“Like sheep to a slaughterhouse.” This is how Behrouz Boochani, in his memoir No Friends But the Mountains, describes the experience of being thrown behind the prison walls of the Manus detention centre. After a month of being incarcerated on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, Boochani writes that he felt like “a piece of meat thrown into an unknown land: a prison of filth and heat.” The full passage reads, “I dwell among a sea of people with faces stained and shaped by anger, faces scarred with hostility. Every week, one or two planes land in the island’s wreck of an airport and throngs of peo ..read more

$7 phone calls should not keep families apart. But for people in Victoria’s prisons, grotesque levels of privatisation mean that it can cost more than a day’s work just to make a short phone call to loved ones. At a time when phone call costs are approaching zero, and calls from payphones around the country are free, one 12-minute call to a mobile phone from Victorian prisons cost around $7. It means mothers and fathers cannot afford to call their children, and siblings and friends cannot maintain crucial social connections. While $7 per phone call is exorbitant for anyone, people in prison ca ..read more

It couldn’t be clearer. Labor’s 2023 National Platform states: Labor opposes mandatory sentencing. This practice does not reduce crime but does undermine the independence of the judiciary, lead to unjust outcomes and is often discriminatory in practice. Labor’s position against mandatory sentencing has been long-standing and for good reason: anyone with practical experience in the criminal justice system knows those criticisms of mandatory sentencing to be true. The Law Council of Australia has observed that mandatory sentencing, among other things, undermines the independence of the judiciary ..read more

Sunita* was ready for an “adventure”, she says, when the 27-year-old Indian student landed in Melbourne in June 2019, to start her master’s degree in sustainability at Deakin University. But instead of adventure, she fell into what she says amounted to a 10-month nightmare of scams and sub-par living conditions, all due to informal rental agreements. In the ongoing rental crisis, an increasing number of desperate students have turned to informal arrangements, as an investigation by The Citizen has found. Sunita was a victim of two financially exploitative subletting arrangements in private hom ..read more

Desperate international students are increasingly turning to informal rental arrangements amid the housing crisis, subletting rooms in unregistered rooming houses or private homes where they are vulnerable to financial exploitation and dismal living conditions. Community legal services say they are concerned for students’ wellbeing as they receive reports from increasing numbers of students who, with little understanding of their options or rights, have been taken advantage of by people offering to sublet rooms at inflated rates. Lawyers and student unions are calling for Consumer Affairs Vict ..read more

Adda is a mainstay of Bengali culture. No gathering of friends or family is complete without it: long, rambling conversations that traverse various territories of petty gossip, philosophy, poetry, and politics. My childhood is full of memories of evening gatherings of Bangladeshi diaspora families in Melbourne in the late 90s and early 2000s. The men sitting in one room, the women in the other and the youngsters dressed in traditional clothing that were otherwise out of place in our Western lives. In the car ride home from these evenings, my parents would trade stories of the information glean ..read more

Our languages were pushed to the edge of existence following British invasion of these lands. They were banned and our people punished for using them. It was all part of a concentrated effort to wipe us and our culture off the face of the earth. As we approach International Mother Language Day on February, I pay my respects to our Elders and ancestors who risked much to keep our languages alive. And I look forward to seeing them rejuvenated by the current generation. People around the world are recognising the importance of incorporating First Peoples’ languages into the naming of places. Revi ..read more

Modern culture offers few depictions of what it means to be a secular Muslim. This has often left me confused about how to relate to my religious heritage. I don’t wear a hijab, pray the requisite five times a day, fast during Ramadan, or go out of my way to eat halal meat. Growing up in the post 9/11 world, in certain social contexts it has often felt easier to hide or downplay my religious heritage — which I have often been able to get away with because of my South Asian ethnicity and my easily anglicised name. In the past six weeks, however, as the war continues in Gaza and protests continu ..read more

Children shackled in a barbaric dungeon in Banksia Hill, spit hooded in adult prisons in Victoria, caged in solitary confinement in Don Dale and human rights laws overridden to allow for children to be locked away in police watch houses in Queensland. These are a handful of headlines that paint a harrowing picture of the human rights abuses that are allowed to thrive in the darkness behind prison walls. Yet governments across Australia continue to pipeline children into prisons at alarming rates, and Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland continue to shirk their responsibility to enact bare ..read more

Niggerhead Rock is a craggy mass that juts out of the wild waters of Bass Strait off north-west Tasmania. You won’t likely find it searching Google maps. And while it was visible as recently as May 2022 on a Tasmanian Crown Lands map, the culturally offensive name was hastily and apologetically scrubbed by authorities after it was called out by prominent Tasmanian Aboriginal campaigner Michael Mansell. He demanded that the government “pull the maps back, get rid of them, burn them”. To locate the site, look instead for titima/Trefoil Island, an Aboriginal-owned, protected muttonbird colony abo ..read more