The Guardian 15 November, 2006
Dingo bytes
The National Coalition for Gun Control has warned that gun violence will only get worse as more handguns spread through our streets and homes. The Coalition says that on average 10,000 new handguns are being legally imported into Australia each year. "With an estimated 300,000 handguns already in circulation in Australia and with this figure being topped up by 10,000 each year, no suburb is safe from gun violence", said the group’s co-chair Samantha Lee. The warning comes after the shooting of a man during a hold up at the Clovelly Hotel in Sydney’s east last week.
The drive by the Howard Government to wipe out policies of multiculturalism went up a notch last week. Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs Andrew Robb told a meeting of the government-appointed Council of Multicultural Australia that he wanted to scrap the word from a redrafted multiculturalism policy. Basically, the government wants to dump the promotion of diversity and push assimilation. Council of Multicultural Australia members expressed concern about the government’s moves. Former member Professor Tom Stannage noted, "I expect references to unity and diversity will be lost from the new policy."
University student debt will grow by more than $1 billion this year. According to the annual report of the Department of Education, Science and Training the total debt in the higher education loan program, previously called HECS, now called, cruelly, HELP, the total debt in the higher education program for 2005-06 was $11.37 billion.
The rate of Aboriginal imprisonment has increased by almost 55 percent since 1991. Reports published last week by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research reveal that the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal rates of imprisonment continues to grow and is now far greater than the gap between black and white in the USA. The Howard Government’s racist policies of assimilation and dispossession will have made a big contribution to this development.
CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is Queensland Premier Peter Beattie. The above statistics appeared around the time the Queensland Government officially responded to the state’s acting coroner’s findings on the death in custody of Palm Island man Mulrunji Doomadgee. Five weeks ago the coroner found that the police officer in charge, Sergeant Chris Hurley, had struck Mulrunji several times before he died in a holding cell. Hurley has been stood down and no charges have yet been brought against him. Premier Beattie said in response last week that police procedures would be changed and police training reviewed. But deaths in custody activist Sam Watson called the response a "cop out". "The Police Service has learned nothing from the Palm Island death or from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991", he stated.