A voluntary euthanasia law has passed in Victoria’s Legislative Assembly after a marathon four-day sitting. The bill passed 47 votes to 37.
The proposed law will now head to the Legislative Council. If it passes there, the bill will allow terminally ill Victorians with less than 12 months to live and who are suffering unbearable pain to access lethal medication to end their lives.
A new report, entitled Don’t send me that pic, has reaffirmed what most women and girls already knew: sexual abuse and harassment are incessant, it starts young and it is on the rise.
Commissioned by Plan Australia and Our Watch, the survey collected responses from 600 girls and young women aged 15–19 across Australia.
In the wake of US film producer and former studio executive Harvey Weinstein’s outing as a sexual predator, who infamously preyed on young actresses, the hashtag #MeToo, which women are sharing to say that they too have experienced sexual assault or harassment, is now trending as an international discussion ensues about sexual violence and power.
So far more than 12 million women have shared the hashtag.
You can never be sure what will follow when a baby boomer begins to ask the (always rhetorical) question: “Do you know what the problem with your generation is?”
OK, Uncle John. I’ll bite. What is it this time? IPhones? Video games? Avo on toast?
Millennials (also known as Gen Y) have been broadly stereotyped as the “cripplingly lazy” and “irresponsible” generation. But are the crises of unemployment and housing really about Millennials or is the problem with the end of the millennium itself?
Since the High Court challenge to the federal government’s marriage equality survey was dismissed and the survey received the green light, streets have been painted all the colours of the rainbow as historically large protests and displays of solidarity sweep the country.
The campaign for marriage equality has been fighting the delaying tactics and homophobic policies of Labor and Liberal governments for the past 13 years.
Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia (RDVSA) announced on August 30, it would withdraw as a service provider from the 1800RESPECT Trauma Counselling Service, the federal government-funded hotline.
The announcement punctuates a struggle waged by RDVSA workers to maintain the hotline as a non-profit specialist counselling service in the face of a push by the managing company Medibank Health Solutions (MHS) towards privatisation. After MHS’s subcontract with RDVSA expired in June, MHS put the contract out to tender with new contract provisions.
In Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence — from domestic abuse to political terror, psychiatrist and trauma specialist Judith Herman wrote: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”
The news that a trillion ton piece of ice just broke off from the Larsen-C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula is a reminder that global warming is real and dangerous.
While climate scientists say this had been expected, they also say it is connected to global warming. As ice shelves help keep land ice in place, when one breaks it allows land ice to slip into the ocean and drastically contribute to sea level rise.
For years climate scientists have been warning that time is fast running out to stop the worst effects of global warming.
The shine has rubbed off Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s apology to those men charged with historic gay sex offences, delivered in May.
Palaszczuk was hoping to score points by introducing a Historical Homosexual Convictions Expungement bill, which is now before a parliamentary committee, but it looks like she has struck out.
Gay men in the Chechen Republic are being kidnapped and detained in torture camps as part of the government’s attempt to “purge” the country of homosexuality.
Chechnya is currently ruled by the wealthy war criminal Ramzan Kadyrov, who has the backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But Russia’s "gay propaganda laws", which criminalise the dissemination of information about LGBTQI issues, are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Chechnya’s deeply homophobic culture.
In February last year, 39 universities signed up to “Respect. Now. Always”, a campaign to eliminate sexual assault and harassment on campus. But more than a year later, there are no new initiatives in place and students are asking why.
As the embers cooled in the debris of US President Donald Trump’s 59 Tomahawk missiles fired at Syria, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ordered an immigration crackdown that includes a new US-style patriot test for those seeking Australian citizenship and the scrapping of 457 foreign worker visas.