Dr Amanda Cohn for the Senate | Political candidate
Dr Amanda Cohn for the Senate
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17.01.2022 Cr Cathy Griff is a vibrant and fierce Greens representative on the beautiful NSW south coast, an area which has been devastated by bushfires and native forest logging and suffers from inadequate public and active transport and affordable housing. I am proud to have her support.
16.01.2022 This was one year ago - ringing in 2020 from night shift at the Lake George Fire Control Centre. Despite the smiles and the sparkling apple juice, it was pretty... grim. We thought 2020 could only get better from there. At the end of such an extraordinarily challenging year, especially for the Albury-Wodonga community that coped with bushfires, lockdown and successive border closures, I'd like to reflect on the things that give me hope. This year, we witnessed remarkable grassroots efforts in our communities to support each other - like our local Sikh community arriving at the Showgrounds to serve fresh hot meals to evacuees from the Green Valley fire, and home-made face masks being churned out for those that needed them most. This year, we saw that significant change is possible in a short period of time - the kind of change we will need in the face of the worsening climate crisis and inequality crisis. Seemingly overnight, things that many have advocated for for years like free childcare, an increase to welfare payments, and huge investment in social housing (in Victoria) became reality. 2020 laid bare the fragility of so many systems we rely on - like our ecosystems and climate, insecure and exploitative conditions of our most essential workers, and our universities. These are our next challenges to overcome. I'm looking forward to working for a better future with all of you in 2021.
15.01.2022 I'm proud to have worked with Dr Nivanka De Silva on her principled and energetic 2019 campaign in the conservative seat of Murray, and I'm delighted to have her support to be the next Greens NSW Senator.
13.01.2022 My reflections on Human Rights Day as Chair of the Border Domestic Violence Network. We need to urgently not only support victims of family violence, but addres...s the perpetrators of that violence, and the social conditions that leave too many women vulnerable to exploitation and coercion. --- Transcript: Today is International Human Rights Day and it's also the last day of the 16 Days of Activism against gender based violence. I've just come back from a fantastic "feminism in the park" event that was organised by the Women's Committee of the North-East and Border Trades and Labor Council, where I made some reflections on Human Rights Day as the Chair of the Border Domestic Violence Network here in Albury-Wodonga and I thought I would share those with you. On Human Rights Day, it's sometimes easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of really big issues overseas where we might feel more helpless or unable to make a difference and I thought it might be helpful to focus on a local issue that's really important to me and really important in the Albury-Wodonga community, across Australia and around the world. I would like to draw your attention to article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes the right to live, the right to be free, and the right to feel safe. So far in 2020, 50 women have been killed through intimate partner violence. That's a rate of more than one per week. Just here in the Albury area, police over 6 months identified 169 unique domestic violence offenders - that's people who've committed three or more offenses in the last 6 months. These are really chilling statistics. I think especially of a patient of mine who had previously been in quite a dangerous relationship with an x partner who turned up to our medical clinic first thing in the morning at 8:00 when it opened and asked to have an urgent appointment with me as her GP, and reception did the best they could to fit in later that day - around 1 or 2 o'clock in the afternoon - and this was back in April at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic - when the last place she wanted to be for any period of time was a doctor's waiting room, and she waited that entire time in our waiting room because she had nowhere else safe to go. Before the pandemic she may well have been in the same position, but it's really laid bare the position of really disadvantaged people in our community, and I think of her often - she reminds me of the need for real change in our community and around the country. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the right to live, the right to be free, and the right to feel safe and that's not the case for all women in Australia or indeed around the world. I think moving forward, there's a there's a few really key things that we need to focus on and that's not necessarily the victims of family violence who obviously need our overwhelming support but firstly the perpetrators (overwhelmingly men) who commit this violence, but also the social conditions that lead victims (predominantly women) to be so vulnerable to exploitation and to coercion and some of those things include financial insecurity, insecure work and lack of affordable housing. We saw during the coronavirus pandemic what big a difference it made to struggling people and struggling families to have the Coronavirus supplement which has now really cruelly been taken away by the Morrison government. If we want victims of family violence to be able to feel safe and confident to seek help and to leave a difficult situation, we need to make sure that they can be financially secure and able to find safe housing outside of that exploitation and potentially coercion.There's so much more work to be done. I'm really glad that we've been able to have this really important conversation today on Human Rights Day and to keep working on this.
02.01.2022 Thank you so much to local Greens members and supporters who gave up their time, at such a busy time of year, to show your support for my pre-selection!
