While global solidarity for things the like the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the US is important, it is always interesting to see it trending in Australia, when there is so little interest in analysing our own institutionalised racial policing. Is it just another by-product of US cultural imperialism that we care more about America’s racist criminal justice system than our own?

Today, capital punishment is generally treated as inhumane, retributive and ineffective at deterring crime. And rightly so. But the question we should now ask ourselves is: when will we see prisons in the same light?

Sex discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick recently called for tougher sentencing of people convicted of intimate partner violence. She argues incidents of partner violence should not be treated as ‘just a domestic’ but should attract ‘a premium penalty’. Broderick is not alone.

I was in Buxton on Black Saturday. My friends and I stood in the front yard of their cousins’ house, almost as if we were in a trance, watching the trees explode as the fire blasted its way down the ridge towards us.