Tuesday 26th of November 2024
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making modern truants and delinquents.....

While Australians pride themselves, for the most part, in having stricter gun laws than most and not being warlike in disposition, their governing officials have increasingly thought otherwise. War drums are beating. The chatter about acquiring and building armaments is getting more frenzied. As a client state of the US imperium, firmly enmeshed in the security arrangements of the AUKUS agreement, Canberra is becoming increasingly interested in militarising the population and turning the country into a garrison state.

 

By Binoy Kampmark

 

There are several ways this can be achieved. If Australia is to have a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, then it will need skills that are yet to be attained. Huge investments will be required in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM, in other words), less for peaceful endeavours than beefing up a machine ready for war. Universities and the entire tertiary education sector will be unashamedly co-opted by the military-industrial complex.

And then there are the children. Pliable, fragile, impressionable. Let them know that the joys of war will be heroically greater than the returns of peace. You can even have a lucrative career in the bargain. Such is the understanding of the Australian Defence Department’s public relations campaign on drumming up interest in profligate submarine projects.

On June 19, it launched a “Nuclear-Powered Submarine Propulsion Challenge in Australian high schools providing a new generation of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students the chance to win a trip to HMAS Stirling in Western Australia to see first-hand how submarines work.” The challenge, “free to enter and open to all high school students in years 7-12”, is intended as an introductory, nationwide program, providing “teachers with learning resources to help students design their own engineering plans for submarine nuclear propulsion.” Such projects are tantamount to encouraging children to assemble their own kits for killing, while feeling a good deal of pride along the way.

Rear Admiral Jonathon Earley, Deputy Chief of Navy, extolled the merits of the challenge, claiming that it gave students across Australia “an opportunity” to appreciate “the STEM principles behind one of the most significant national projects ever undertaken in Australia, as we prepare to deliver nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”

Earley, sporting his advertiser’s hat, promised the winners much excitement: “a visit to HMAS Stirling in Western Australia”, the chance to “tour a Collins-class submarine”, a dining experience with submariners “and virtually drive a submarine through Sydney Harbour in the submarine bridge training simulator.” If you can’t do the real thing, video gaming will suffice.

The press have also picked up on the extent Defence are moving into the curriculum, and are ghoulishly salivating for that fact. “A tech firm, a global defence company and SA teachers have teamed up to build an extraordinary new workforce,” The Advertiser celebrated in a July column.

Arms manufacturers have also gotten into the STEM war racket through such indoctrinating projects as the Beacon initiative, which, according to BAE Systems, “focuses on young people aged between 8-11, helping them understand more about technology early in their education and to encourage more children from diverse backgrounds [to] consider STEM subjects.” In May this year, BAE Systems Australia boasted about how “more than 600 students in years 4-6 across Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and New South Wales will benefit from the Beacon program this year, which involves in-school learning and intensive STEM focused camps.”

The immersive technology company Lumination, in partnership with BAE Systems Australia, has also sponsored such initiatives as the “4-Day Beacon Student Holiday Program”, intended to give students opportunities “to solve real world problems around sustainability through the use of emerging technologies.” All innocent enough, till the darker picture emerges.

Such a military industrial complex has also been taken over by an army of trendoids attuned to the socially sensitive. Any all-functioning war machine must be diverse. Members of the indigenous population are being courted. Women are particularly the subject of interest. As Shelley Willsmore, head of HR at BAE Systems Australia observed with regret, “young people – and young women especially – can have a negative view of the role of defence industry.”

Companies such as BAE Systems go even further in targeting schools in socially disadvantaged areas, presenting the means of fostering death with a pedagogue’s caring face. The Smith Family’s STEM education program for underprivileged children, Michael Willis of the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network wrotein August 2022, receives funding from BAE Systems Australia. In doing so, such companies engage in PR exercises “designed to prevent community opposition to the presence of their research and manufacturing facilities.”

The lengthy tentacles of weapons manufacturers and their spread into education has become inexorable. In its 2021 report, Minors and Missiles, the Medical Association for Prevention of War found that “major weapons companies seek to build positive brand recognition amongst Australian primary and secondary students, and attract the ‘best and brightest’ young people into a comprehensive talent pipeline.” Company programs emphasise ethics numbing gamification, particularly pertinent to “the next generation of offensive, intelligent, and autonomous weaponry – weaponry whose moral and legal implications are profound.” Throw in a few prizes and seducing initiatives, and the children, along with their gulled teachers, will be none the wiser.

 https://johnmenadue.com/kits-for-killing-aukus-goes-to-school/

 

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By Brian Burdekin

 

Australia urgently needs a national plan to effectively address child and youth homelessness.

In 1989, after a two year National Inquiry, the Human Rights Commission advised the Federal Government that Australia had nearly 25,000 homeless children and young people – some of whom were dying from neglect — while many others were living in squalid conditions, reduced to petty crime and prostitution to survive and frequently subjected to violence on the streets. A disturbingly large number of these children had been wards of the state and many had fled families where they had been sexually, physically or emotionally abused. Many were suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness or serious mental health problems left untreated. Some were as young as nice years old.

Some of the rapidly growing number of homeless children we are now looking after at the Burdekin Association in Sydney are as young as seven years old. The problems confronting these children and young people include family poverty and isolation; the scarcity of low-cost housing alternatives; failure to provide any follow-up support for children who have been wards of the state; the inadequacy or complete absence of mental health facilities in rural and regional areas (where our youth suicide rate is double that of our major cities); and failure to implement programs for family support and early intervention strategies which could assist children at risk of becoming homeless.

The Federal Government initially responded to public pressure generated by the Commission’s report with a range of programs specifically designed to help these children and young people. They included increased supported accommodation; various health initiatives; employment and training support programs and programs for early intervention and support for families where children were at risk. But funding for many of these programs dried up after a few years and by the year 2000 the number of homeless children had increased to almost 30,000.

In 2008, The National Youth Commission, after an extensive national inquiry, concluded that the number was close to 40,000. And by census night in 2021, the number had substantially increased to almost 46,000 – of whom almost 28,000 homeless young people were aged 12-24 years– and even more disturbingly 18,000 were under 12 years of age.

In the intervening years there have been various promises by government – but those promises remain largely unfulfilled. The most important areas neglected include: adequately funding early intervention programs – which proved effective in stemming the flow of young people into homelessness; failure to implement strategies recognising the need young people have for appropriate low-cost housing and failure to fund adequate programs for the mentally ill or those with serious mental health problems.

The human cost to our young people — in terms of their right to adequate shelter, and where necessary, to receive special protection from the State – was obviously my main concern as Human Rights Commissioner.

But we also prepared a careful “cost benefit analysis” of the economic advantages of early intervention and prevention strategies – rather than meeting the costs when children become homeless. Those “costs” involved: the juvenile justice system/ adult prisons; health care over a lifetime; long term social security costs; costs to the individual; and costs to the community. In 2008, almost 20 years later, another extensive report “Australia’s Homeless Youth” reached exactly the same conclusion.

There has also been an abject failure to implement appropriate programs for state wards leaving care. Evidence emblematic of the extremely disturbing findings in our 1989 Report, came from the Salvation Army officer, working with homeless children in Kings Cross, who reported that most of the young boys prostituting themselves on the infamous wall were wards of the State.

I was accused of exaggerating the importance of this appalling fact, but evidence given to the Senate Community Affairs Committee 15 years later established that: in 2001, 65 per cent of the Victorian female prisoner population had a “protective care” history; in 2007, 42 per cent of Australia’s homeless youth had a “protective care” history; and that once they enter the juvenile justice system, as many as 90 per cent of “protective care” clients graduated to the adult criminal justice system. In 2015, a national homelessness survey found that 63 per cent of homeless youth had previously been in “state care”!

Australia’s “care and protection” programs are severely underfunded. Children have rights – including the right to adequate shelter and protection from abuse – as the High Court held in a case I was obliged to intervene in in 1994 (the Teoh case). Our governments have a legal as well as moral responsibility to ensure the rights of state wards and all other homeless children are protected.

All the evidence in the last 30 years indicates that federal, state and local governments need to work together with community organisations to develop a specific plan to address child and youth homelessness — to prevent them continuing to experience homelessness into their adult years. Their pathways into homelessness, their vulnerability and the assistance they need, are frequently very different to adults.

The last 10 years were a lost decade in progress to help our most vulnerable children and young people. It is critical that we do not lose the next 10 years.

https://johnmenadue.com/government-is-failing-our-most-vulnerable-children/

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW:

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