FERN Collective

28/10/2021

If you missed the forum you can listen here!

Good morning Zedheads!! It's Hannah in the studio, and look at me making a post ahead of our start time (9am on 102.1FM, 4ZZZ) ! ! !

Today I'll actually be in your ears a minimum of your Radio Reversal hour given I have so much brilliant content to play for you -- recordings from the Community discussion: Housing justice in unjust cities that took place on Sep 24, presented collaboratively by FERN Collective, Brisbane Free University, and Jonathan Sri, Councillor for The Gabba.

Inspired by the research of ‘Housing Justice in Unequal Cities,’ https://unequalcities.org/about/ detailing the housing crisis and tenant organising across multiple global cities this discussion addressed the tensions, barriers, strategies and possibilities for tenants' rights and housing justice here in Meanjin, and across so-called Australia. In discussing and advocating for housing justice, it is vital to consider who is included in this framework of justice and how we frame advocacy for housing on stolen land: where First Nations folks have been subject to eviction and dispossession since the beginning of the invasion, and a disproportionately high rate of First Nations people experience homelessness. Through a combination of online interviews and live panelists from disability justice network, tenant union and anti-eviction organisers, First Nations activists and ex-incarcerated folk, this discussion dives in deep to the intersections of housing justice and addresses these connections between housing justice, ongoing colonial dispossession, racial and carceral barriers, community fragmentation, gentrification, private development and commodification of land.

Speakers included:
Uncle Shane Coghill
Professor Chelsea Watego
Kevin Yow Yeh
Samantha Bond

The panel was facilitated by Radio Reversal's own Dr Natalie Osborne.

Catch us live from 9am, or listen back later on 4zzz.org.au

Incredible artwork by Mo Chan
[Image description: a black and white illustration of a miscellaneous collage of images. In the centre of the image is a river-like banner with the words housing justice in unjust cities moving through it. On the top left is a possum with a baby possum on its back, with a bottle-brush branch behind it. To the right-centre is a collection of three houses, two houses have been drawn so they have smiling faces, on one house is a family of two partners one with a mobility device and children holding each other. On the other two houses are two children on the roof throwing a ball to each other with an Aboriginal flag coming out of the house on the furthest right. On the far-right of the image is an apartment tower with various characters in the window with a tree stump to the left of the building and a large eucalyptus branch to the right of the tower. Underneath the river-banner, on the left is a house that has been drawn to have a sad face in its windows and doors and its behind prison bars, with a landlord sitting on top throwing money in the air. On the ground is a line of police protecting the landlord and activists with various signs saying ‘build tenant power,’ ‘no evictions!’ ‘always was, always will be’, ‘fight back against landlords,’ ‘build homes not prisons’. In the centre-bottom is a community garden, with a large eucalyptus branch and underneath another small Aboriginal flag. To the right is a traditional Queenslander home with solar panels and a person sleeping on the roof. On the right is another building with bricks and a concerned expression drawn into its windows and doors with a garden on the roof, a large eucalyptus branch is beside it.]

07/10/2021

On Sunday the 3rd of October 2021 my brother, sister in-law , nieces and… Noelene Wills needs your support for Please Help support family of Charlene Warrior

05/10/2021

STATEMENT RE: BRISBANE PRIDE FESTIVAL’S REQUEST FOR QUEENSLAND POLICE SERVICE TO NOT MARCH IN UNIFORM
Released October 5th, 2021

We warmly welcome the decision of the Brisbane Pride Festival (BPF) Committee to request that Queensland Police Service (QPS) attendees not wear uniforms at this year’s Pride Rally and March. As the Committee rightly acknowledges, many people within our LGBTI+, Sistergirl & Brotherboy communities are traumatised by the QPS. We also take this opportunity to commend Pride Incorporated on the increased accessibility of the event. We hope both this and the introduction of concession pricing will continue to be rolled out across all Brisbane Pride Inc. events. Notable also is the diversification of the Pride Committee Board, and the increased inclusion of First Nations community members.

We repeat our demands for a decommodified and decorporatised Pride. We ask that QPS not
be permitted to march as a bloc in the Pride Rally and March, even without their uniforms. We again ask that Queensland Corrective Services (QCS) also be requested not to march in uniform. We assert that the Fair Day space should not be dominated by armed police showcasing police vehicles.
We agree with BPF that there is “little or no accountability” within the police force for their q***rphobic actions, but we do not share their hope that the police may march again in uniform.

The issues BPF raises are not only “historical homophobia, abuse, police brutality and unsafe behaviours against LGBTI+ people”, but also “escalating levels of homophobia” within the police force, we see this in our lived experience, we see it leaked from their “s*xist, racist and homophobic social media posts”. The q***rphobic and racist individuals in the Police are only part of the problem. The core of these issues is systemic and institutional: when people put
on a police uniform, they represent the organisation that has and does enact horrors without consequence.

LGBTI+ individuals in the police force have a duty to our community to recognise historical, current and ongoing harm caused by police. While pride is a celebration of our resilience, it also offers our community the chance to reflect, and pay respects to our LGBTI+ siblings who lost so much to bring us as far as we’ve come. We believe that our community’s pride in recovering from a shared struggle is mutually exclusive with the pride of LGBTI+ Police Officers in their profession. We will always prioritise the fight for the members of our community who are marginalised by state violence. Our collective trauma from police violence is alive and felt deeply.
QPS began as ‘Queensland Native Mounted Police’, a state-sanctioned terrorist organisation that waged genocide against First Nations people during the Frontier Wars. The massive Black Lives Matter protests and the ongoing deaths in custody protests demonstrate that this historical violence continues today. The QPS continues to defend people’s “property rights” to stolen land and First Nations people continue to be killed in police custody at staggeringly higher rates than non-Aboriginal deaths in custody. As q***r Kurnai/Gunai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri, and Yorta Yorta writer Nayuka Gorrie explains: “There is simply not enough space to list all the ways the police can inflict terror – targeting Black people, strip searches, abusing their partners at home, sharing the private information of women being abused with their abuser, removing children, bashing people, neglecting those they have injured. For some, the police might be the answer if they have experienced violence. But for many, they are the violence.”

QPS officers wearing rainbow badges were spotted protecting the Kangaroo Point refugee detention centre in 2020. Protesters - many LGBTI+ - were beaten and traumatised by the excessive use of violence from officers. QPS officers bashed and bloodied protesters who attended the Defence Weapons Expo which exhibited the weapons of war used to kill our siblings and friends overseas. QPS is responsible for breaking strikes and punishing militant union organising that defends workers’ rights. Queensland Police continue to violently target s*x workers – especially migrant, q***r, disabled and survival s*x workers. They utilise
a dedicated predatory task force who use techniques of entrapment, arresting them after pressuring them into illegal acts and receiving s*xual services.

So, while the Pride Committee sees their uniform request “as an invitation to the Queensland Police Service to acknowledge their harm and to correct course moving forward” - we believe the police and correctional services are part of a racist and q***rphobic structure of power that cannot be reformed. We continue to stand for their abolition.

Lest we forget that the Pride movement was founded by Bla(c)k and Brown trans/gender nonconforming people, drag queens, s*x workers, homeless street youth, and butches who rioted against relentless police raids one night at the Stonewall Bar in New York City. Stonewall legend Marsha P. Johnson said: “no pride for some of us without liberation for all of us!”. We repeat her words today. We stand with the others who are marginalised in our community - those who are also perceived as a threat. We are the ones whose bodies are policed. We have transformed our trauma and our pain into pride, and we will fight to protect our dignity.

Our opposition to the police in Pride is not a fringe belief. We stand on the shoulders of LGBTI+ people across Australia who have fought to protect what Pride represents.
QPS was only invited to march in uniform at Pride less than ten years ago.
In Meanjin (Brisbane), the community has consistently written open letters requesting Pride Inc. rescind its invitation for QPS to march in uniform, as well as protesting their involvement, since 2015. Large protests occurred in 2016 and 2019. A large, free alternative community event was established in 2017 that was less policed and more accessible.

This dialogue in the LGBTI+ community has never stopped. It is a global conversation. Many other Prides have already removed uniformed police from their marches (Toronto,
Auckland, New York, and others) – Meanjin (Brisbane) is leading the way in Australia. We stand with the fight to see Sydney Mardi Gras follow suit, as well as Melbourne Pride, Adelaide Pride and Perth Pride. We applaud Pride celebrations’ return to their radical roots.
We cannot support reinviting the police to march in uniform in 2022 or any year thereafter. Not after an apology from QPS for historical homophobic and transphobic violence during the criminalisation of homos*xuality;
not after the 30-year-overdue implementation of all recommendations from the RCIADIC; not after the dissolution of the Prostitution Enforcement Taskforce;
not after the decriminalisation of s*x work and removal of sections of the Police Powers and Responsibilities Act (2000) allowing entrapment;
not after transgender prisoners are housed in their correctly gendered prison and provided adequate healthcare;
not after the end of indefinite detention for those seeking asylum;
not after drug decriminalisation;
and not after demilitarisation of the QPS and removal of handguns from patrolling officers.
There is no pride in police.

These reforms are urgent - but they will not, and cannot, redeem the institution that is QPS. Even if every police officer wore a rainbow badge and every police vehicle were rainbow- themed, we will never welcome the bloodied institutions of QPS and QCS into our cherished radical spaces. We thank BPF for acknowledging and honouring those that feel distrust towards the QPS. Our community is unsafe around the QPS. We look forward to celebrating Pride without fear, and implore BPF to uphold this standard of community care and recognition for years to come.

Signed,
No Pride in Police Collective

Co-signed,

Action Ready
Amy MacMahon - Greens MP for South Brisbane
Anarchist Communists Meanjin
Antifascist Action Brisbane
Anti-Poverty Network QLD
Brisbane Free University
Disrupt Land Forces
FERN Collective
Growing Forward

House Conspiracy
Jonathan Sri, Councillor for The Gabba
Megaherzzz on 4ZZZ
Pride in Protest
Queensland Young Greens
Queensland Rainbow Greens
Q***r Anti-Capitalist Action Blok
Radio Reversal - 4zzz
SEQUR - South East Queensland Union of Renters
Shandy
Refugee Solidarity Meanjin
Revolutionary Communist Organisation
Wage Peace - Disrupt War
Workers Power 4ZZZ

20/09/2021

Some more information on some of the incredible panelists who will be joining us this Friday night!

Image description: two posters with a watermelon red frame and a teal square with photographs of Chelsea Watego and Kevin Yow Yeh with bio captions. The first image is of Professor Chelsea Watego as she stands leaning on a pole wearing a black t shirts the words in white saying another day in the colony. The text beneath her says: Chelsea Watego (formerly Bond) is a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman with over 20 years of experience working within Indigenous health as a health worker and researcher. Chelsea’s work has drawn attention to the role of race in the production of health inequalities. Her current ARC Discovery Grant seeks to build an Indigenist Health Humanities as a new field of research; one that is committed to the survival of Indigenous peoples locally and globally, and foregrounds Indigenous intellectual sovereignty. She is a prolific writer and public intellectual, having written for IndigenousX, NITV, The Guardian, and The Conversation. She is a founding board member of Inala Wangarra, an Indigenous community development association within her community, a Director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, and was one half of the Wild Black Women radio/podcast show, but most importantly, she is also a proud mum to five beautiful children. Her forthcoming book Another Day in the Colony, published by UQ Press, is to be released in November 2021.
Image 2: is a photograph of Kevin Yow Yeh smiling, as he wears a black coat jacket and a t-shirt. With text below the photograph saying: Kevin is a Wakka Wakka and South Sea Islander man and current Higher Degree Research student at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), researching ways to best support First Nations peoples seeking justice and compensation from racial discrimination. Kevin is a Social Worker and recently managed a bail and order program based out of a Community Legal Centre, which supported young people to comply with their bail and/or order conditions, which regularly involved sourcing safe and appropriate accommodation, to not only meet their basic survival and protective needs, but to also adhere to the conditions outlined within their bail and/or orders.

20/09/2021

Our confirmed collaborators for this week's event! A lot of heart and minds have been put into this exciting event and we’re so grateful for all of our contributors! We acknowledge that discussions around housing justice comes with a lot of complexity and tensions, so we hope this is just one of many spaces of discussions to happen within these movements!

If you’re wanting to attend please register your attendance via the eventbrite link (link in bio)! More details are also found on the Facebook event page but feel free to send through an email if you need :).

Hope to see you there! 💖

Accessibility info: From the front footpath there is a straight and flat path to the front door. The entrance has a double door - accessible to wheelchairs and other mobility devices. The hall has a large open space, so wide distances will be provided between chairs and rows. There are no stairs. The toilets are left to the entrance of the hall. There is a separate disabled toilet. The venue can be accessed by bus routes 199, 60 and 192. Limited street parking is available. There are no car parks onsite.

16/08/2021

Join us for a free public discussion about tenants’ rights and intersections with other related struggles on the 3/09, 17:30 at AHEPA Hall West End!

Inspired by the research of ‘Housing Justice in Unequal Cities,’ https://unequalcities.org/about/ detailing the housing crisis and tenant organising across multiple global cities, FERN Collective + Brisbane Free University and Cr Jonathan Sri of the Gabba Ward, are excited to co-host a public discussion on the tensions, barriers, strategies and possibilities for housing justice here in Meanjin, and across so-called Australia.


Police, landlords, real estate agents and government departments coordinate to gentrify neighbourhoods and create an environment of easy eviction. We must then also create solidarity and organising capacity for tenants to resist such forces. We hope this event will also be such a space where we can discuss and listen to stories of resistance and organising. We are living in an unjust system which continuously benefits and maximises profit for those who own private property and upholds fictional colonial housing laws.

When we discuss and advocate for housing justice, we have to consider who is included in this framework of justice and how we frame advocacy for housing on stolen land: where First Nations folks have been subject to eviction and dispossession since the beginning of the invasion, and a disproportionately high rate of First Nations people experience homelessness. Through a combination of online interviews and live panelists from disability justice network, tenant union and anti-eviction organisers, First Nations activists and ex-incarcerated folk, we hope to dive in deep into the intersections of housing justice.

Speakers will be announced closer to the date!

This event will be placed on unceded Yuggera land, and we pay respect to all elders past and present, whose legacies of resistance and protest against the settler-colonial government remain today.

Accessibility and image description in comments

Artwork by

04/08/2021

Useful lockdown financial resources:

Find out how to apply for the Small Business COVID-19 Adaption Grant, to help businesses adapt and sustain operations, sustain employment and build resilience.

12/07/2021

Keep donating to this! Ty!

Hi im Seb, a trans man from El Salvador living in Meanjin. Writing this has been a real challen… Seb Otilia Ardon needs your support for Seb Top Surgery Fund

12/07/2021

A rally and March is going to be held at Brisbane Immigration Transit Accomodation (BITA) on Sunday 18th of July 12pm (100 Sugarmill Road Brisbane).

For those in BITA, those who sought safety and asylum and yet were imprisoned in a cruel and violent xenophobic system, the 19th of July marks 8 years of being in detention. This violent colonial entity which non-consensually governs on stolen land, has controlled these mens’ lives for too long. Those originally detained at Kangaroo Point have now been moved into another hotel-prison in so-called Melbourne and BITA. BITA is very far from the inner city public eye, purposefully making it more difficult for the community to mobilise and protest. The government hopes the community will forget and neglect, enabling their violent and inhumane regime to continue unopposed. We cannot let this happen.

If you are able, please make yourself available to attend this rally on the 18th, offer carpools etc. If you aren’t available, please encourage others around you to attend! Please make sure to bring hand sanitiser, water and masks.

This rally will be taking place on unceded Turrbul land.

People will be meeting in the slip road 50m to the right of the front gate (which is public land), rally and then March.

Image description: first image is of a concrete wall with black graffiti saying “our lockdown never ends, free the refugees.” The second image is a poster that says “8 years no freedom” in black text, and then in red text says “Rally at BITA” and in black underneath says “Brisbane Immigration Transit Accomodation, 100 Sugarmill Rd Pinkenba 18th July, 12pm” .