After “tumultuous year,” Speaker says change starts at the top

By Aaron Humes: Speaker of the House, Laura Longsworth has called on parliamentarians at their last sitting of 2019 to “put their heads together and lead” societal change.

She reviewed a “tumultuous year” in which violence and a toxic culture, especially in social media, took hold – the effects of murder and missing persons on families as well as the “vicious” nature of society.

“A fight can get you a bullet in your head, or a hat can get you chopped, and our women are subjected to gender-based violence [to] a level we have never seen before, and at the end of the day families are suffering and individuals are suffering. And we should be wondering what’s happening to our women and those fathers in our homes when their children are killed,” she observed.

Of social media, she said, it was “no holds barred,” and the recent threat against Shasta Wade was “terrible; it tells us what is happening in our society and we have to come together to regulate social media. We cannot continue to have these kinds of attacks on us. People are now afraid to even post, because the minute you post something constructive, you are immediately attacked viciously, personally, and it really must stop.”

Whether quiet or open about violence, she observed, justice seems unattainable. But we can control our language and sensitivity, she concluded.

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