More than 120 Muslim scholars from around the world joined an open letter to the “fighters and followers” of the Islamic State, denouncing them as un-Islamic by using the most Islamic of terms. Relying heavily on the Quran, the 18-page letter released Wednesday (Sept. 24) picks apart the extremist ideology of the militants who have left a wake of brutal death and destruction in their bid to establish a transnational Islamic state in Iraq and Syria. A translated 24-point summary of the letter includes the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Tony Abbott is spending 4 BILLION of your Australian taxpayer dollars each year: Read the rest of this entry »

In 1973, Father Gerard Ridsdale and Father George Pell lived together in the parish house of St Alipius in Ballarat East. Father Gerard Ridsdale became chaplain at the St Alipius Boy’s School in the early 1970s where his career as Victoria’s most rampant Catholic pedophile priest began. By 2013, Ridsdale was charged with over 200 counts of child sexual abuse and pleaded guilty to 167 of these counts. Cardinal George Pell was implicated in the investigation into how Ridsdale was a known abuser since the early 1970s but escaped conviction until 1993. Read the rest of this entry »

I was among the 50,000 protestors at the Melbourne March in March 2014 this weekend. It was a family friendly demonstration with babies, children, mothers with prams, couples, elderly citizens, people in wheelchairs, people in suits, people in dreadlocks, people in costumes, people with home made signs and expressive TShirts. Read the rest of this entry »

We all have around 4 main personality traits out of the 16 listed by Dave Kelly. It is these main defining 4 personality traits that shape our most dominant motivation patterns. And no matter how we try to hide or obscure these, no matter what self-serving bias drives us to identify otherwise, it is these main 4 personality traits that will ultimately ‘leak’ through. Even if we erase them from the lines, they will continue to have a presence ‘between the lines’. Among these 16 personality traits is a personality trait called the Inventive trait. Now you may think being ‘inventive’ is a damned good thing. But the term here is misleading. The Inventive personality trait is that of the bluffer, nothing is ever their own fault and the extreme of it is Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently refugees fleeing to Australia showed their badly burned hands and claimed Australian Naval officers had systematically inflicted burns on them and kicked them whilst on the boat they were on as they returned them to Indonesia under Tony Abbott’s “Operation Sovereign Borders”. Read the rest of this entry »

I met up with a friend today by chance, known her for years. When it came to what happened in Manus Island it was a shocker… it was like listening to a Tony Abbott recording… Read the rest of this entry »

AN AUSSIE PRAYER

Our Values, which art in limbo,
Halos be thy… gone.
Thy fellow man come.
Thy racist greeting done
on earth, that we call Australian

Give us this day like a hole in the head Read the rest of this entry »

So far we have been through the Medical Model of disability, then moved to the Social Model of disability and more recently the ‘pride movement’ moved on from the social model of disability to an Affirmation Model of disability. But in addition to the medical, social and affirmation models of disability, from this day forth I’d like to propose a new model… THE EMPOWERMENT MODEL Read the rest of this entry »

How do we each perceive our own disability/ies? How do our communities perceive them? Our families? Our society? Our support workers, therapists, doctors? There are a variety of models of disability and each has levels of validity and equally associated pitfalls in over application. What is a model of disability? Read the rest of this entry »