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[martinuzz]

Perhaps you should continue that discussion in the armchair general thread

[MetalSlimeHunt]

But Indonesia has God on their side, whereas Australians can only stand in front of their bathroom mirrors at midnight chanting "Towney A'bbot...Towney A'bbot..." and hope for the best.

[Emma]

But... But Tony Abbot is just as good as God!

re prisons:
It really pisses me off that any of that was allowed to happen.

[Orange Wizard]

But... But Tony Abbot is just as good as God!

Have you ever seen Abbot and God in the same room?

[Emma]

But... But Tony Abbot is just as good as God!

Have you ever seen Abbot and God in the same room?

That would certainly explain why Abbot's so comfortable in church. God's house is his house.

[DG]

I thought the minister only had the Corrections portfolio stripped from him, keeping others? Has he actually been sacked outright now?

I watched it on tv, it was shown on the Four Corners program by the Australian public broadcaster for what that's worth to anyone worried about "child porn" dangers. About the most explicit thing you see are a kid's buttocks when he's thrown on a bed and stripped for no apparent reason.

I see that the Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister is taking a cue from George Pell when it comes to defending himself: "...it hadn’t piqued my interest sufficiently."

That's about the truth of it. I don't think this will "sufficiently pique" Australia's interest in the long term. I mean, it's not like this is something important like greyhounds, right? It's mostly aboriginals and we don't care about them, plus it's so far away in the Northern Territory. We do worse things to people in offshore detention without giving two fucks about it. We'll be sufficiently outraged, we'll do something so that we can be seen to be doing something, a Royal Commission like the last one done into aboriginal incarceration and which was then largely ignored.

Fake edit:
I'm reading some articles about it now. Dylan, who was one of those boys in the program and who is currently in adult prison, now fears for his safety. A prison guard apparently told him on Tuesday: “You bloody well deserve everything you got.”

[Reelya]

I thought the minister only had the Corrections portfolio stripped from him, keeping others? Has he actually been sacked outright now?

Some more background that I've dug up: the relevant minister was already due to retire in 4 weeks, at the next election. So sack / not-sack makes basically zero difference. He's leaving anyway.

As for how much personal blame he deserves, we can consider that he's been in that portfolio for just 3 years. The gassing incident occurred on 21st August 2014, at which point he'd been the minister for 1 year. He had the center closed down in September 2014, about a month after the incident. That center had a long history of abuse, and previous ministers didn't bite the bullet and shut the place down like he did. That was probably the first he knew of how bad the place was, and he acted promptly to close the place and remove the officers involved from dealing with children by the sounds of things. He did what you'd hope he could do.

Removing him from the relevant portfolio is just damage control / PR because of the upcoming election, and is otherwise meaningless, unless they're going to appoint someone who magically fixes this entire problem in the next 4 weeks before the election.

[Reudh]

Per 10,000 people, the Territorian youth incarceration rate is three times that of its next closest competitor, Western Australia.

NT: 16.7 / 10k
WA: 5.4 / 10k
QLD: 3.4 / 10k
NSW: 3.3 / 10k
SA: 2.4 / 10k
ACT: 2.2 / 10k
Tasmania: 1.5 / 10k
Victoria: 1.5 / 10k

Isn't that ridiculous? As compared with Tas or Vic, the NT incarcerates over 11x the amount of youths. I seriously doubt their youth crime rate is 11x that of Tas or Vic.

[Orange Wizard]

Be proud, you're doing better than New Zealand

[Jimmy]

Weirdly enough, the Aboriginal percentage of the population is about 30% in the Northern Territory, vs. about 3% or less in other states. What a coincidence!

[martinuzz]

What are you trying to say with that statement? Can be interpreted two ways.
Are aboriginal kids more criminal than white australian kids, or do Northern Territory authorities grossly discriminate against them?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Probably the latter, given past...activities by parts of the Australian state towards aboriginal children.

[Orange Wizard]

I doubt it's lolracism. More likely that aborigines are convicted more often because they commit more crime because they fail in school because they have have broken low-income families that commit more crime, etc. Same problem as with Maori in NZ and Africans in the US.

[Reelya]

It's always a chicken and egg thing.

Impoverished classes commit more crimes, they are then targeted as criminal classes, which justifies the discrimination. Class and race are very hard to disentangle.

This also occurred with the Stolen Generations. Many more white kids were taken from poor parents than black kids according to some articles I've read. If you account for socioeconomic class, then poor parents in general were all very likely at the time to have their kids taken away. So class arguably played a bigger role than race. But racism also feeds into why certain people are shoehorned into specific classes in the first place, and laws that disproportionately affect people by class might actually have a racist motivation, but a need to obfuscate the racial elements. Consider the example of "Voter ID laws" in the USA. Are they targeting race or class? And how much does racism feed into class division and vice versa? It's hard to draw a line.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, it's likely that the Northern Territory has a disproportionate amount of young aboriginal men in jail compared to any other state. New suggestion: instead of locking them away in prison and abusing them, I suggest taking all convicted Australian aboriginals, putting them on a boat to the UK, and letting them shoot white folk and claim their land. I doubt the EU will mind after the Brexit debacle.