The 15th of March marks the one year anniversary since the Christchurch shooting. It’s one of those moments that pretty much everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news – I checked a news alert while pushing my niece on a swing and read that upwards of 40 people had been killed in a New Zealand shooting. As the next few days passed, the death toll settled at 51, and we learned more about the man who shot up a Mosque for no good reason.
Cast your mind back a year. Remember how horrible everybody felt? How all our leaders were decrying the racism that led to this horrid event?
Well, all our leaders except Fraser Anning, who decided to blame the Muslim community.
In the year that followed, Fraser Anning got egged for his efforts and then lost his senate seat in the 2019 election, so that was something at least.
But what else happened was that the world banded together to support New Zealand in the aftermath, and watched on as their Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, immediately changed the country’s gun laws. It really felt like we were moving towards something better as a society.
Anyway, fast forward to today, and those promises to stamp out the sort of abhorrent racism that killed 51 innocent people haven’t quite come to pass. In a world that’s increasingly under lockdown because of the threat of coronavirus, we’ve seen an astronomical rise in everything from microaggressions to flat out hate crimes committed against people with an Asian background.
Coronavirus has lead to the cancellation of a lot of major events, listen to the GOAT Team run you through it…
With the Christchurch Shooting making its way back into the headlines and back into our consciousness on the anniversary, remember that feeling of coming together to rebuild. We need that feeling now just as much as we did then.
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