Massive crowds have turned out in cities such as Washington DC and Philadelphia as protests over the death of George Floyd enter their 12th day in the US. 

Meanwhile around the world protesters gathered in London and Paris in largely peaceful protests.

Follow the latest updates in our live blog.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-07/george-floyd-protests-us-live-updates-black-lives-matter/12330128

Victorian health officials say it could be at least a week before it is known whether Saturday's Black Lives Matter protest caused COVID-19 to spread in the community.

• Deputy Chief Health Officer Annaliese van Diemen says authorities are monitoring for cases linked to the protest
• Police are reviewing footage of the event with a view to fining protest organisers
• Four new coronavirus infections were recorded in Victoria overnight

More than 10,000 people marched from Victorian Parliament to Flinders Street Station on Saturday afternoon in solidarity with anti-racism protests sweeping the US.

Many protesters wore masks and gloves and used hand sanitiser at the peaceful demonstration, but the large numbers meant many did not follow health advice to stay 1.5 metres apart.

Gatherings of more than 20 people are banned in Victoria under the Chief Health Officer's directives and police said they would fine the organisers $1,652 each for breaching the restrictions.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-07/coronavirus-impact-of-protests-not-known-for-a-week/12330278

According to Gustats, should there be a few, say 3, people with Covid19 infection and showing no symptoms (the others would be in bed coughing their lungs out), there would be about 11 people further infected in the crowd. Should you be under 65, your chance of developing bad symptoms are about 2 per cent amongst the 11 or 0.22 per cent. And knowing the public was wearing masks and hand sanitiser, this would likely go down to about 0.02 per cent, as long as there were no kissing nor hugging. There was 1 per cent more chance of someone dying from being run over by a tram after the parade and 2 per cent of bleeding from being hit on the head by the police...

Oh I see, Mathias Cormann is not from Victoria...

Last Tuesday, our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who is white, was interviewed on radio station 2GB. The host, Ben Fordham, who is also white, asked about the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, and Morrison expressed hope we would not see similar scenes here. He said, twice, that our country was a “wonderful” country. It was also a “fair” country, though it had its “problems”, “faults” and “issues”.

On Thursday, the Prime Minister called in to the same radio station to speak with white radio host Ray Hadley. Asked again about the protests, Morrison said Australia had “issues in this space”. On Friday, at a press conference, asked if it was a national shame that at least 432 Indigenous people had died in custody since the royal commission in 1991, he said of course, noting “the problems we have in this area”, “these issues”, and “these concerns”.

The sterility of this language, its obvious vagueness, is striking. It is particularly striking when contrasted with the language the Prime Minister used in service of the opposite cause, urging people not to attend Black Lives Matter protests in Australia. On Friday, expressing fear that coronavirus might spread at the protests, he cited examples of the sacrifices of people who had not been able to visit nursing homes, or attend funerals, and spoke in moving terms about “those who had the absolute agony of not being able to say goodbye to a loved one”.

Those words stand out, not because they are moving, but because the Prime Minister could equally have chosen to use them, without a single change, to explain to listeners the grief and rage that drove people to protest while the threat of a pandemic had not entirely vanished. The hundreds of Indigenous people who have died in cells: their families, too, “had the absolute agony of not being able to say goodbye to a loved one”.

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-way-scott-morrison-talks-about-indigenous-pain-is-a-problem-20200605-p54zrv.html

Read from top.

Meanwhile:

Labor's spokeswoman for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney said Senator Cormann should be listening to the "visceral cries" of people speaking out against inequality.

She said his home state of Western Australia had some of the highest levels of incarceration of Aboriginal people, including two deaths in custody in recent years.

"Mathias Cormann should know better than to describe these protests yesterday, this cry from the heart of many thousands of people across the world and in Australia, as self-indulgent and reckless," Ms Burney said.

"It struck me listening to people at the protest that they were very conscious of what the health risks [were]."

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-07/cormann-dubs-black-lives-matter-protesters-selfish-coronavirus/12330196

Read from top.

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34878

by Garry Linnell

You know how it is.

You’re at one of those family gatherings where everyone casts nervous glances at the door.

Is he here yet? Will he turn up?

The kids are playing in the backyard. The adults are gathered around the barbecue. Everyone is chatting politely and thinking the same thing.

Please don’t let him show up and ruin another gathering.

And then comes the knock on the door. Everyone swallows as they hear the voice they have been dreading.

“Hi everyone. Sorry I’m late.”

The door bursts open and he charges in.

He’s wearing a stained Hawaiian shirt and carrying a cheap flask of wine when he accidentally stands on the dog’s tail, knocks over an antique vase, farts loudly, launches a loud wolf whistle at your son’s girlfriend before unleashing another round of tone-deaf comments.

“Bloody hell, Joyce. You’ve been in a  good paddock. How much weight have you put on then? Oh, hello Max. How’s that divorce going? That ex missus of yours still bonking that young personal trainer you hired for her last birthday?

You know how it is.

Every family has one. Before he falls asleep in the corner, snoring loudly with a lampshade over his head, he manages to spit out a series of shallow remarks guaranteed to misread every situation.

Happened again this week.

Just as the Australian family was getting together after months of lockdown, Mathias Cormann reminded everyone why the federal Minister for Finance now possesses one of the worst sets of tin ears in federal politics.

After tens of thousands rallied on city streets as part of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement to denounce racism and demand an end to Indigenous deaths in custody, Mr Cormann labelled the protests as “incredibly selfish, it’s incredibly self-indulgent … it’s quite irresponsible what we’ve seen there”.

Despite a Supreme Court ruling in NSW that lawfully allowed the Sydney protest to proceed, and with cases of community transmission of coronavirus at close to zero, Mr Cormann echoed the sentiments of a slew of right-wing commentators denouncing the protests.

“It is inappropriate and a complete double standard,” he said.

“People ought to comply with the rules that apply to everybody else.”

Speaking of double standards, who can forget Mr Cormann’s comments just a few months ago as the pandemic began sweeping the world and the jobless rate began to soar?

As hundreds of thousands of Australians joined the unemployed queue or were forced to take significant pay cuts, Mr Cormann quickly dismissed suggestions that federal MPs should also experience a wage reduction as a token but significant gesture of solidarity.

“I’m not sure how this sort of suggestion would help,” he said with one hand cupped to his tin ear.

“In the context of the budget challenge it’s essentially at the margin.”

Certainly, the timing of last weekend’s protests made many people feel uncomfortable.

After months of national lockdowns and growing economic despair, mass demonstrations with a political and humanitarian tone were always going to arouse passions and suspicions.

But where is the evidence that these rallies triggered widespread outrage and contempt in the general community?

As the Queen’s Birthday long weekend got into swing in many Australian cities, large groups of people gathered on beaches, queued in supermarkets and bunched closely together at cafes.

I lost count of the number of times the 1.5-metre social distancing rule had been forgotten.

Apart from the odd face mask, it looked like a scene from any long weekend, with families fearing only the appearance of a relative with a tin ear.

But while these old-fashioned displays of Australian complacency were taking place, the rallies were a sign of how this country has begun to change.

Could it be – finally – that we are ready to confront and come to terms with the racial stains of our past and present?

If we have always done our best to look away and pretend they don’t exist, those stains are now hard to hide.

More than 430 Aboriginal people have died in police custody in the three decades since a royal commission was appointed to investigate that very same issue.

It’s an extraordinary number and a breathtaking indictment on our capacity to care for a culture we spent more than a century trying to eliminate.

More than 50 years ago the influential anthropologist William Stanner dubbed our refusal to recognise the brutality inflicted on Indigenous Australians since European settlement as The Great Australian Silence.

If this silence was not a conspiracy, it was at least a determined collective effort to avoid the topic.

The Great Silence settled over Australian culture. It numbed our awareness, deadened our empathy and compassion and washed through our high school history books.

It’s why you and I were taught fairy tales about white settlement and never read about men like Frederick Taylor, who massacred almost 40 men, women and children of the Tarnbeere gundidj clan of the Djargurd Wurrung near Mt Emu Creek in western Victoria in 1839.

The latest round of Black Lives Matter rallies might have been triggered by the death of George Floyd, who suffocated after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on the back of his neck for more than eight minutes.

But in Australia those demonstrations are also a sign that the era of The Great Australian Silence is finally drawing to a close.

If only Mathias Cormann could be so quiet.

Garry Linnell was director of news and current affairs for the Nine network in the mid-2000s. He has also been editorial director for Fairfax and is a former editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Bulletin magazine

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/people-entertainment/2020/06/10...

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has demanded an end to further Black Lives Matter protests, saying some protests have been hijacked by left-wing movements and demonstrators at future events should be charged.

• Scott Morrison says people who breach public health orders should be charged
• Further protests are being planned for coming days
• Mr Morrison says calls to remove statues of white historical figures point towards a "left-wing agenda"

Mr Morrison has previously urged Australians not to attend the mass protests against Indigenous incarceration rates and deaths in custody, citing the risk of COVID-19.

Today he ramped up his rhetoric, saying developments overseas, where protesters have torn down statues of historical figures deemed responsible for atrocities such as slavery and genocide, showed the Black Lives Matter movement had been "taken over by much more politically driven left-wing agendas".

"We've got to be honest about our history, we've also got to respect our history as well," he said.

"This is not a licence for people to go nuts on this stuff."

He accused protesters of setting back efforts to lift coronavirus restrictions.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-11/black-lives-matter-protests-morrison-calls-for-charges/12342762

Bullshit from Scotty of muckraking... He has not understood anything yet, has he? Dumb as a silly Donald, is he not?... 

Read from top.

Commenting on today’s report that a person who attended Saturday’s Black Lives Matter rally in Melbourne has tested positive for Covid-19, Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance said:

Many Australians proudly took action for the families of the victims of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody, who don’t have a choice but to continue the call for justice.

The moment was bigger than the protest itself. It was the product of hundreds of years of systemic racism and racist policing that state governments and police have directly contributed to.

Individuals weighed up carefully the decision to protest and the importance of the lives of 434 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died in custody without anyone held accountable for their deaths.

Safety was paramount and people did their utmost to support the official advice on social distancing, using masks and hand sanitiser. Anyone feeling unwell was urged to stay home.

The official advice stands that any person who attended the rally and is feeling unwell should get tested.

We will continue to campaign for justice, and to push Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody to the top of the national agenda.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2020/jun/11/australia-co...

Read from top.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has come under fire for stating Australia’s past is free of slavery, before suggesting he has always pushed for honest conversations regarding our history.

Discussing the Black Lives Matter protests and the colonisation of Australia on Sydney radio station 2GB on Thursday, Mr Morrison said: “My forefathers and foremothers were on the first and second fleets. It was a pretty brutal place, but there was no slavery in Australia.”

“I’ve always said we’ve got to be honest about our history. We’ve got to acknowledge the positive and the negative.’’

The Prime Minister is right about one thing, Australia needs to be honest about its history, and that includes admitting parts of this nation were built on the back of slaves, Dr Nareen Young of the UTS Jumbunna Institute told The New Daily.

“He [Mr Morrison] thinks because [Captain James] Cook didn’t want to involve this colony in the slave trade, there was no slavery and that’s not true,” Dr Young said.

“The existence of stolen wages has been well established.

“Aboriginal people, they were working for indentured wages as labourers and domestic servants,” she explained, adding “[Mr Morrison] either needs to read some history books or talk to someone”.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2020/06/11/scott-morrison-australia-slave/

Recent debate in the United States over the legacy of slavery has reignited discussions about Australia's own dark past.

Starting from the 1860s, tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders were taken to Australia to work on plantations in Queensland, often by force or trickery.

Unmarked mass graves full of labourers who died on those plantations are still being uncovered today.

Now their descendants, the Australian South Sea Islander community, are calling for their history to be properly recognised.

While there is evidence that some of the 62,000 people sent to Australia came willingly, and signed contracts to work on the plantations, many others were lured or taken forcibly onto the boats.

This practice is what's known as blackbirding.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-17/blackbirding-australias-history-of-kidnapping-pacific-islanders/8860754

Aboriginal community leaders are calling for answers after a baby girl died while her mother was in police custody.

NT Police arrested the 21-year-old mother of the four-month-old baby and a five-year-old girl at a public housing unit in Katherine East on Sunday morning.

The girls’ mother was still with police when the baby died later that day.

Jawoyn Association Aboriginal Corporation chairperson Lisa Mumbin is calling for answers, and says police need to make sure children are safe if they are placing a parent under arrest.

“What took place is totally unacceptable,” she said.

“I really believe there needs to be answers.

“There needs to be a gathering of leaders and more information and more action coming from the authorities, it’s a very serious matter and it’s very painful.”

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/nt/2020/06/12/baby-dies-mother-custody/

Read from top. I mean: Scott Morrison, READ FROM TOP, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!

This is another DEATH IN CUSTODY caper....

Speaking from an aged care home in western New South Wales, Violet West has no doubt what she experienced more than 70 years ago was slavery. "I went through hell at that place," she says. "I'd be working, working. I worked my little guts out."

Violet, 87, was taken from her family near Dubbo at the age of five to be trained as a domestic servant at the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls, more than 300km to the south. There, along with dozens of other Indigenous girls her age, she was taught to clean and cook, churn butter, collect coal, milk cows and care for children, to prepare her for a lifetime of severely underpaid domestic work.

When she ran away she was caught and locked on her own for days on end in "the morgue" — a room with no bed, blankets or food.

"It was disgusting," she says.

"I don't know how I managed to survive what we went through."

He [Scott Morrison] may have been talking about anything from the First Settlement or the whole sweep of Australian history — it's not clear. In any case, many have since pointed out Australian history appears riddled with slavery — from the Northern Territory stockmen paid in sugar and flour to South Sea Islanders kidnapped from their homes to work in the cane fields. Whether or not it's called 'slavery' or some other form of dreadful exploitation could be a matter of semantics. Some historians stick to European-American definitions of slavery, and others believe these are too narrow, that they hide what's in plain sight.

Violet calls it slavery.

"He has no idea. It was slavery," she says.

'Slavery in Australia different to the US, but still slavery'

Professor Heidi Norman, a Gumeroi woman from north-western NSW and a researcher in the field of Australian Aboriginal political history, says there's "an argument to be made that there was slavery in Australia." It's just different to the African slave trade to the Americas and the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The early NSW colony already had free, disciplined labour in the form of convicts and so did not need Aboriginal people for labour, she said. Instead, what it needed was access to land. Frontier wars were fought between Indigenous groups and settlers.

In 1860 this changed. Gold was discovered. With the white labour force frantically working the creeks and mines, Aboriginal people were able to return to their country. This was now full of new pastoral stations that couldn't find workers.

"They worked on big stations for no money at all," Professor Norman said.

"They were working for maybe basic rations, but certainly not wage labour."

At the same time, pseudo-scientific ideas about race had caught hold. They proposed that human 'races' could be arranged into a hierarchy, with white north-western Europeans up the top and Aboriginal people at the bottom. This idea was used to justify the organised removal of Aboriginal boys and girls from their families. By this point, Professor Norman says, the system was beginning to resemble something like slavery.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/violet-was-stolen-and-forced-to-work-she-says-it-was-slavery/12346312

Read from top.

With COVID-19 case numbers on the rise in Victoria, some people have drawn an unsubstantiated link between the spike and the large Black Lives Matter protest held in Melbourne on June 6.

Tweeting this week, Liberal senator Sarah Henderson said:  "Daniel Andrews blames law abiding Victorian families for doing the wrong thing rather than 10,000 illegal protesters?"

Some of Senator Henderson's Liberal Party colleagues, including Matthew Guy, Georgie Crozier and Tim Smith, as well as Evan Mulholland of the Institute of Public Affairs, tweeted similar criticisms, while headlines have also declared that the "upsurge in COVID cases [is] linked to Melbourne Black Lives Matter protests".

But these assertions contradict the guidance of officials of the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, who continue to report that the current burst of cases does not stem from the rally. They have said that while one protester "may have been infectious at the rally", two others who have since tested positive for COVID-19 were not infectious at the rally, nor is there evidence they contracted the virus at the rally.

Rather, Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, has linked the increase in cases to family gatherings, citing family spread as the "main cause" of 120 cases in the week to June 22.

"People have not followed our advice around physical distancing, hygiene and limiting the number of people you invite into your home," he said in a statement.

Australia's Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Nick Coatsworth, also dismissed claims the spike could be linked to the protests, telling reporters that "there is no evidence that there has been chains of community transmission that we are aware of through the Black Lives Matter protests".

According to official Australian Government advice, "most people who are infected will develop symptoms within 14 days of infection". It has been 20 days since the Black Lives Matter protest in Melbourne.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-26/coronacheck-victoria-black-lives-matter-protests-family-spike/12391628

The families that have been infected are well-"catalogued" and have nothing to do with protest. They cannot be named here or singled out, but their members know who they are...

Read from top.

Australia’s longest-serving finance minister, Mathias Cormann, says he has “left it all on the field” and announced he will be leaving politics by the end of the year.

The West Australian senator described himself as being “at peace” with the decisions he has made – including helping to bring on the leadership spill which ended Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership. 

Flanked by his family and looking happier than he has since before the last federal election, Cormann was asked on Sunday morning if there was any chance he would change his mind.

He answered immediately: “No.”

Cormann said he would see the Morrison government deliver its post-Covid-19 budget in October, but would not see out the term.

Rumours Cormann wanted to leave the parliament have abounded since before the 2019 election campaign. He confirmed the worst-kept secret in Canberra with an interview in his local paper and a media statement on Sunday morning, days after the Australian Financial Review reported he was planning to end on his 13-year Senate career.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/05/mathias-cormann-s...

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Australia will nominate outgoing Finance Minister Mathias Cormann for the position of secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Senator Cormann has served as Finance Minister for the past seven years but announced in July that he would retire this year.

The OECD is an international organisation that works to create policies that promote economic growth and look to improve social and environmental challenges faced globally.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/2020/10/08/mathias-cormann-nominate-oecd/

Read from top. As a multi-lingual Aussie from Belgium, Corman is the perfect illiterate economist cigar-smoking person for the job of leading the dark ages of the future. One must say, Cormann had the good grace of appearing in person on "Mad as Hell", to congratulate his satirical spokesperson who will be out of a job from now on. Lucky, there are plenty of funny characters left in the Scomo government, for a talented comic to wear a wig and a false nose... or bandages like an Egyptian mummy to represent the tanking farming sector.

May the gods of the OECD see the light... and offer Cormann a box of cigars...