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indigenous affairs April 15, 2017
Pardon call over ‘flawed’ Kevin Henry murder case
For the past 25 years, an Aboriginal man in Rockhampton, central Queensland, has been serving time for a murder he says he did not commit. Kevin Henry, or Curtain, as he is more commonly known, was 21 when he was accused of raping and murdering an...
indigenous affairs March 18, 2017
Government withholds funding for Indigenous genetic disease foundation
Machado-Joseph is a dreadful disease, a rare genetic neurodegenerative condition that progressively robs sufferers of their muscle control, and usually takes about 20 years to kill. In the remote Aboriginal communities of East...
indigenous affairs January 28, 2017
Ms Dhu's family's fight for prosecutions
For the first time since his niece died in police custody in 2014, Shaun Harris is taking a break. The past month has taken its toll on all of Ms Dhu’s family – a coronial inquest into her death, and the pain of both her...
indigenous affairs February 4, 2017
Wayne Morrison's family questions secrecy over his death
On the morning of September 23 last year, Latoya Rule and her family were waiting at Elizabeth Magistrates Court north of Adelaide for her brother to appear via video link when a man rushed in with a handwritten note for the...
indigenous affairs October 1, 2016
Marcia Langton on Recognition and income management
Karen Middleton The federal government recently announced planned changes to welfare policy, moving to an actuarial style measuring welfare costs over a lifetime, identifying groups most at risk of lifetime dependency and...
indigenous affairs October 1, 2016
NT royal commission and the youth justice system
No family members were in court to support Jason Reid when he was sentenced to 11-and-a-half years in jail for reckless manslaughter and robbery. He had killed the man who had done the most for him in recent times – rescued...
indigenous affairs September 3, 2016
Inquest examines infractions of NT domestic violence orders
“We would tell him off, ‘Stop hitting her.’ He’d say, ‘That’s my wife, don’t interfere.’ ” Daniel Stafford was giving testimony to the Northern Territory Coroner’s Court about his late niece’s violent husband, Stanley Scrutton...
indigenous affairs August 20, 2016
WA still waits for Indigenous Custody Notification
They only stopped when they heard a thud. The two prison transport contractors heard the noise from the steel cell at the back of the van as they approached Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. They had been driving for nearly...
indigenous affairs August 6, 2016
How the Northern Territory failed
The current Northern Territory government has been in a semi-constant state of chaos since the time it was elected four years ago, beset by scandals, sackings, allegations of corruption, defections, un-defections and all...
indigenous affairs July 23, 2016
How Pauline Hanson changes politics through fear
There was not a lot of love about in Queensland Liberal Party HQ on Valentine’s Day 1996. Quite the reverse. The Liberals’ then state director, Jim Barron, a party moderate of a socially progressive bent, had decided it was...
indigenous affairs June 4, 2016
Steady rise in number of women in NT jails
When the Alice Springs jail was built in 1996, it did not cater for women. The rare female offender serving more than 28 days was sent to Darwin, until numbers began to rise about a decade ago. In 2010-11 a facility was built...