Sikamikanico Blogs

Cathy Wilcox The National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention was released in parliament this week - four months after the government received it in November (and at the end of a week when the PM was looking for anything to distract from his own leadership). It contains extremely distressing accounts of the lives of children in detention; the physical, psychological and in some cases sexual abuse; the trauma, the self harm, the bed wetting and nightmares; children who cannot conceive of a world outside of wire and bars and armed guards; babies unable to learn to walk because they have no safe place to learn to crawl. The nation from our leaders on down were horrified, and immediately united to find a bipartisan solution to end this suffering. Well, I wish that were true. Instead, our Prime Minister, the proud head of the policy to keep asylum seeker children indefinitely locked up in detention centres, said that he felt no guilt whatsoever  over the plight of children in de

This will be a much shorter post than usual, but there are just a few things I have to say regarding the tragic death of Courtney Topic, shot by police in a western Sydney carpark yesterday . The exact circumstances of her death are for the coroner to determine, but the death of any young person is a tragedy, and my deepest sympathy goes to her family and friends. In the aftermath of her death, her family have revealed that Ms Topic lived with Asperger's syndrome, and this has set of a flurry of inaccurate comments on social media. Don't read the comments , they say, and I shouldn't have but did, and what's there is very distressing. People with Asperger's (or on the autism spectrum) are "mad", "mentally ill", "mentally challenged", "sick", "violent". This young woman should have been more closely watched by her parents, should have been looked after, we should re-open the institutions as people with autism cannot fu

I never thought I'd be saying the words "thank goodness Tony Abbott is still Prime Minister", but here we are. With Tony Abbott seeing off a motion to spill his leadership yesterday , we're all ahead. The media would be popping champagne corks - Australian sparkling wine, anyway (cutbacks) - knowing that though Abbott may have survived, his leadership is now mortally wounded, and almost certain to face another spill in months to come, guaranteeing plenty more copy that just about writes itself; "new PM Turnbull guides Australia to stability" does not for scintillating news make. Julie Bishop can rub her hands together with a glee not felt since she was screwing dying asbestosis victims , knowing that the party and electorate have been softened up for her to take a tilt next time - that is, if the Liberals could quite handle a female leader. The few remaining Liberal voters are head since they can point to yesterday's result and say "see? Abbott defe

So as we all know, after months of chaos and dysfunction from the Abbott government, at 9am the Federal Liberal party MPs will meet to vote on a spill motion. But what does it all mean? Ask someone with a D in first year politics to clear it up. What started all this? Last week, WA backbencher Luke Simpkins sent an email to his fellow federal Liberal party MPs, announcing that he would be launching a spill motion at the next Federal party meeting on Tuesday 10 February ( said meeting now brought forward to 9am tomorrow  in the latest unpopular move by Abbott, who claims he is wanting to "end the uncertainty"). Are the Libs voting on whether Tony Abbott should remain as Prime Minister? No. The motion being voted on is whether the senior roles in the party should be vacated ("spilled").  So what happens if the vote passes? The Liberals will be required to vote for a new leader, deputy leader, treasurer and so on. MPs will be able to nominate themselves for these role

There's an old cliche that no one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the general public. I'm not so sure. Because the Liberal and National parties are losing, well, everything by treating the general public like idiots. Greedy idiots. If you want to know everything about how the right sees the public, just see how they carry on when they lose. The line goes from the LNP and their media supporters that their massive electoral failures are due to an inability to effectively get their message across. They have solid plans to rejuvenate the state and federal economies, but voters just won't accept that, won't join in on making the sacrifices required of us all in this time of economic difficulty. And it's this that's making the electorate shake their heads in dismay. Not just the "latte sippers" of the left (and we should all start referring to right wingers as coffee obsessives; what's with their fixation on people's choice of hot be