Filed under: Activism | Tags: Australian Labor Party, Australian Liberal Party, Democracy In Action, Japanese Whaling, Stolen Generation
Recently I wrote a letter to my local Member of Parliament. Some of you may wonder if democracy works. Some of you may doubt that voicing an opinion actually gets results. Well, surprisingly, it does. My local member is Malcolm Turnbull, the Shadow Treasurer. I’m not even an Australian citizen, nor am I living in Australia at the moment, but I like to think that my letter played some small part in changing Opposition policy.
I wrote to Mr Turnbull to try to convince him to push Mr Nelson and others in the Liberal Party leadership to support the Government’s apology to the Stolen Generation. For those of you laboring under impressions of Australia as the happy sunny land, check out the wikipedia article for The Stolen Generation. We are the only country (apart from Nazi Germany, perhaps) to have a legal mandate for institutionalized racism in the form of the White Australia Policy. (more…)
