Empowering Sex Workers: An Interview with Urban Realist’s Julie Bates
Amnesty International has formally adopted a policy to protect and fulfil the human rights of sex workers. This position includes calling for the decriminalisation of sex work, which they define as “consensual exchanges between adults.” The starting point of their policy is to prevent and redress the...
Treaty First: An Interview with Uluru Summit Delegate Fred Hooper
The Uluru Statement from the Heart was the culmination of a six month process that saw the Referendum Council traveling the country carrying out a series of dialogues with First Nations representatives to ascertain how Indigenous people should be recognised in the...
Stop Animal Cruelty: An Interview with Anonymous for the Voiceless’ Matt Stellino
A group of black clad, Guy Fawkes mask wearing individuals were standing at the centre of the bustling crowd in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall last Saturday holding laptops and flatscreens, displaying graphic footage of animals being treated with horrific brutality. The...
Supporting Criminalised Women: An Interview with Flat Out’s Jake Argyll
The Australian prison population is at an all-time high. At the end of June last year, there were 38,845 adult prisoners in Australian correctional facilities. Women accounted for 3,094 of them, which is 8 percent of the overall adult prison population. But...
Reducing Indigenous Youth Incarceration: An Interview with Just Reinvest’s Sarah Hopkins
There’s a glaring overrepresentation of young Indigenous people in the NSW prison system. While Aboriginal young people make up around 3 percent of the general population, they account for 51 percent of youths being held in juvenile detention. At the...
Sydney’s 24-7 Street Kitchen and Safe Space: An Interview with Lanz Priestley
In February this year, there were 948 homeless people in Sydney, according to City of Sydney statistics. Of these, 433 people were sleeping rough, 489 were occupying crisis and temporary accommodation, while 26 were hospitalised. At Central’s Belmore Park and Wentworth Park...
“Free My Father”: An Interview with Jewher Ilham
On September 23 2014, peaceful Uyghur rights advocate Ilham Tohti was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Xinjiang People’s High Court in western China on separatism charges. The two-day trial was condemned as “grossly unfair” by human rights activists around the world....
Attacks on Muslims on the Rise: An Interview with Mariam Veiszadeh
Four Muslim women were randomly punched in the face in an Islamophobic attack out the front of Sydney’s University of Technology (UTS) last Wednesday. A 39-year-old woman from Paraguay allegedly assaulted each woman – one after the other – in a...
Rehab and Harm Reduction: An Interview with WHOS director Garth Popple
The subject of drug rehabilitation formed part of the national discussion recently, after Australian Story aired the Breaking Good documentary. It told the story of Peter Lyndon-James, a former ice user, who now runs the “nation’s strictest” rehab clinic. Shalom...
Crime and Incarceration: An interview with BOCSAR director Dr Don Weatherburn
NSW crime rates are at their lowest in over forty years, NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) figures revealed last month. Crime across most of NSW was found to have either declined or remained stable in most major...
