If someone says “18C is bad for free speech"...

In a trendy café in the heart of Wollongong a pharmacist tells me how he despairs at the hurt in his 7-year-old daughter’s eyes as she sees news reports and hears stories in the playground telling her she should be ashamed of who she is. In the same café I hear from an imam at a local mosque about the dumping of a pig’s heads outside his place of worship. In Melbourne’s Coburg I hear how an engineer who also happens to be a young Muslim woman wearing a hijab, is told by a male colleague “over the water cooler” how much he hates Arabs and that they would all be dead within a few years. A young Muslim lawyer tells me that members of his family fear putting their name to the census because they don’t want the government to know where they live. He says they don’t want to put down roots because they fear that one day the authorities will come for them. My conversations with multicultural communities in recent months, particularly with Muslim Australians, suggest these incidents are all too common. Australians are being subjected to acts of bigotry that defy who we are as a nation. With more and more men, women and children experiencing racism in their streets, on public transport and over social media, it’s never been more important to ensure that people can rely on basic legal protections from its crushing effects. Yet Malcolm Turnbull has signalled he’s prepared to water down protections in the Racial Discrimination Act, to make it even easier for people to express racist and bigoted opinions.

pink irene or blonde irene

Seventeen!

steven!!

WTF YOURE NOT UGLY AT ALL