Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.
…what’s going on in Australia?
Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:
The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”
BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.
OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”
The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!
Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?
Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.
We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.
(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).
So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
Let that sink in.
And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.
The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.
Also, that Australia/New Zealand immigration deal? Australia has slowly been taking away the rights of New Zealanders resident in Australia – including children born in Australia to Kiwi parents – and making it nigh-impossible for them to actually get Australian citizenship, basically all because of paranoia that brown people will move from NZ to Australia. They’re aggressively deporting Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders, even those who may have come as small children and have no memory of New Zealand, both for things like being convicted of any crime and for things like “being of bad character”. Or, rather, they don’t deport them. They put them in offshore prison camps and tell them they can’t leave until they agree to leave Australia. (It’s not that these things don’t affect Pākehā NZers, it’s that we’re not the real targets.)
During our election campaign last year, the Deputy PM of Australia openly said that if Labour were elected to government it would be bad for Australia because they would encourage refugees to try and get to Australia hoping to be taken by New Zealand. They have an island fortress mentality Trump hasn’t even started to achieve.
“In a performance protest against the Australian shark cull and the global slaughter of sharks, a woman risks it all to dance on the sea floor with swarms of tiger sharks up to 17 feet long without any dive or protective gear.” (x)
I’m not saying I have a mad-crush on this amazing shark-mermaid-lady, but I have a mad-crush on this amazing shark-mermaid-lady.
This is great but she’s not “risking it all”. The entire fucking point is that she’s not risking it all. Those sharks are HARMLESS and dont care about humans at all. As you can see, they’re totally chill with her being there. And as a pro-diver/mermaid she’s fully trained to free dive without equipment.
The reason this is such an effective protest is because it proves that tiger sharks aren’t interested in harming humans. And that they’re actually quite gentle even. So please, for Hannah Fraser, stop putting this shark-scare bullshit on images of her when that’s literally what she’s fighting with this performance.
@zoologicallyobsessed What do you think about her protest method/protesting the shark cull?
Shark only attack people when they mistake them for prey they actually do eat, which is why most of the people who do get attacked are surfers or drivers wearing driving gear; it changes the outline of their shape to look like a seal.
The Sydney Taronga zoo has a published report on shark attacks in 2017, which you can read here. And across Australia there was only 18 attacks, of which only 1 person died, 11 suffering injured and 6 remaining unharmed.
You can see why the shark cull is such an ineffective and cruel process then. Shark culling does not work. It does not lower the already very low number of shark attacks, and most of the time the shark that gets killed isn’t even the shark that attacked in the first place. It serves no purpose.
As for the protest, I think it is effective showing that she can be in the middle of a school of sharks and not be attacked – she’s trying to target the unfounded fear and hate people have for sharks which is good. She’s also not touching or otherwise really interfering with any of them which again is good.
Mr Cox said street-based work has increased “four- to five-fold” in the last few weeks.
“That’s extremely dangerous. They’re being forced to work in a situation they’re not experienced in with no support or access to information.
“We’re seeing an increase in the reports of sex workers who have gone missing over the last three weeks. Things have fallen apart really quickly.”
Despite the doom and gloom, Mila told me there is a way people can help.
An Australian-based website, Crocker, is picking up steam as an alternative classifieds portal for Australian sex workers. In the meantime, Mila urged the average Australian to “support and donate to sex work organisations, be vocal about sex worker rights and start conversations online by retweeting, liking and sharing as much as you can”.
“If you have friends who are sex workers, check to see how they are doing because many struggle unnoticed.
“Finally, if you’re a client, please make a booking.”
The new population could double the known numbers of these oddball creatures
by Briget Katz
The red handfishis a funny little critter that uses its fins to scuttle along the rocky seafloor. Dwelling exclusively in the waters off Tasmania, it is also one of the rarest fish in the world. So researchers were excited to find an entirely new population of red handfish hiding amidst Tasmania’s reefs. As Calla Wahlquist reports for the Guardian, the discovery may double the number of known red handfish.
Previously, scientists were aware of only one red handfish population of between 20 and 40 individuals, which swim along a stretch of reef in the Frederick Henry Bay. But a member of the public recently reported seeing a little handfish in a nearby area. So seven divers from the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and the citizen science project Reef Life Survey set out to try and find these elusive marine creatures…
I’ll be the first to admit I thoroughly enjoy all the “holy shit, Australia” posts that circulate around here but I feel like there’s a very important caveat when it comes to the discussion of swooping season that no one seems to mention.
For those not aware, swooping season is when the magpies start to nest and turn into mini dive-bombers comprised of talons, feathers and spite. It’s not fun. I bled heavily after a particularly vicious swoop when I was a kid, and I’m definitely not the only one.
But here’s the thing: swooping is not an innate behaviour. It’s a learned one. I realised this the moment I moved out of home and began my decade long (entirely unintentional) habit of moving to a different suburb every two years.
I’ve met a lot of wildlife, walking everywhere as I do. And I’ve met a lot of magpies – hella intelligent creatures that are probably thinking “what the fuck is this chick doing” every time I say hi to them as I walk past.
When I first moved out of home, I automatically started taking notes on areas I saw magpies in preparation for swooping season. It was just the done thing. It wasn’t until September came and went and the magpies in my area continued their quizzical but otherwise completely non-aggressive behaviour that it started to twig with me.
The next few years of moving around solidified my suspicions.
Anytime I lived close to a school or in an area with a high concentration of families with young kids, the magpies would swoop. Any suburb (usually inner city) with a high concentration of childless households and/or share-houses: no swooping to be seen.
And it’s any goddamn wonder.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve yelled at kids for messing with wildlife. I grew up in the outer suburbs, so there was no shortage of mini-assholes with an empathy shortage. Australian kids will poke anything they can reach with a stick, and throw rocks at everything else. Including birds nests.
Magpies are intelligent as hell, and they remember shit for GENERATIONS. Some human-shaped fucker throwing rocks at them and their nests? That’s something that’d stick.
So anytime you read one of those “lol the birds try to kill us here” posts, remember: it’s not the birds that started that shit – it was the asshole humans.
Adding on to the fact that magpies are super intelligent:
In primary school there were these really huge gum trees in which a family of magpies took up residence one year.
(an important thing to note is that I grew up in the country with A LOT of magpies -that were basically like relatives for the amount of time they spent on the veranda- and never encountered any swooping)
So one morning walking in to school I noticed that all the kids ahead of me were giving the really huge gum trees a wide berth, with other kids shouting warnings from the buildings. Being an airy-headed little kid, I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were actually saying, so I just kept walking straight under the trees.
Nothing happened.
I got to the buildings and asked why everyone was making a big fuss about the trees, and one of my friends just pointed back the way I came and said “the birds!”
And sure enough, any of the other kids that tried to walk under the trees got immediately swooped and chased to what the magpies thought was a good distance from their nests.
Magpies not only remember humans that are mean to them, but they recognise humans that have been given the seal of approval by other magpies.
For the last 40+ years there’s been a rapidly growing family of magpies at my grandparents house.
The lady next door would feed them every morning and they would do that beautiful warble. After she died my grandad started feeding them. Everyday.
They come to the same place everyday and wait for him, he used to take my sister and I as kids to help him feed the magpies and it was honestly a highlight of our visits. He still does it with our younger cousins.
They’ve never swooped anyone in the family, they scare off cats that try and get in my grandmas garden and they sing for my grandparents everyday.
Last year my grandad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He sometimes forgets what he’s doing and what he was saying and repeats conversations over and over.
Sometimes he’s late to feed the magpies, and they wait. It’s kinda like they know. They’ll come right up to the house and gently tap on the window to remind him, and he’s so happy to see them and feed them.
Magpies are beautiful birds, and anyone that thinks otherwise is probably a dick to them.
fight the australian government’s military violence towards refugees
The situation for refugees on Manus Island has always been pretty brutal but the Australian government has been ramping things up through military violence over the last few days and weeks and the situation is more urgent than ever.
As much as the new accomodation the refugees are being moved to is sub-par and unsuitable, this isn’t just about the accomodation. These people have been locked up and imprisoned for over four years for simply trying to flee war and persecuation (that the Australian government has often participated in) and want to come to Australia to join their families and be safe. This is about freedom.
Racism towards refugees has always been a particularly useful tool to Australian politians, providing a scapegoat while wages, education, and healthcare keep being cut back at home, and both major political parties have been perfectly happy to sit back and let these atrocities happen.
We need to continue to put pressure on the Australian Government and make this an issue that they can no longer continue to ignore and stand in solidarity with those who have been protesting for weeks and continue the fight for them.
What can we do about it?
If you don’t live in Australia: share this urgently and sign the petition
If you do live in Australia: come to the protests happening in every major city THIS SATURDAY AND SUNDAY (25th and 26th of November)
for those who aren’t aware, the australian government has abandoned the manus island offshore detention facility where it’s been indefinitely holding over 600 refugees. they have no food, water or electricity and are at risk of malaria. you can donate here to the RISE refugee welfare organisation, and here for the asylum seeker resource centre #bringthemhere
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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