ages (10-13) will “simply grow out of it” with appropriate support, but those who won’t will need an appropriate public health response, rather than justice based;

2. The younger a child is at their first contact with the criminal justice system, the greater their chances of future offending, so at least increasing the age will mitigate the harm to the child;

3. Indigenous children are highly over-represented in this group of children so positive, culturally and age-appropriate responses are critical for these children to reduce this over-representation;

4. It is extremely costly to bring children into juvenile detention – that money urgently needs to go into therapeutic justice re-investment;

5. Raising the age to 14 would bring Australia into line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is time that Australians were again proud of our civic culture, rather than being stuck in a time-warp of ‘old white man’ reaction.

The Morrison Government has a chance to undo some of the reputational damage it has caused to Australia over the last eight years. Raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14 is a no-brainer. All thinking Australians seem to be in favour, except for the lawyers in power. We should release the children in custody immediately. Their lives are being trashed as we speak!

So, take a good look at a ten year old kid, and wonder why we are victimising children. To make matters worse, the law is more likely to punish them, if they are Indigenous. Shame on us.

This post has been updated, to reflect changes since it was first released.