A daily 5 minute news wrap for English learners and people with disability
Welcome to SBS News in Easy English. I'm Deborah Groarke.
Leaders from nine Australian churches say they support the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Religious leaders from churches such as the Anglican, Sikh and Islamic congregations have signed a document as a sign of their support, five years after the landmark Uluru Statement was issued.
Dr Shireen Morris from Macquarie University says there is growing community support for changing the Constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians.
"I think we absolutely can. You know, the polling is indicates consistently high support amongst Australians for this reform of voice in the Constitution. What today demonstrates is that civil society, religious groups are willing to step up, their transcending their differences. They're uniting behind this cause in a really unprecedented way. So the community support is there. So I think this has got a fantastic chance at succeeding provided we all do the hard work."
Australia's Foreign Minister Penny Wong says it is just a coincidence that she is visiting the Pacific at the same time as Chinese Foreign Minister is also there.
China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi has begun a tour of eight Pacific Island countries, and hopes that some of them will agree to security deals just like the Solomon Islands did.
Penny Wong is in Fiji at the Pacific Island Leaders Forum.
Senator Wong says she is making it clear that Australia's policy for the Pacific region will be different now.
"We understand how important this is and we understand that Australia has more to do, and we wanted to put out there the things that we wanted to do."
The Federal Government is expected to announce that a family of Tamil asylum seekers will be allowed to go home to Biloela [[bil-uh-WEE-luh]] in Queensland, after years of fighting to stay here in Australia.
The previous government led by Scott Morrison would not allow the Murugappan family to have permanent residency because the parents, Nades and Priya, came here by boat.
But the Labor government promised during the election they would be allowed to return to Biloela.
The couple and their two daughters, who were born in Australia, have been living in community detention in Perth after one of the girls became sick and needed medical treatment in Western Australia.
Calls to a service that helps people with alcohol problems tripled last year, compared to the number of people who contacted them before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education says there were 25,000 calls to the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline last year, compared to just under 8000 in 2019.
The Foundation says the increase was because people had higher levels of stress, anxiety, boredom and isolation.
The prime minister of New Zealand is on an official visit to the United States at the moment, and has just given a speech to a class at Harvard University about the importance of democracy and gun laws.
Jacinda Ardern's speech was very well received by the crowd, when she told them the New Zealand parliament was 50 per cent women, almost 20 per cent Maori, and that her deputy was a proud gay man.
But with gun laws in the news because of a deadly school shooting in Texas earlier this week, the biggest cheer of all came at the mention of New Zealand's banning of semi-automatic weapons after the deadly 2019 Christchurch Mosques attack.
"Now in the aftermath of New Zealand's experience, we felt a sense of responsibility. We knew that we needed significant gun reform, and so that is what we did."
I'm Deborah Groarke. This is SBS News in Easy English.
