Australia’s first refugees
Thank you for celebrating Martin Luther King and the social movement he came out of (How a rebel leader was lost to history, 13 April).
Many years ago, Edmund Burke said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.” That is very true here in Australia, the largest coal exporter in the world, a country that has been holding 1,800 refugees hostage for five years, that continues to persecute the indigenous people of the continent and steal their land. Our mass media continues to ignore UN reports on Australia, and not cover the brave people such as Behrouz Boochani and his friends on Manus Island, and the families on Nauru. And how disrespectfully we treat the people of those islands, bullying and bribing them into accepting those refugees held hostage.
It is rightly said by activist Ken Canning that the first refugees in Australia were indigenous people, forced off their land, on to other tribal areas, as the European plague took hold after 1788. We pay tribute to them and all those who resisted our invasion.
Stephen Langford
Paddington, NSW, Australia
Progressives must not give up
I refer to the article on populism and liberal democracy (6 April). Yascha Mounk expressed the idea that teachers should provide reasons to students why liberal democracy has special appeal, and they should point out that other ideological alternatives are quite repellent.
Mounk talks about recovery of liberal democracy but I think he confuses the issue by failing to distinguish between civil liberty, which is progressive, and economic liberalism, which has had its day. Economic liberalism has morphed into globalised corporations and institutions like the World Bank that are outside national control.
The current crisis of democracy is a symptom of this trend whereby populists act like retrograde conservatives looking to return to what many people remember as a kinder era of middle-class prosperity. But we cannot go back in time and, unfortunately, we don’t know where to go from here.
When the planet becomes even more unstable due to climate change and populist pseudo-fascists, a new era may be born. Meanwhile, progressives must not give up.
Don Kerr
Collingwood, Ontario, Canada
Root causes of knife crime
As police numbers dominate the debate over the increase in UK knife crime (13 April), it bothers me that so little attention is paid to the root causes of violence. We know that adverse childhood experiences (known in research literature as Aces), especially violence in the home, are strongly associated with aggression and violence in later life. And Aces rarely happen in isolation.
Violence in the home is frequently associated with poverty, substance misuse, separated parents, mental health issues, an incarcerated parent and abuse or neglect of children. Put more resources into supporting families with young children, provide sensitive and trauma-informed parental guidance universally, and it is absolutely certain that, in the long term, we would have a healthier society and we would need far fewer police on our streets too.
Daphne Cotton
Twickenham, UK
The
greatest what?
In Trump’s enemy is not your friend (13 April), Thomas Frank refers to “the world’s greatest democracy”. However, I’m a little confused as to which country he refers.
If by greatest democracy he means the most populous then he must be referring to India. If he means largest, he may be talking about Canada. If he’s referring to highest electoral turnout maybe he’s talking about Australia, and if he means the best democracy, he is probably referring to Norway.
I thought he was talking about the US but realised my mistake as it is a country classified as a “flawed democracy” by the Global Democracy Index with only 55% of citizens voting (barely enough to form a government in real democracies).
Unless, of course, he was referring to the world’s greatest perpetrator of war with the world’s largest military budget?
Oliver Kerr
Eden Hills, South Australia
Briefly
• While I am as angry about the abuse of personal data by Facebook etc as anyone (30 March), our insistence in not paying for services has led us to become milking cows. We cannot be too outraged when we have never demanded online services from our governments but instead relied on “friendly” corporations. Got a free email account? Free anti-virus? Free journalism? Fine, but how do you think these private companies view you as worthwhile?
Andy Symington
León, Spain
• As someone with an impeccable Cornish lineage who loves all things Cornish, I was delighted to read the article about Gwenno Saunders’s solo album in Cornish (6 April). However, I was rather surprised to hear about the traditional saying “Eus Keus?” (“Is there cheese?”) as I thought it was “Eus Kres?” (“Is there peace?”): food for the soul rather than the body!
Sheila Williams
Beerwah, Queensland, Australia
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