Today I have attended an excellent 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning play “Disgraced” performed at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta and chaired a discussion after watching it. The play was directed by Sarah Goodes, director at a Sydney Theatre Company.

When I arrived in Australia in 1975, Prof Alice Tay told me that in Australia polite dinner conversation should not touch the topics of politics, religion and sex. This was very different to my cultural background – about politics we spoke constantly and about religion and sex from time to time.

The play broke down all the wisdoms I was told by Alice and the established dinner conversation taboos. In fact, veneers of civility are being ripped away in a discussion on religion, politics and sex between characters from different cultural and religious backgrounds. There is a clear “clash of civilisations” taking place.

The play is relevant to those interested in contemporary Australian multiculturalism and islamophobia. The play is about a conversation we need to have! Recommended viewing.

Orlando has witnessed a worst mass shooting in the US history – murder inspired by gay hate and terror. I write to express my feelings of deepest sympathy to the victims of this horrible crime, their families and friends and to the world-wide LGBTIQ community.

This terrible incident is a stark reminder of why it is important to demonstrable our determined stand against homophobia and transphobia in our workplaces and in public life on a daily basis. There is so much to be done!

I am proud to be working at the Western Sydney University which encourages all our staff and students to actively work to combat homophobia and to provide active support to our GLBTIQ community through the Western’s Ally Network. An Ally is a volunteer (staff or student) from the Western Sydney University community who is committed to cultural change and provides support to LGBTIQ community members at the University.

An inaugural conference about Ally networks at Australian universities will be held at Parramatta on 27-28 June – for more see:  http://allynetwork.com.au

Death penalty has been abolished in Australia long time ago and by now most of us agree that there should be no death penalty on our law books.

But the execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in Indonesia on 29 April 2015 made the capital punishment a BBQ stopper of conversations again. In fact, Indonesia is currently preparing to execute further 15 individuals sentenced mostly for drug related offences. What is however of particular concern is the fact that the death penalty is making an alarming resurgence in Australia’s neighbourhood as several Asian countries move forward with executions.

For example, the recently elected Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte vowed to reintroduce capital punishment that was abolished in 2006. On May 11, Bangladeshi officials hanged Motiur Rahman Nizami following a conviction in Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal for alleged political and war crimes in early seventies. On May 8, the Afghan government hanged six Taliban prisoners as part of President Ashraf Ghani’s efforts to respond to critics who have demanded that the government take a harder line against the Taliban.

It is time for Australians and our government representatives to mobilise to present a consistent, principled objection to capital punishment and try to reverse this Asian trend before it is entrenched. International human rights law is clear: if used at all, the death penalty should be reserved only for the “most serious crimes” – most of drug offences do not meet this threshold.

This month the Australian Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade released its report of an inquiry into Australia’s Advocacy for the Abolition of the Death Penalty entitled: “A world without the death penalty” The report makes 13 recommendations and acknowledges that Australia has traditionally been a strong advocate for the abolition of the death penalty.

The report recommends that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade coordinate “the development a whole-of- government Strategy for the Abolition of the Death Penalty which has as its focus, countries of the Indo-Pacific and the United States of America” Philip Ruddock, chair of the report’s Human Rights Sub-Committee and Australia’s Special Envoy for Human Rights, has made ending capital punishment a signature issue.

Let us work together to ensure that Australia carries out the recommendations of the Report and urgently intervene with relevant countries to privately and publicly denounce past executions and oppose future ones. Our officials should work closely with the United Nations and other abolitionist countries to urge our neighbours to get rid of the death penalty once and for all.

Helen Clark, former New Zealand PM and now the U.N.’s development czar, has emerged as a front-runner in the race for U.N. secretary-general. See an interesting article by Colum Lynch about difficulties Helen may face that was published  about her candidature in Foreign Policy:  http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/assets/attachments/articles/5.24.2016.helen.clark.docx