gimpled

Aboriginal children on the roof of a police car during a protest The details are sketchy.  A fourteen year old Aboriginal child is dead.   His body is found lying in the bush. A fifty five year old man is charged with manslaughter, and the details are cautiously outlined.    The man who was arrested is the owner of a motorcycle, the same motorcycle which was allegedly stolen at the weekend.   The same motorcycle found by the body of the boy.  The man is also the owner of a Nissan Navara utility.   The same car that left tyre tracks along the route that the teenager took from the road into the scrub.  The police won’t say how the Nissan made contact with the motorcycle, other than to say that the man has been charged with manslaughter.  That should be the story.   That a man in a big car allegedly ran down a child on a motorcycle in a vigilante attack.    Inst...

Like other disabled Australians, the #censusfail furore is making me grin.  Over the past month, the nation has been immersed in the type of outrage only afforded to the privileged.   Billboards encourage passersby to tell the government that they are atheist if they no longer subscribe to a religious belief.   Impassioned expressions of outrage about loss of privacy and the potential for the government to know your business are flooding social media.   And the news that the ABS Census website crashed last night, allegedly due to ‘overseas hackers’, has been greeted with delighted handclapping and a virulent spray of ‘I told you so’s’.    Instead of talking about white people problems, we need a new hashtag, #ablepeopleproblems. When it comes to the Census, many disabled people are not even counted.  That big snapshot of what’s happening across Australia for communities of people tells government a lot.   It might inform ...