By Marc Eliot Stein, World BEYOND War, September 29, 2025

This is a complete transcript of this episode. Please join us at #NoWar2025.

Marc: Welcome to episode 76 of the World BEYOND War podcast. If you’re catching this show in real time, please make plans to see us next month, October 2025, for the #NoWar2025 global peace conference taking place online. Look on our website worldbeyondwar.org for information.

This year’s annual peace conference is focused on abolition. And today we’re honored to speak to one of the panel leaders for this conference, Tabitha Lean. Here’s what we say about Tabitha on our speakers page for this conference:

“Tabitha Lean is a First Nations prisoner activist, mad survivor, abolitionist, and storyteller whose work is grounded in her lived experience of criminal and psychiatric incarceration. A disruptor and troublemaker, Tabitha uses poetry, art, and narrative to expose and resist the violence of the colonial carceral state. Her activism is rooted in collective care, community accountability, and the belief that no one is disposable. Living and creating at the margins, she channels her experience into a powerful refusal of systems of punishment and control. Always with love, always in resistance.” Welcome Tabitha.

Tabitha: Thank you for having me. Thank you. Wonderful to meet you.

Marc: Yes. So many things that I’ve heard about you strike a chord. Can you tell us about yourself and your own words?

Tabitha: Yeah. Thank you. I’ll start off by acknowledging the country that I’m on here today, because I’m not on my mother’s country. So the lands that I’m zooming in from today for this podcast, are the lands of the Kaurna people, the unceded lands, the stolen lands of the Kaurna people. And I’ll acknowledge the elders, both earth side and in the dreaming, the warriors named and unnamed that have defended this country against the brutal effects and the ongoing effects of colonisation here on this land that they call Australia. I pay my respects to the elders here and the work that they do in caretaking this country and this country that is not my own country or my mother’s country, but has cared for me and in turn I am called to caretake it as it has held me for so many years.

So yeah, as you said, I’m a prisoner activist. I served two years in prison here on Kaurna country in what they call Adelaide Women’s Prison and in the Adelaide Pre-Release Center. I also served around two and a half years on home detention.

For people who might not know what bad it is in Adelaide here, you can serve part of your sentence on home detention with a sort of a monitoring device on your ankle, where you’re basically imprisoned and incarcerated in your home, where you can only get very limited passouts to go out into the community. And then I also did about three years on parole, which I call open-air prison. And I’ve also had a considerable amount of incarceration in psychiatric facilities.

In Adelaide here, which is in South Australia, for your international audience, we have the highest rate in this country of forced community treatment orders in terms of psychiatric incarceration in this country by the nature of the way our legislation is constructed. So, yes, I’ve been subject to those community treatment orders here. And as many people will know, that the pathway from mental distress and the pipeline from that into prison is very well defined.

So, my criminalization has been bound up with mental distress, domestic violence, dispossession from country and a range of things. So, the way I do my resisting is around encompassing all of those experiences from mental distress, from violence, from the experiences of my family around the dispossession that they have suffered and the fracturing from being removed from country. So, that’s sort of the basis from which my politics and my community organizing come from.

Marc: Wow. Do I understand that you are engaged in protest as a result of becoming incarcerated or you became incarcerated because of your protesting or both?

Tabitha: Look, I’ve always been an activist. I was read by my father, my father’s non-Aboriginal, and my dad was a staunch unionist. So, I spent many days up to school, sitting on dirt mounds at working sites where my dad picketed and put his body and livelihood on the line for workers’ rights, payers’ conditions in the construction industry.

And then in my teens, I was involved in the labor movement. So, activism has always been central to who I am as a person. I was raised to think of others and to consider the collective rather than the individual.

And I was taught that there’s real power in collective action and trained from a young age from my dad to look for moments of division. Because of that old divided we fall stuff. So, I had this excellent socialist upbringing where we talked over dinner about Lenin and Marx and we read “The Ragged Trousered Philanthrophists” together.

It’s one of those things that my dad and I share, this love of people and left-wing politics and this pool to fighting for social justice and this recognition that the rights that we have, have never been handed to us by politicians or in the halls of legislature, but they’ve been won by people power and grit and determinations, dearly resolved to accept no compromise. But the day that I walked out of those prison gates, I became an abolitionist. But the fact is I’ve probably always been an abolitionist, but I never had the language to understand what it was.

And potentially before I went to prison, I maybe had this idea that prisons could be fixed. I perhaps had this idea that we could make them maybe better. So I had this, perhaps before I was more of a prison reformist, I kind of had this idea that, you know, prisons and punishment was not ideal, that what we were doing to people inside was harming them and that this was not an ideal situation.

But I think back then, I kind of thought this was a broken system. I might have used that kind of language. But after being inside, I could see this is not a broken system.

It is working exactly how they intended to be. In fact, I get wild when I hear people say jailing is failing or this is a broken system. And I see how lazy that analysis is, how short, like all of its shortcomings.

Because when I was inside, I could see so clearly how perfectly working this system was. Because they’re not setting out to do one thing and woefully failing. They’re actually, it’s working like clockwork.

The prisons and these systems of punishment are part of the arsenal and the settler colonial war machine that is setting out to destroy my people in this country. So the day that I walked out of those prison gates, I looked back at the prison, not for the sake of nostalgia, but to say, I will be back. Not to be held captive by your bars and your shackles, but to free everyone from those cages and to bash down the walls of the prison.

And I cannot wait till we take a wrecking ball to that place. So I’ve always been an activist, but I think what it did for me is it solidified my hatred and my contempt for the state and my motivation to tear it down, to burn it down, metaphorically, by the way, just in case anyone is listening to this. You know, it solidified my fire and it kind of stoked that campfire in my belly to fight even harder for this.

And I’ve kind of made that my life’s work coming out of this, is to make abolition the most common sense option for us as a community, for us as a people, and how do we then connect it. And I actually think we’re at a crucible moment in this country’s history, because we’re seeing a powerful and sustained condemnation of racism and carceral violence, even as in this country. So I don’t know how much your listeners will see what’s happening in Australia.

Right now, we are seeing groups marching in the streets over here in Australia, marching for white pride, marching with Nazi symbols adorning their body. And then we’re seeing counter protests by Aboriginal people against it. So we are seeing the rise of conservatives, and we are seeing the rise of white pride.

We are seeing that. But what we are seeing as well is a pushback. We are seeing a rise of people saying, no, we will not accept this in our communities.

So I think we are at a crucible moment. We are at a moment where we are saying these things are not acceptable, but we are seeing also a rise of people saying something else. So we are at this moment where we have to decide who we are and what we are.

And under what means are we going to accept either one of those things? So I think this is a critical juncture for us as a people overall and for us as a community and never has it been more important for activists to be loud, for activists to say no, and never has it been more important for us to stop just marching in the streets and for us to take real action that make people listen. Because the days of just walking quietly or just chanting with a banner are no more.

We actually have to disrupt.

Marc: So many things I want to make sure we spend a few minutes talking on here based on the things you said. I want to talk about what it means to disrupt and what we’re disrupting. I want to talk about psychiatric abuse or the abuse of people with psychiatric methods.

First, I want to just talk about the word abolition. I’m so fascinated by this word. Now, many of us have noted a similarity between the slave system, the historical slave system, mostly historical, and the prison system.

Of course, in the United States of America, abolition meant that you are fighting to end slavery. Abolition now, can you tell us what abolition means? And I don’t think it means just one thing, obviously.

I’m not expecting a simple answer.

Tabitha: Yeah, sure. And so I can say, for me, when I think of abolition, for me, it’s a political vision of liberation. Because that’s my focus, liberation.

So it’s a political vision of liberation with the goal of eliminating prisons, policing, surveillance. It’s about imagining a future free of punishment, imprisonment, exile. And it’s both a demolition project, but it’s also a building project.

So on the one hand, we want to dismantle policies, practices, and institutions that make people disposable, you know, challenge the ubiquitous belief that there are throwaway people. On the other hand, we also want to bring together communities to develop revolutionary and transformative community-based responses to harm, rather than relying on a system that reinforces and perpetuates that violence. So I see abolition strategies as being distinctly anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, internationalist, pro-cooperation, and also a very necessary element of the decolonial struggle, and one that is rooted in collective care and values of mutual aid.

Marc: Absolutely. That’s how I see it. Every one of those words resonates with me.

I’m not sure if I heard you say anti-war, but that’s actually what you mean. Yeah. That is what brings you and I together here right now, and I’m so glad we are because I need to have more conversations like this.

I want to tell you, Tabitha, I do one episode a month, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to address the horrors right now that immigrants in the United States are suffering at the hands of masked police who are really doing, you know, cruel things. The Trump administration is showing its cruelty in the way it’s treating these people, and this is a topic I’ve been trying to figure out. It’s just so gigantic, and I’m wary of not spending enough time on it, because it seems to me that this is destroying many people’s lives, and it’s horrifying, and yet it’s only one of hundreds of horrifying syndromes going on right now.

In my part of this dystopian world, you know, we are also going through what I call a fascist, a neo-fascist age, certainly inspired by fascist leaders of the past, and the bleeding edge of it here is suffered by people from South America, people from Mexico, people from Haiti and the Caribbean. And I do think that we’re talking about abolition when we’re talking about that.

Tabitha: Absolutely. Absolutely. And abolition is about tearing down every page, right?

Marc: Yes.

Tabitha: And that includes pages built for migrant people. Like, ICE raids are policing in another form. They terrorize communities, families apart and treat people as if crossing a border is a crime deserving of disappearance.

Just like prisons, these raids are justified as keeping us safe. But what they’re actually doing is criminalizing survival, poverty and migration. Right.

And so when I say abolition, I mean, no one should live with fear that their home will be raided in the night, that their kids won’t come back from school because they’ve been picked up. Or that they’re seeking refuge that will land them in detention. Immigration enforcement and prisons are part of the same machinery of state violence.

And our vision as abolitionists is borderless solidarity, where people can move freely, where care takes places of cages, where families and communities are kept whole. We want to dismantle ICE, we want to dismantle detention, we want to dismantle deportation. And that is critical because that’s dismantling prisons and police.

Because safety will not come from raids or wars, it will come from justice, dignity, freedom of movement. Like what is happening over there is scary. It’s scary.

Marc: I’m so glad that World BEYOND War is devoting this year’s conference to folks like you and many others. The intersection between the anti-war movement and the abolition movement, you know, to me, prisons are concentration camps and concentration camps are prisons. We are drawing lines between slavery and genocide, which of course is, you know, another horror that’s going on around the world right now.

You and I have spent the last few minutes painting a picture of how bad things are right now. Let’s talk about what is the positive vision of not having borders and not having, I mean, I certainly am with you on being anti-capitalist, but it’s a tall order. What is the positive vision that we can think about as we are abolitionists?

Tabitha: Yeah, I think it’s hard. I think what’s difficult as an abolitionist when we talk about abolition, and I’m always really conscious of this when I talk about it, it is in describing what that world will look like.

Marc: Yeah.

Tabitha: The difficulty is because abolition is so place-based and community-based in that, when I talk about the vision for an abolitionist world, is that I can’t describe what it would look like because it needs to look like the communities within which it is manifesting.

It shouldn’t look like one thing.

Marc: Absolutely.

Tabitha: This utopian vision of abolition, I can’t describe it because it’s going to look like what it looks like in those communities. But broadly, I think for me, when we tear down these borders, it’s going to look like creating a world where freedom of movement is honored as a basic expression of being human.

Because borders like prisons are built on fear, disposability, and control. They decide who belongs, who is excluded, who can be caged or deported. But abolition’s positive vision is that communities thrive when people are free to move, free to connect, and belong without threats of raids, detention, or deportation.

So it will mean that families are not ripped apart, children are not disappeared into detention, and survival itself is never criminalized. So borderlessness means safety rooted in solidarity amongst us all, not surveillance. It means resources flowing towards life, not away from it, towards housing, health, collective care, instead of walls, camps, and militarized borders.

So it’s a vision of freedom where no one is illegal, where our belonging is not determined by papers or passports, but by our shared humanity and our responsibilities to one another. So that’s, I think, what the broad vision is. And then what we need to do as a community is consider within our own communities, what that looks like in practical terms.

And I think that’s the really exciting part right now. It’s like, how do we get together in these dreaming spaces and think about what does it look like for us in individual communities? And I think it’s really exciting.

Like I get excited when I talk to people about the opportunities for us to be able to dream up collectively what that looks like. And I don’t think that these are utopian ideas. I think that we can create it when we work together.

I’ve just started running some community workshops here where I live around community care and what we want to see happen in our own communities. So because I spend a lot of time talking about getting rid of prisons and policing and for psychiatric care, I was thinking like I’m talking a lot about tearing it down, but I need to start talking about what does it mean to build up immunity. So I’ve started running these community gatherings and the excitement in the room and the energy in the room to sort of talk about this has been so incredible.

And I’m really enjoying that because people are really excited to come together into what I’m calling these dreaming spaces, where they’re actually collectively thinking about what they see as an alternative, what they see as other solutions to what we have. And when we do imagine those transformative spaces, when we do think of other positive visions, I think we start to create that. We start to create little connections.

You know, people start to meet each other. They start to go, oh, wow we’re starting to meet our neighbors, we’re starting to meet people in our communities. And I think that’s really beautiful.

And that’s what we can do when we create a borderless society, when we start to know who are the people living in our community, who are the people at risk of ICE raids, who are the kids at risk of being disappeared into detention. So when we start to do this work, when we start to do the actual doing of abolition rather than just the theorizing and the intellectualizing, which is still critical work. But when we start to do the work of abolition, we can start to unpack this, we can start to move towards borderlessness.

Marc: I love this.

Tabitha: So it can happen. It can happen in the here and the now. Absolutely. We don’t have to wait for the future. It can happen now.

Marc: Completely agree. I agree. It’s not utopian. It’s necessary. It’s our only path to survival. It’s our only path to mental health as world.

A few episodes of the podcast, I mentioned the word anational, that I am a national. Just like other people are atheist, they don’t believe in God. I am anational. I don’t believe in nations.

Another thing that I’ve said — and these are the tropes that I’m constantly talking about on this podcast, but another one is that 100 years ago, there was a practical need for mass government to do things like build transcontinental railroads and figure out air travel and stuff like that. But with the technological sophistication that we live with now, we actually don’t need mass governments at all.

And to me, this is one of the most hopeful arguments for fast, rapid change in the future, is that the mass national government is a dinosaur. It serves no practical purpose except war and predatory capitalism and prisons and police. All the things we don’t like.

And, I mean, what else does the United States of America do then? War, predatory capitalism, prisons and police. Trump has closed down the Department of Education. And as the father of teachers — I have three kids and they’re all teachers in New York City, public school teachers, but these institutions serve no purpose. Do you agree with me on that, that Australia serves no purpose? I don’t know much about Australia, but …

Tabitha: Oh, look, I mean, being a First Nations person, I mean, I think Australia itself is an artificial construct, you know, and it’s built on colonization, carcerality, and control. And I agree with you, I would love to get rid of the government and replace it with community-led forms of care and accountability, because the state and the government, as we know it, all they exist to do is decide who is disposable, who is a good citizen, a worthy citizen, a productive citizen. And I think instead of governments hoarding power, resources, and land, we could build webs of solidarity and shared responsibility, where needs are met collectively, decisions are made horizontally, and care, not coercion, is at the center of life.

Like we could create life-affirming systems, yes, rather than the ones that suck everything out of us.

Marc: And which are now suicidal, because I wanna make the point that these systems are so dysfunctional that they actually destroy. They’re eating themselves. And an example is, again, I am focusing on what’s on the news here in the United States, so-called United States. Trump has been deporting, you know, we have a caste system here in the United States, and he’s deporting the group of people who work harder than most white people.

Believe me, they work harder and they wake up earlier and they go to bed later and they work Saturdays. And a lot of white people have cushy jobs supported by immigrants who are now being deported or frightened into- So this is an example of the dysfunction of the carceral state, you know, of the police state.

I think we have to tear this down. You know, I agree with you before we, you know, when we say burn it down, we have to say metaphorically that we’re speaking metaphorically. When we say tear it down, no, all we need to do is let it die.

Let it die of its own bloated weight.

Tabitha: Yeah. It’s a horrendous thing. And you know, when we start thinking about racial capitalism and the way it consumes people by treating human lives as raw material to be extracted, exploited and discarded, like the way it feeds on the labor, the culture and the very survival of Black, Indigenous, migrant and racialized communities while designating those same communities as expendable.

When you think about that, it’s horrendous, like the pain of those people becomes profit, whether that’s through prisons that cage us, welfare systems that police us, or industries that commodify creativity or resilience while erasing our names. Like racial capitalism doesn’t just exploit the word, it devours whole lives. It just devours whole lives.

Marc: And families.

Tabitha: And families, while turning people into surplus populations whose deaths are written off as costs of doing business. In this way, racial capitalism, the way I think about it, is not just an economic system, but a machinery of disappearance. I think about it all the time, like about missing and murdered indigenous women, about ice raids, like it’s a machinery of disappearance.

It consumes our bodies, it consumes our time, and it consumes our futures.

Marc: So true. I mean, it’s literally true right now with what’s been happening in my so-called country.

Tabitha: And we see it over here in Australia, like we have missing and murdered indigenous women over here as well. We have children who go missing and no one searches for them. We have indigenous women who are killed in this country and no one searches for them.

We have children who are lynched on the street, and there is never any justice. You know, this is racial capitalism in countries like these, countries like your country. You know, it is fueled by racial capitalism, which is a machinery of disappearance.

And it’s a machinery that casts certain lives as disposable. And abolition is the way that we can challenge that. It’s a way that we can say that there are no lives that are disposable.

And as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, you know, where life is precious, life is precious, you know.

Well, I’m so glad that we are, you know, bringing this to our listeners. And just, you know, we’re mentioning a lot of words. Like you just dropped the word extraction and like we haven’t even talked about extractivism, which just shows that we could do 10 hours here and we wouldn’t get to everything.

But I want to get to one thing you said that really piqued my interest, which is that psychiatric, or I’m not even sure how to find the words to, you know what I’m talking about.

Tabitha: Yeah. So I’ve been thinking a lot about, like when I came out of prison, I talked a lot about my like criminal incarceration and the impact that that had on me. And then, then after a little while, I started thinking about incarceration that I had by the state in psych wards and the similarity about my experience there and my experience in prison and how really they were both exactly the same.

So it took me a little while to understand that because when you’re incarcerated in a psych ward, you’re sort of ghastly into thinking that this is care. They’re caring for you, they’re keeping you safe. So it took me a little while to kind of get it through my head that actually it was just another form of punishment, another form of containment.

Like I was detained by the state because I was mentally unwell. This isn’t a form of care, this is a form of incarceration. Yes.

So I started thinking about the ways that mad liberation and abolition are intertwined because they both refuse the state’s power to define whose minds, bodies and lives are legitimate. So psychiatry like prisons have been used as tools of control, pathologizing resistance, locking people away, medicating people into silence and justifying that coercion in the name of care. You know, so I started like, the way I see it, like abolition insists that cages, whether made of bars or locked hospital doors are not healing, right?

So I start to think about it in terms of like mad liberation brings the vision and practices of survival, collective care, mutual aid, non-carceral crisis support. So like not calling the cops on someone who’s in distress. That’s what abolition depends on.

So both of them, whether it’s abolition of prisons or abolition of these kind of carceral responses to mental distress, they demand a world where distress, rage, grief, or altered states are not criminalized or medicalized, but they’re held with dignity, autonomy, and communities. So a lot of the work I’m doing now when I talk about abolition, I’m talking about abolition of these forced and coerced medical responses to distress. So I’m starting to have conversations in our community here about not about alternatives to police responses, because as soon as we start talking about alternatives to police responses, people start to think about that idea of alternatives, people think about replacing police with something else.

So they start to go, oh, we could send a social worker instead. Well, actually no, because social workers have caused just as much harm to my people as the cops have. But what I want to start talking about is, what would it look like for someone in mental distress at that moment, and I’m using mental distress in inverted commas, because even those terms are very heavily laden, right?

They’re very heavily laden with psychiatric sort of overtures to them. But what would it look like for someone in a moment of distress to be held by their community? What would it look like in community care?

So for everyone, it’s very different. But also, what would it look like for that mental distress not to be pathologized? So right now, if you open your phone, we all see it in our social media.

We are heavily bombarded with graphic images of genocide playing out before our eyes. We are seeing, and trigger warning, I’m going to describe it. We are seeing images of parents carrying plastic bags of bones of their children.

We are seeing children with limbs amputated here on my country. We are seeing deaths in custody over and over again. We’re seeing families call for justice of missing, disappeared and murdered Aboriginal women.

Every day we are bombarded with images of grief and despair. It is a natural human response to be sad, to be in grief, to be in despair, to be in utter panic. So to pathologize that is to ignore a natural human response.

So what I want to talk about in community is how do we hold that? How do we hold space for each other to grieve for humanity? How do we say to our kin, how do we say to our neighbor, what you’re feeling right now is completely natural.

And how can I care for you and support you in your moment of grief? How can I care for you in this moment that you are feeling so overwhelmed by what you are experiencing and witnessing, that I can help you stay safe in this moment? How can I support you to feel this very natural response?

To me, to not feel these natural responses is to mean that you’re actually disassociating and potentially you are the one that actually needs support because when I’m doing my shopping and I look around and I don’t see people with that same panic in their eyes that I have, I think, what’s going on? Can’t you see what’s happening? Can’t you see?

So these are the conversations I want to have in community. I want to have this idea of how do we create these shared strategies for survival? How do we create these collective care outside of clinical models?

How do we create safe non-castoral spaces where people can rest, where people can rage, where people can grieve, where people can alter without fear of restraint or detention? Also, what I want to do, Marc, is I want to get the funding that is currently in policing psychiatric hospital and put it into housing, put it into food, put it into healing infrastructure. I also want to decriminalize survival.

I want to end the laws that punish drug use. I want to end the laws that punish poverty, migration, and public nuisance behaviors that are tied to distress because that’s critical. I want to embed Mad and disabled leadership in all decisions that affect our lives rather than psychiatrists and bureaucrats that decide for us.

I want to see when someone is dragged to a hospital because they’re wailing in the grief over the death of someone in their family that they are not hospitalized and forced to have electricity pumped through their brain that steals their memories through electroshock treatment but instead they’re held in their grief and that their grief is valued as a natural form of human emotion. Like it just distresses me when I see this happening. You’ve got to go to an emergency department with your child that’s broken their leg and you see an elderly person grieving because they’ve just lost their husband that they may have been married to for like the past 60 years of their lives and you’re seeing them being carted off because of what the hospital is saying is like a mental episode if you listen as I put that in inverted commas, but is actually an overt display of extreme grief.

And it’s like that is a natural form. And I want to hold that person. I want to ask them what do they need in that moment and how can we as a community wrap our giant collective arms around that person?

That’s what I want to see. Like treat this madness and distress as part of human diversity, not as something to be hidden or fixed. Let’s value it.

Let’s value rage, grief, and breakdown as forms of knowledge and sites of connection, not as symptoms to be erased.

Marc: Yeah. I love this and I want to put down two takeaways that I think you and I both believe will bring us closer to that. One is that the greed of our society makes it very difficult to have decent health care or whatever we call it, decent understanding of mental illness, if we call it that.

The fact that, for instance, the entire medical industry, as far as I know around the world, certainly in my so-called country, is just riddled with corruption and rudderless in terms of ethics.

It’s the illness of money, the illness of greed, and to me, until we have an egalitarian society, we’re not likely to have a healthy society.

The other thing, and I’d like to know if you see these both as important principles, the other is just trusting communities. We have to trust our natural communities, which are not always defined by space.

My natural community is people who listen to the same music that I listen to all over the world, for instance. But I trust all communities I’m in. I don’t trust nations.

I don’t trust states. I don’t trust any governments, but I trust communities.

Tabitha: Absolutely. Yeah, I get my strength from community. I was only having this conversation with someone last week.

I’d been asked to be a part of a conference for an organization that our principles don’t align. The patrons of their organization are former Chief Justices, former heads of police. I’m like, I cannot be involved with an organization that their patrons are carceral agents.

They said, but it’s really good to be there because it’s about telling them, pushing back against it. And I said, I have no interest in lobbying up. What I’m interested in is expanding our knowledge horizontally.

What I’m really interested in is empowering and working with my community and sharing my information, my wisdom horizontally because I think that these are my sites of learning. This is where I get my most growth and this is where that’s what I’m interested in. I have a zero interest in what’s above me.

What I care about is the collective knowledge and wisdom, love and support of community. And that is because they will not free us, we free us. Liberation is going to come from each other.

And that’s what I care about because the change is, as I said earlier, the change is never going to come from the halls of legislature. Academics are never going to free us.

Marc: Because they are bought and sold by corporations for one thing.

Tabitha: Totally, totally. And the academics aren’t going to free us either. Let’s not appeal to them.

And I say that as someone with two postgraduate degrees. What’s going to save us is the care and love of our community. And people laugh at me when, like they say, we just have to love each other more.

They look at me like I’m some Pollyanna. But when did love become such a radical concept? You know, if we loved each other just a little bit more, the world would be a different place.

War would look differently, right? Like if we loved each other, it, you know, things would look very different. Yes.

But I want to just pick up on something you said before around healthcare, because I think it was really important, Marc, what you said around healthcare and the deliberate underfunding of healthcare and the way it is. Because I think the underfunding of healthcare is very deliberate in the way it’s done. Like it’s no mistake that there is endless money for prisons and policing and forms of punishment.

Like there is always a bed for a person in a prison, but there’s never enough beds for a woman in a DV shelter or a bed for someone in a homeless shelter. There is always a bed in a prison or always a detention facility. But the underfunding of health care keeps communities sick, it keeps communities exhausted, and it keeps communities easily governed.

Yes. But they funnel billions into policing, billions into the military, and billions into border enforcement. It’s a strategy that turns health care into a privilege instead of a right.

And it ensures that survival itself is rationed and used to leverage to maintain inequality. And it’s really important that we understand that. Like in Australia, we have what we call universal health care.

And don’t get me wrong, we are privileged in some way compared to the US in terms of our health care. Like when I compare it to yours, we are quite lucky and adverting commerce. However, even as much as we say that our health care is universal, it is not entirely universal.

Because if you are in prison, you do not have access to universal health care. So we do not have access to what we call our Medicare system. Prisoners are not able to access Medicare health care.

So while we do have health care in prison, it is not the same as the health care that you have access to on the outside. So even in Australia, which is well known for its universal health care, and people look at it with envy, and rightly so because we do have a different level of health care to other people, and there’s a privilege around that. Yes, but there is still a deliberate underfunding of health care within Australia and a different level of access.

There is even a different level of access in the community in terms of what Aboriginal people have access to in difference to the rest of the community. But even when we look at that deliberate underfunding within prisoners and what prisoners have access to. So when we look at that for prisoners in Australia, because we do not have access to Medicare, it means we don’t have access to those really important things that people on the outside have access to, like mental health care plans.

And so what we know about the construction of, like what people, the needs, the health care needs of people in prison. Because they’re deliberately underfunding the health care, it means that people in prison are becoming out more unhealthy and more sick. And we’re not counting the deaths from custody.

So people are dying when they come out of prison because they’ve had inadequate health care. And I say that’s a very deliberate thing of government.

Marc: Yes. These are important things. And it just shows how far we need to go. But we’re going and we’re not going to… I’m sure, by the way, that you… One positive result of your own history is that you have a lot of solidarity with other people who have suffered the same.

Let’s talk about when World BEYOND War has its annual conference next month. I think, are you leading a panel? Is that right? Can you tell us about that?

Tabitha: Yes, I’m really excited to lead the panel. So what I’m really excited about with the panel is connecting with people internationally. I think when you do so much work in your own country, you get this sort of…

You get to hear of what’s happening within your country and your perspective of… If you’re an Indigenous person within your country, you get this sort of focus of the Indigenous experience here, and what that means for you as a First Nations person here, what that means for you as an abolitionist here. I think what the conference is going to give me is this international perspective.

Even though I try to keep across from that, it’s going to give me this really intimate focus on what’s happening. I’m really excited to hear about the work that’s happening in people’s communities over there, and then what we can draw from that to apply here, but the lessons that we can learn from that. Because I think that that’s the exciting thing about learning is that it’s lifelong, but also I learned so much from hearing about the work that people are doing in their own country, and what it means for them individually and collectively.

I think when people speak about, like people speak from the chest, right? People speak from their belly. People speak, like I think about the campfires that burn within them, and people speak with so much heart when they are from their own communities, and they’re doing this change making work.

And I’m really excited to hear about that. And when I’ve read the abstracts of the work that people are presenting on, I’m really excited to hear what they’re going to present and what I can bring back to our own communities, those learnings. So yeah, I’m very excited about it.

Marc: What you said is really what is great about World BEYOND War’s conferences. And what we do is that we make an effort to be global. I’m on the staff of World BEYOND War, and every week we have a global meeting on Zoom. You know, and it’s really good to connect with people all over the world. It means a lot to me as an anti-war activist. That’s kind of my lifeline is being part of a global group.

I do think you’re going to bring a lot to this. I’m really looking forward to what you bring. And anyone who’s listening to this in real time, absolutely show up at this conference.

And it’ll speak for itself. Nobody ever regrets going to a peace conference. We need that solidarity so much right now.

Tabitha: I think that’s what it is as well. It feels like we’re reaching across countries. I think when I was asked to do it, I always get this kind of imposter syndrome as well.

I was a little bit like, why am I being asked to chair this, like to facilitate this panel? These speakers really are like, I shouldn’t be the one chairing this panel. The baby in this group, why am I being asked?

But I’m excited about it because it feels like we’re reaching arms across the scene. That’s what it felt like to me when I read everyone’s abstracts, who’s going to be on the panel. It felt like there wasn’t a gap between our countries because what they’re speaking about, while each of them is different, the stories are the same, right?

Our struggles and our humanity and our visions for liberation are the same. They’re same, same but different. And I think that that made me feel so, it just created this warmth within me and this sense of community, despite us having never met and despite our experience being so different, just this shared humanity that we all have in these spaces and this vision for this beautiful future where we all live free and this idea of freedom for me.

And I think as an incarcerated person, like freedom has been different things to me at different times. But when I read other people’s vision for freedom, I realized that this idea of freedom and liberation is such a global thing. Like it’s, it really means the same thing to all of us.

In the kind of overall sense, it might look very different in each community, but overall our vision for liberation is the same thing. And I think that’s what I like about what’s going to happen with this conference, is it’s going to show us all this beautiful shared humanity that we have and how we can reach across the ocean and touch each other in a way that the government and the state apparatus tries to keep us separated. But you can’t actually separate people when you have a political vision of liberation.

You can’t separate us when we have shared imaginings and this conference creates these portals of discovery for us. These, what I always talk about these dreaming spaces and this conference feels like another dreaming space for everyone to step into the portal and to think about how we can work collectively without a border, like in a borderless space to dream up these visions of liberation. And so, yeah, I’m really excited to do that.

I’m excited, yeah, to chair this panel and think, hear about the brilliant, brilliant, innovative work being done by people in spite of state intervention, right? In spite of the state constantly putting barriers in everyone’s place. And I think it’s really courageous for people to do this work.

I think we underplay that all the time, because when you are doing liberation work, your body and your liberty and your income is at risk, right? All the time, like people don’t realize how risky this work is.

Marc: I think more and more so. I think it’s getting more and more so as fascism tightens its grip on various parts of the world. It does take courage to be an activist, for sure. You know that because you’ve been incarcerated.

Tabitha: Yeah. I think that’s the thing that I’m excited about, that this panel that I’m sharing will bring together global indigenous voices, and even more so, it’s going to draw on ancestral ways of knowing, being, and doing. I really like that idea of bringing.

For me as a First Nations person, I never just exist in the now. I always exist in the past, present, and the future. I like the fact that this panel will draw on the past.

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