“You’re just a performing fucking monkey”. A racist barb, and one of many pointed moments in Jacky, a Melbourne Theatre Company production currently playing at the Arts Centre. Jacky is about the politics of performing monkeys. It is about racism and exploitation, hypocrisy and resistance.
Banksia Hill is a youth detention centre with an overwhelmingly Indigenous population and a notorious record of human rights violations. Detainees are regularly confined to their cells under “lockdown” conditions, which means that they are released from their tiny, suffocating rooms for only 10-30 minutes a day, as has been exposed by the ABC. One inmate spent 79 out of a total of 98 days in solitary confinement, according to Jesse Noakes in the Saturday Paper.
Not content with spearheading a concerted racist campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and his repeated vile attacks on Aboriginal youth in Alice Springs, Peter Dutton has now turned his fire on migrants.
Standing behind a podium reading “STOP THE BOATS”, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in March launched the Conservative government’s latest piece of anti-refugee legislation. Speaking of his concern for the world’s most vulnerable people—and the country’s allegedly broken border control system, which allows criminal gangs free entry—he said that the only fix is the Illegal Migration Bill, which has now passed the House of Commons.
Federal opposition leader Peter Dutton announced earlier this month that the Liberals will join the Nationals and One Nation in formally opposing the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament, binding his frontbench to the No case in the upcoming referendum. The decision has led to the resignation from the Liberal Party of Ken Wyatt, former minister for Indigenous Australians in the Morrison government, and the frontbench resignation of shadow attorney-general Julian Lesser.
Perth activists converged on the Yongah Hill detention centre on 6 March to protest against the imminent deportation of more than twenty Tamil refugees to Sri Lanka.