PO Box 1675
Preston South Vic 3072
Australia
e-mail: josken_at_josken_net
As it is the end of the festive season and in keeping with most newsletters these days, we decided to produce our own "Year in Review " which will be our only issue for 2010. It certainly won't follow the accepted form of month-by-month news-event style but instead will jump around all over the show which is our normal way.
NEW EMAIL AND WEBSITE
If you look above at our masthead and the information about LGS underneath, you will note that our email is now: josken_at_josken_net and our home pages site is quite short at: http://www.josken.net and easy to remember. We changed our service provider, after many years with the same one, and the change-over has not been easy and has presented us with many headaches not least of which has been the relocating of each of our home pages from the previous site. There are more than 160 It has been a mammoth task for Mannie because it has also meant changing at least half of all the archived newsletters since the first one in 1979, from scanned copies to word documents to reduce the megabytes. It still isn't complete because there's much editing to be done and photographs to be included. So, if you go to our webpages, you may find a chunk of wordage that remains to be paragraphed and with words here and there to be made legible or understandable in the text. Sorry! But eventually all shall end up being reasonably intelligible.
NO SPAIDS TREE PLANTING IN THE MEMORIAL GROVESThe Sydney City Council informed us that because the Groves area was fully tree-ed there would be no tree planting there in 2010. This was disappointing for us especially when we learned that in another part of the park there was to be a community planting on the usual National Tree Day August 1st -normally the Sunday date for our Council planting.
In October, we had word from the Sydney Beat Project that they were planning a picnic on the last Sunday in November to commemorate World AIDS Day in the SPAIDS Memorial Groves and seeking our approval. We were extremely pleased because it had always been our desire that the SPAIDS Reflection area and Memorial Groves would be used for World AIDS Day events. Soon afterwards we learned that Positive Life NSW had joined the Sydney Beat Project to host the World AIDS Day picnic on Sunday 28th November to highlight the need to remind the community that the fight against HIV and AIDS is not over. Unfortunately, we have had no report on the success or otherwise of the picnic.
RESTORED FAIRFIELD AIDS MEMORIAL GARDEN re-opened in MelbourneThe Garden languished after the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital was closed in 1996 and where it had been established in 1988 as a place of tranquillity and respite for AIDS patients, their carers, friends and families.
The old hospital grounds and heritage buildings eventually were taken over by Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (NMIT) which gradually renovated, restored and rebuilt the whole place as their newest campus which began functioning as a modern educational institution in 2009. NMIT were made aware that it was under obligation to restore the AIDS Memorial Garden which up till then had been sadly neglected during the years of restoration when the public access had been restricted. Now the Garden's restoration, too, has been completed.
During the week preceding World AIDS Day 2010, former hospital staff and doctors, patients, friends and families, administration personnel from NMIT and those involved in the HIV sector gathered to celebrate a memorandum of agreement between the Victorian AIDS Council (VAC) and NMIT to ensure the upkeep and access to the historical site. NMIT also announced that a proposal had been submitted to Yarra Council for an extension to a roadway and access from the Yarra Bend Boathouse pathway to the Memorial Garden area.
CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT IN CANBERRAAfter the Labor Party sacked its leader Kevin Rudd and installed Julia Gillard as replacement prime minister of Australia, Julia called an August 21st election after only weeks in the office to satisfy herself that the electors liked her enough to keep her as PM. How wrong she was. They didn't like her any more than they liked the Liberal Coalition's Opposition leader Tony Abbott. After several days of teetering on the brink of a political equilateral gulf for both major parties following the election, Julia managed pull the right strings of three of the four independents and the one Green in the lower house to save her bacon to remain prime minister until the strings fray and break. You can be sure the insidious Abbott will continue to wear away those loose threads and undermine her grip on the office.
LIKEWISE IN MELBOURNEThe Victorian Labor Government crashes out after just over ten years of "we know what is best for you people." That happened at the end of November 2010 when the somewhat right-wing Johnny Brumby government lost marginally to the new broom equally right-wing governing style of Ted Baillieu and the State’s Liberal-Coalition. As with the federal Gillard crew in Canberra the state crew of much the same colour with a different moniker though, has to prove itself worth the close call by which it won to govern.
HOMOPHOBIA AND HATE CRIMES INCREASE INTERNATIONALLYThere have been reports during 2010 of increasing hate crimes against gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV/ AIDS community members around the world. Some of the alarming reports emanate from the USA where homophobia is reported as increasing due to the religious right and other violent neo-nazi-style hate organizations stepping up their rhetoric about the evils of homosexuality and gay marriage which threatens the foundations of society as we know it today.
In the United States during 2010 there were alarming increases in suicides due to young gay people being exposed to homophobic attacks which left them devastated and unable to cope with continuing to live surrounded by such hate. Reports from many African countries - and South Africa has to be included in these reports despite it being one of the few countries in the world which supports the rights of homosexuals as built into its post-apartheid constitution - indicate that legislation has been attempted to be introduced which puts the lives of homosexuals at increasing risk of incarceration and worse - murder!
In South Africa lesbians have been murdered and/or attacked leaving them scarred for life if they survive, or by being subjected to "corrective rape" attacks to "normalise" them, to the extent that these brave survivors have now tried to build international support systems (see change.org) to publicise what has happened and obtain help from wherever possible.
Iran and Iraq are amongst middle eastern countries where human rights abuses against gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV/AIDS communities have continued to increase with horrific murder reports coming out of these countries.
In 2009 that middle eastern "bastion of democracy", Israel, saw an attack on a gay and lesbian community with some ghastly murders resulting from attacks by religious right fanatics who do not seem to have been caught and brought to trial. In 2010 Australia as a so-called secular state elected a prime minister who is a self-declared atheist. Her government refuses to allow equal human rights for all its citizens, some of whom, such as the Aboriginal communities, live in third world conditions. Others, such as the gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV/AIDS communities, are treated as second-class citizens who, although they pay the same taxes as heterosexual workers, do not receive the same benefits, and this includes such issues as same-sex marriage. The religious right hold sway and dictate policy without paying any taxes! What we need to emphasise is that although progress has been made in some countries such as India and even China, in many countries a great deal of work has still to be done. We need to continue to support the work of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), and all groups around the world fighting to improve our rights and obtain equal human rights for all citizens.
FREE ASSANGE! FREE MANNING!During the last month of 2010, attention has focussed on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the thousands of US government documents being released daily by WikiLeaks while the man himself remains on bail and in hiding in England. However, little interest is being shown for Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old US army Private 1st Class intelligence analyst, accused of passing the secret diplomatic cables and intelligence reports to Assange. He has been held in solitary confinement since May 2010 by the US, under suicide watch.
Obviously, this young man is under tremendous pressure to admit to whatever the authorities require to link him to the WikiLeaks founder. Seven months of the kind of pressures being used are obviously why he is under suicide watch. One has to wonder about the validity of these so called secret files when literally many thousands of public servants read them daily in their US work environment. From those released in our news media it seems ludicrous that they should have been considered too secret for the electors of a so-called democratic government to read.
"As a teenager, Bradley Manning lived in rural Oklahoma where his father is from (his mother is Welsh), his father found out he was gay and kicked him out of the house. He joined the army in 2007 after briefly living out of his car. But in the army, his social life was defined by the need to conceal his sexuality under 'don't ask, don't tell' –NY Times 8/8/10,"/Care2.
Manning has his supporters including the support of Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and was charged and acquitted under the US Espionage Act.
Assange says that 'he has never spoken with Private Manning and does not know who is behind the leaks.' He has also stated that the WikiLeaks was 'designed from the very beginning to make sure that we never know the identities or names of people submitting us material.'—Care2/causes/politics/webblog.
NATIVE FORESTRY IN TASMANIAThe Australian Federal Government is to support the State Government of Tasmania in an agreement, developed by environment groups, industry and unions to transition out of native forestry in Tasmania. As a sign of good faith the Gillard Labor Government is supporting the Tasmanian Government by placing an immediate moratorium on further logging in native forest areas of Tasmania, identified by the parties, which include the Weld, Tarkine, Upper Florentine and Styx. –Martin Ferguson, federal Minister for Resources, Energy and Tourism, in a letter dated 14 December 2010.
COMMANDER OF NY VICE SQUAD 1969 RAID ON STONEWALL INN, DIESSeymour Pine, a deputy police inspector who unwittingly helped start the gay liberation movement when he led a raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York, more than 41 years ago, died 2 September 2010 in Whippany, New Jersey. He was 91.
Pine, who later apologised for his role in the raid, led eight officers into the Stonewall Inn, an illegal club frequented by cross-dressers, just after midnight on June 28, 1969. About 200 people were inside. Ordered to line up and show identification, some refused. Several transvestites refused to submit to anatomical inspections. Word of the raid filtered into the street, and soon hundreds of protesters gathered outside, shouting “gay power” and calling the police “pigs.”
The turning point came when a lesbian fought with the officers as she was pushed into a patrol car. The crowd rushed the officers, who retreated into the club.
It was the start of several nights of rioting, during which the police used force to disperse crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Fewer than three dozen protesters were arrested, but hundreds were detained and released.
“The Stonewall uprising is the signal event in American gay and lesbian civil rights history because it transformed a small movement that existed prior to that night into a mass movement,” David Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (2004), said in an interview. “It is to the gay movement what the fall of the Bastille is to the unleashing of the French Revolution.” –From the New York Times published in The Age, 5/10/10.
SEQUEL EVENTS IN AUSTRALIA THAT BECAME OUR LESBIAN/GAY HISTORYIn 1972, a gay man who appeared on a Sydney television programme with his male lover and two lesbians, was sacked from his job as secretary of an Anglican church. The sacking sparked a Gay Lib protest outside St Clements Mosman, a middle class suburb of Sydney, on Sunday 12th of December and attracted some 200 protesters demanding reinstatement.
In 1973, the gay activist group, Gay Liberation (Gay Lib) were again in the news. To mark its existence in Australian cities, it held a Gay Pride week in September 1973 including a Saturday street march in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The demonstrations went well without incident save in Sydney where its march was marred by clashes with police who heavied the demonstrators and arrested 18 of them.
In 1978, activists in Sydney received a request from San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Committee to support its commemoration of the STONEWALL RIOTS with an event in June in the hope it would become an annual event. Sydney activists complied with a week of special events ending on Saturday June 24, the closest day to 9th anniversary of the New York Stonewall Inn riot, when they held a morning march through the streets of Sydney without police incident and at nighttime a gay mardi gras. At this event, there were plenty of brutal incidents in clashes with NSW police in the centre of Kings Cross. 53 arrests were made. Little did the organisers realise that it certainly would become a spectacular annual event, due to police intervention.
Again in 1978, the fourth Homosexual Conference, being held in Sydney over the last weekend in August, was asked by the Women’s Abortion Action (WAAC) campaign to join their protest against the Christian Festival of Light anti-abortion meeting in Hyde Park. The lesbians and gay men attending the Conference in Paddington agreed and decided to walk down Oxford Street en mass to Hyde Park. They got permission from local police to do so provided they remained on the footpath and didn’t disrupt motor traffic. They set off with hastily lettered placards with slogans like “get your laws off our bodies” and “it’s a woman’s right to choose” and some banners from the gay and lesbian groups involved in the conference. They got as far as Taylor’s Square. There they were blocked from proceeding by a line of hefty police across Oxford Street.
Then began a systematic show of force by large numbers of police suddenly pouring out of side streets. They set about grabbing individual women by the hair and dragging them across the road and gay men by the backs of their belted trousers and flinging the men into paddywaggons which were being driven in to block any traffic from entering the street. It was bedlam. Over 100 lesbians and gays were arrested and placed in different police lock-ups around the city. 1978 was Australia’s Stonewall Year.
COURT ALLOWS GAY MAN IN VICTORIA TO ADOPT A CHILDA judge has allowed a gay man to adopt his foster child in what is believed to be a first for Victoria. The man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, is in a gay relationship but has adopted the child by himself to comply with Victorian laws that make it illegal for gay couples to adopt a child together.
The Victorian Commission for Equal Opportunity and Human Rights intervened in the case to protect the rights of the child, who had been abused and neglected until he was placed in the couple’s care four years ago.
The New South Wales Parliament in September 2010 passed legislation giving same-sex couples full adoption rights, and similar rights exist in Western Australia, Tasmania and the A.C.T. The Victorian Commissioner for Equal Opportunity Helen Szoke welcomed the judge’s order allowing the gay man to adopt the child, now 11, but said: “Until we see the reasons, it’s not clear what this does in relation to the laws. The 11-year-old told The Sunday Age he was overjoyed at the decision.
Brian Lucas, general secretary of the Australian Bishops Conference, when approached for a comment said: “The general principle is that adoption needs to look at the welfare of the child and that will depend on very particular circumstances. I don’t have any comment on the particular circumstances here.”
The boy’s adoptive father said it had felt like they were going on trial for their sexuality, and the possibility of losing their son had been hell. When they first began fostering the boy they thought he had a speech impediment but then realised he had trouble speaking only because he had been so neglected. He is now confident and articulate. –From The Sunday Age, 12/9/10.
CHURCH ‘SILENT’ ON ABUSE REFORMSMelbourne’s Catholic Archdiocese has failed to announce or fully implement changes requested by Victoria Police to the church’s sexual abuse inquiry process (created by Cardinal Pell when he was Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne and endorsed by the police of the Melbourne Response). It’s more than a year since serious deficiencies were exposed. The failure has sparked fierce criticism from victim groups and lawyers and comes with police recently launching two separate investigations into sexual abuse involving a serving and a former Victorian priest.
Sources close to the church have said that police have requested it to revamp its inquiry process to ensure that priests under investigation for sexual offences by detectives are not in effect tipped off by the church’s chief abuse investigator, Peter O’Callaghan QC, that they are the subject of a police probe. Church sources also confirmed to The Age that the police had serious concerns about Mr O’Callaghan’s practice of comparing himself to a royal commissioner, despite the fact that he is appointed and paid for by the church.
Lawyer Paul Holdway said that the church’s inquiry process has not been reviewed since 1996 when it was launched. “The system is still impacted by confusion from a victim’s point of view on who O’Callaghan is acting for. Another is the appropriateness of the skills of the church staff working with the victims,” Holdway said. –From The Age Investigative Unit Article, 28/12/10.
GOOD BOOKS RECOMMENDED FOR YOUR READING LIST IN 2011More than three years after the multibillion federal indigenous intervention, government agencies and non-government organisations say children still continue to be vulnerable to abuse in many Northern Territory communities. A shocking picture of agencies’ failure to protect children has emerged in submissions to the territory’s Child Protection Inquiry.
The government’s own Office of Children’s Commissioner, set up to monitor child protection, makes some of the strongest criticisms. The submission says a lack of volunteer foster carers in the NT has contributed to children often being placed in unsuitable or unsatisfactory care where standards are not met. So much stress on the system means neglected children’s situations often are not investigated. In one community, supposed to be under an alcohol ban, residents created a drinking camp outside the prescribed area. Many drunks walk back into the community and cause trouble for children and families living in overcrowded, under-resourced housing that does not provide protection or safety from sexual abuse or violence. Many have inadequate nutrition and significant health problems. Hunger apparently is widespread and the remote office of the NT Dept of Families and Children submits that a feeding programme similar to those run by the Red Cross in foreign countries is needed to deliver food to starving children, while other programmes must address underlying issues, including poor parenting, poverty, overcrowding, violence, drug abuse, alcoholism and gambling. NT Legal Aid Commission submits that up to 200 territory children have dropped off all child protection radars after being transferred to other states. From The Age, 18/9/10. And all this is happening in the affluent, lucky country! Both the federal and the Northern Territory governments should be put under pressure to implement the recommendations of the inquiry and recognise their own obvious shortcomings in how they provide funding, and how recipients use the funding to their advantage at the expense of the indigenous people.
AGEING IN VICTORIA from 2010 to 2020: a failed LABOR GOVERNMENT’S PLANDuring the final few months of the Brumby Government, the Department of Planning and Community Development issued a 60-Page glossy Ageing in Australia: A Plan for an age-friendly society 2010-2020. It purports to protect older people’s rights. It promises training and education to achieve better outcomes to meet the needs of senior Victorians as well as supporting caring relationships among elderly people whether in their homes or in institutions.
However, there is no mention whatever anywhere in the plan about the change of status for the elderly in same-sex relationships. For age pensioners and the disabled, the federal government’s change to 85 pieces of legislation to enable them to be viewed as de facto relationships, allowed its Centrelink agency to force them “out of the closet” and treat them as interdependent couples like wedded couples but without the safety of the marriage certificate.
One would have expected the Labor Government of that time in Victoria to have been aware of the fact that same-sex elderly pensioner couples were going to be put at fearful risk because they must have known from experience that homophobia and discrimination have always been rife in the aged care sector.
If the Victorian Government was going to achieve better outcomes it needed to recognise that it must include gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex (GLBTI) culture in its training and education of its staff and volunteers as it does for its culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) population. It must go further too, because Victoria’s aged care facilities mostly are privately owned (subsidised by the Federal Government) and therefore have to be included. When they advertise for staff, they ask for people with nursing certificates in caring for the elderly. So it’s in the education as well as in the workplace where this GLBTI training should be occurring. Unlike the other Australian states and territories, who have ceded their responsibility for Home and Community Care Services to the Federal Government whereas Victoria retained it, so it behoves this State to be the leader in educational change.
We want to make sure the new Lib/Nat Government does not implement this Plan for Ageing in Australia without including recognition of the GLBTI culture as part of (CALD) training.
Are you a member of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives? If not please give it a go. It’s our own institution since 1978. Costs you $20 yearly. PO Box 124, Parkville,Vic.3052.
CURRENT NEWSLETTER AND ARCHIVE OF PREVIOUS NEWSLETTERS
Mannie has a personal web site: RED JOS: HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISM
Mannie's blogs may be accessed by clicking on to the following links:
MannieBlog (from 1 August 2003 to 31 December 2005)
Activist Kicks Backs - Blognow archive re-housed - 2005-2009
RED JOS BLOGSPOT (from January 2009 onwards)
This page was created on 8 JANUARY 2011 and updated 22 APRIL 2017
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