Chaos continues in Los Angeles

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Annie Guest: Hello, welcome to PM. I'm Annie Guest, coming to you from the lands of the Turrbal and Yugera people in Brisbane. Tonight, chaos on the streets of Los Angeles as the National Guard cracks down on thousands of protesters. Also, difficult questions about when a patient should be forced to get electroconvulsive therapy and King's birthday honours for some inspiring Australians.
Geraldine Atkinson: We were teaching those children about their culture, about their identity. We wanted them to be children that were going to be proud of their originality. I'd go in classrooms with the children.
Annie Guest: First, California's Governor Gavin Newsom has announced he'll sue the Trump administration for deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles without consulting him first. As protests continue for the third day on the streets of LA over Donald Trump's immigration policy, tensions flared when the President brought in soldiers from the US Armed Forces Reserve. Legal experts argue the President is authorised to do so under certain circumstances, but this is different. Kathleen O'Connor reports.
Kathleen O'Connor: Gunshots echo through the streets of Los Angeles as thousands of angry protesters respond to President Donald Trump's extraordinary deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops in downtown LA. Protesters blocked a major freeway and set fire to numerous cars. Police fought back, using tear gas and rubber bullets in an attempt to control the crowd. Channel 9's US correspondent Lauren Tomasi was among the chaos and was shot in the leg live on TV. The ABC spoke to her afterwards.
Lauren Tomasi: Look, I did get hit by a rubber bullet and we were caught on the side. We were standing out of police way. But unfortunately, you know that we are reporting from the scene. But we are safe now.
Kathleen O'Connor: Lauren Tomasi says it's still an unfolding situation.
Lauren Tomasi: I'm in the heart of downtown LA now and there are still protesters who are lining the overpass of the highway right now. I'm looking at a few dozen riot police standing at the entrance to the 101 freeway. It's a major freeway in the heart of LA and it runs right up California. It's been shut down because protesters were on there. It feels like things may have cooled off a little bit at the moment. At one stage, there were three vehicles that were burning as police were trying to push these protesters back. But it's just been so much emotion and so much anger in LA.
Kathleen O'Connor: The clashes came on the third day of demonstrations against immigration raids carried out as part of Donald Trump's crackdown. But things escalated when President Trump deployed the National Guard, something he says was necessary to uphold law and order.
Lauren Tomasi: There is just so much pushback right now against the Donald Trump administration because it is the US president who ordered in the National Guard and Los Angeles residents very much for the most part are against that. This is a democratic city pushing back against a Republican government.
Kathleen O'Connor: Typically, a state's National Guard force is activated by the president at the request of the governor. According to American think tank the Brennan Center for Justice, this deployment marks the first time in six decades a state's National Guard was activated without a request from its governor. Political leaders are divided mainly along party lines over whether the president was justified in bringing them in. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass says it's a dangerous escalation.
Karen Bass: What we're seeing in LA is chaos caused by the administration. People should exercise their right to protest. That's their First Amendment right.
Kathleen O'Connor: California Governor Gavin Newsom called the National Guard deployment unlawful and formally requested that the Trump administration withdraw its troops. He spoke on television network MSNBC.
Robert Brokenshire: Donald Trump needs to pull back. He needs to stand down. Donald Trump is inflaming these conditions.
Kathleen O'Connor: President Trump is only allowed to request the National Guard in certain circumstances. President Trump claims the protests in Los Angeles constitute a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States. Jean Reese is the co-director of the University of South California's Immigration Clinic and an associate professor of law.
Jean Reese: The last time that the federal government deployed the National Guard without the request of that state was in 1957 in order to segregate schools where the governor of Arkansas has said, I'm not going to follow federal law. This is a very different situation. So it is likely unlawful to deploy. And I think this is part of kind of creating a spectacle and narrative for the Trump administration to make an example of Los Angeles.
Kathleen O'Connor: Los Angeles police say they've made dozens of arrests in the days since the protests began.
Annie Guest: Kathleen O'Connor reporting. Earlier, I spoke to migrant activist and Professor Dylan Rodriguez from the Black and Cultural Studies departments at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Dylan Rodriguez, you've not been among the protesters in Los Angeles, but among some of the activist groups. Can you tell us what was your gut reaction to learning that President Trump ordered the deployment of National Guard troops?
Dylan Rodriguez: I will say that I, among many others in the communities of organizers and solidarity supporters in the surrounding area and throughout the United States, were quite unsurprised. Why is that? By the mobilisation? Well, we've been waiting for the escalation to happen. And the escalation has already been happening. The way the Trump administration has been operating has been through, you know, spectacles of retaliation against real and perceived political enemies. And the entire state of California, in the view of the Trump administration, is itself an entire geographical and political area of retaliation. So, this is not surprising.
Annie Guest: Donald Trump posted online that he sent the National Guard in to restore order, saying LA has been invaded and occupied by what he called illegal aliens and criminals with insurrectionist mobs attacking to stop the deportation operations by federal agents. What do you say to that?
Dylan Rodriguez: Well, I'll say that this exhibits some of the prototypical hypocrisy and dishonesty. What he's pronounced is, as always, a pretext to play out his, on the one hand, his political whims and on the other hand, to normalise, and I want to emphasize that term, to normalise a state of one directional domestic warfare.
Annie Guest: What do you mean by domestic warfare conducted by his administration?
Dylan Rodriguez: Trump is using the inflammatory and racist rhetoric of illegal immigrants, which comes from an old reservoir of white supremacist depictions of brown and black people crossing borders. And it's used as a pretext to mobilise and normalise police violence, repressive police violence, and in this case, National Guard violence, so it actually goes beyond the police at this point on a domestic population.
Annie Guest: What do you say is the president's endgame?
Dylan Rodriguez: This is all traceable to Project 2025. Trump is simply a figurehead for this execution of what is a somewhat orthodox version of white supremacist fascism in the United States.
Annie Guest: You've accused President Trump of white supremacy there, but he says that he's simply deporting or arranging a deportation of illegal immigrants. Can you remind us, what is President Trump's stated immigration policy and how do you say it differs to previous administrations?
Dylan Rodriguez: Well, that's a really important question and I think it's important to consider the premises of the question. On the one hand, I think it's important to note that there's actually more continuity than there is difference in terms of the actual policy. The second dimension of that is that I'm not sure the Trump administration knows what its immigration policy is at this point. I think what the Trump administration knows is that it's committed to a militarisation and a normalisation of policing and warfare against whatever it deems to be the target population at that time. And Trump will be consistent in some ways and in some ways seemingly whimsical. In this case, he's focused on California and he's focused on black and brown people in California, which is in some ways nothing new.
Annie Guest: Activist and Professor Dylan Rodriguez from the Black and Cultural Studies departments at the University of California, Riverside. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it's taking a group of pro-Palestinian activists to Israel after Israeli commandos seized their vessel in international waters. The ship, called the Medline, launched by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was about 160 kilometres from Gaza when it was stopped, with allegations made about the possible use of chemical weapons on the activists. Dijana Damjanovic reports.
Dijana Damjanovic: The charity organisation running the mission says this video, which is yet to be verified, shows the moment the Medline was intercepted. The group says just after 1am local time, four speedboats approached their ship and then two drones sprayed a thick, white, paint-like substance onto the vessel before Israeli soldiers boarded it. Yasmin Akar is a 37-year-old activist from Germany. This video of her was posted on the group's social media account.
Yasemin Acar: We are masking our face right now. We have protectors right above our heads. We don't know what this is, if this is paint or some chemical. No idea, but please sound the alarm.
Dijana Damjanovic: The group says all on board have been detained and contact with them has been lost. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition is a group of international activists attempting to deliver aid and supplies into Gaza, including food, baby formula and crutches. It's understood prominent Swedish activist, 22-year-old Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a French ambassador of the European Parliament, are part of the crew. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs says the crew was taken to the Israeli port of Ashdod. In a written statement, it described the ship as a selfie yacht full of celebrities. It also said:
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: While Greta and the others attempted to stage a media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity, and which included less than a single truckload of aid, more than 1,200 aid trucks have entered Gaza from Israel within the past two years. And in addition, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has distributed close to 11 million meals directly to civilians in Gaza. There are ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip. They do not involve Instagram selfies.
Dijana Damjanovic: Francesca Albanese is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
Annie Guest: Dijana Damjanovic reporting there. This is PM, I'm Annie Guest. You can hear all our programs live or later on the ABC Listen app. Australian dairy farmers have suffered drought and floods this year, but they say the price of milk is an added challenge. While the price offered to dairy producers by the processing companies is higher than last year, farmers say it's not enough to make a living. Luke Radford reports.
Luke Radford: Dairy farming is a tough gig. There's long hours, early mornings, and you can't really just take a week off.
Bridget Goulding: We milk twice a day, 365 days of the year, so you don't get a break from it.
Luke Radford: That's Bridget Goulding from Kattunga in northern Victoria. Like many farmers, she lives and breathes her job, despite the challenges. But in recent years, the price she's getting for that hard work isn't enough.
Bridget Goulding: The problem though that is happening is that it's the costs that are really affecting the farming businesses. Everything has gone up in price and as dairy farmers, we can't just go, we need more.
Luke Radford: Dairy farmers sell their milk to processors who turn it into things like drinking milk or cheese. These include brands you may recognise like Bega or Norco. But there are also large multinational companies involved, like Fonterra from New Zealand, Saputo from Canada, and Lactalis from France. Every year, these processors have to announce their base price by the 1st of June, which they then can't go below. But when the price came out in May this year, farmers were shocked to discover it had barely increased. Robert Brokenshire is President of the South Australian Dairy Farmers Association.
Robert Brokenshire: Some of the processors have worked really hard to get the best possible price for farmers and other processors we're very disappointed with because we were hoping that they would all come in with at least $9 a kilogram milk solids opening offer. But for quite a lot, particularly some of the bigger multinationals, they came in at prices from about $8.60 to $8.80. And unfortunately, that's not a sustainable and viable price for dairy farmers.
Luke Radford: That price of $8.60 per kilogram milk solids is an industry term. It's used instead of price per litre because the raw milk is used for many different products like cheese, yogurt or even protein powder. It translates to somewhere between 75 and 80 cents per litre paid to the farmer. Robert Brokenshire says that number needs to be between 90 cents and a dollar and he fears the fallout if it isn't.
Robert Brokenshire: If the milk price is not there to be viable, notwithstanding that we love our cows and in many of our cases we've been breeding them for generations, the fact is that those of us in the high rainfall area with irrigation could turn to horticulture, vegetables and other diverse agricultural products. That would have an impact on the consumer because there'd be less milk production, more demand for that and probably would put an increase on the price in the supermarket.
Luke Radford: So given the days of the dollar per litre milk at the supermarket are now long gone, why are those higher prices not trickling down to farmers? There are many factors at play but it's mostly because of the international market. Matt Dalgleish is a market analyst and director of Episode3.net.
Matt Dalgleish: When it comes to the setting of the price, the domestic processes have to weigh up of course how that supply situation is situated. They've got to be very careful about what they offer because they are very much subject to that international market. They have to be competitive in that international market and when they're thinking of products that they're trying to sell into the domestic market, because we do have a significant amount of imports coming in of various different types of products, some of those imported products can be quite competitive too.
Luke Radford: Whatever the cause, dairy farmers say if they don't start getting paid more for their milk, there could be less of their product on Australian shelves in the future.
Annie Guest: Luke Radford reporting. The mental health treatment known as electroconvulsive therapy is often used as a last resort to address severe depression. Last year, more than 1,700 orders for involuntary electroconvulsive therapy or ECT were approved by tribunals across Australia. Some advocates are raising questions over consent but psychiatrists say those receiving mandatory ECT are too unwell to do so. Geraden Cann reports.
Geraden Cann : Rebecca says she remembers fighting her clinical team all the way to the theatre.
'Rebecca': I felt completely helpless, that my body wasn't my own. I felt like I was in a movie.
Geraden Cann : She was about to receive electroconvulsive therapy or ECT.
'Rebecca': I was shocked they could actually administer it against my will.
Geraden Cann : Rebecca, who's not using her real name for this story, had been experiencing delusions when she was voluntarily admitted to hospital. At one point she tried to go on holiday without any tickets or identification, but shortly after admission she was placed under a treatment order and told she would be having ECT. Her case raises the issue of when authorities should and should not be able to give a person ECT without their consent. Health authorities describe ECT as a safe procedure where the patient is under general anaesthetic. Electrodes are placed on the head and seizures are induced in the brain. Colleen Loo is a clinical psychiatrist and a professor at the University of New South Wales. She's also a former president of the International Society for ECT and Neurostimulation. She says for many patients receiving ECT their symptoms are so severe they've lost touch with reality, including those who pose a risk to their own safety.
Colleen Loo: So this person believed that they were in such a terrible state that they lacked internal organs. This was a delusional belief that they had no stomach, no gut, etc. and therefore they could not eat and drink. Now if you continue without eating and drinking you would die in a few days. Medication treatments hadn't worked. It's not a kind of state that you can talk people out of. Talking therapy does not work with delusions. So this person lacked the ability to understand they had an illness.
Geraden Cann : She says that patient was put under the Mental Health Act, treated on an involuntary basis, and was completely well after five or six treatments.
Colleen Loo: So this is an example of someone who was seriously ill so much so that they lost insight into actually having a mental illness, so could not have chosen ECT treatment even though in this case it was a life-saving treatment. And this is not just a one-off case. This person is very typical of the kind of people we treat in public mental health.
Geraden Cann : There are different rules in each state and territory, but most require a tribunal to approve a clinician's request to give a patient involuntary ECT. Those tribunals usually require a patient to be unable to give informed consent and to be admitted to hospital involuntarily. And there's usually a requirement that less restrictive treatments have been tried first. Simon Cotterill is a mental health advocate and has previously been an internal advisor to Victoria's Royal Health Commission into the mental health system. He says while he hasn't represented anyone before the tribunal, he's heard many others describe the process as a rubber-stamping exercise.
Simon Katterl: I spoke to people who gave evidence to the Royal Commission. I supported them to give evidence to the Royal Commission. They said that they felt silenced and that the treating team's perspectives were valued over them and their lawyers. People speak a lot about a lack of procedural fairness, that they're not given information in a timely way, even though that there's obligations under mental health legislation for treating teams to do so.
Geraden Cann : Katterl points to high ECT application approval rates as evidence tribunals too readily agree with clinicians. In the 2023 to 2024 year, the New South Wales Mental Health Review Tribunal approved 95% of the 749 applications for ECT orders. In Queensland, 92% were approved. Colleen Lu says the approval rates are so high because the doctors and tribunals work closely together, paying attention to the same legal criteria.
Colleen Loo: And we've all, when we started off, presented people who we thought needed treatment but the tribunal said, no, we will not approve that. So you learn kind of what is the threshold that the tribunal is likely to approve and we don't present people who are unlikely to meet that threshold.
Annie Guest: Clinical psychiatrist, Colleen Loo, ending that report from Geraden Cann. 830 Australians have been recognised in this year's King's Birthday Honours for contributions to the nation. Among this year's recipients are an Indigenous activist who's worked through all levels of the education system and an avid stamp collector who's traced some of Australia's postal history. Kimberley Price reports.
Kimberley Price: Dr Geraldine Atkinson has dedicated almost 50 years of her life to improving the education system for Indigenous students. She started out as an Aboriginal teachers' aide at Wanganui College in Shepparton, Victoria in 1976.
Geraldine Atkinson: All schools were given money to employ Aboriginal teacher aides to get students into schools so they said we would see an Aboriginal face. So I'd visit families of the children and I'd go in classrooms with the children.
Kimberley Price: Going the extra mile for students and their families is something the Bangerang-Wiradjuri elder continued to do as she saw the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.
Geraldine Atkinson: A lot of them were leaving school as soon as they turned 15 and that really worried me. I really thought something needed to be done.
Kimberley Price: Throughout Aunty Geraldine's career, she's worked across all levels of the education system, including starting a childcare centre in her local Rumbalara community to her role as President of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association. She's travelled to Canberra to lobby governments to do more for Indigenous education. As an inaugural co-chair of the First People's Assembly of Victoria, she's advocated for a treaty between the state government and Indigenous communities.
Geraldine Atkinson: We were teaching those children about their culture, about their identity. We wanted them to be children that were going to be proud of their Aboriginality.
Kimberley Price: Growing up in 1960s Australia on missions and communities along the Murray River, Aunty Geraldine says she was always proud to be Aboriginal.
Geraldine Atkinson: I think it was where I'd lived, lived in Leighton, that had made the house out of tin from the tip and there would be other families. So we were all together and we had each other and we all knew we were Aboriginal.
Kimberley Price: Today she still lives along her beloved Murray River in Barmah and Aunty Geraldine says she's proud to receive the National Award of Officer of the Order of Australia. Many others have received an honour today. In Lismore, near the northern New South Wales coast, Geoffrey Wotherspoon admits he had a bit of imposter syndrome when he found out he was receiving a Medal of the Order of Australia.
Geoffrey Wotherspoon: I did think at the time, have I done enough to deserve this and all that sort of stuff, but yes, certainly an honour.
Kimberley Price: Geoffrey Wotherspoon began collecting stamps in high school and it's led him down a path of researching his local history.
Geoffrey Wotherspoon: There's a close friend of ours, Lloyd Newton, he was an incredible collector and he took me under his wing and I've been collecting ever since. He specialised in the early series, the King George and the Kangaroo series and that's where I specialised.
Kimberley Price: As president of the Richmond River Philatelic Society for over 30 years, Geoffrey Wotherspoon has worked with many community members to record Lismore's history. In 2019, he wrote a book detailing Australia's first official airmail flight and led the re-enactment of the event for its centenary in 2020.
Geoffrey Wotherspoon: It started from just looking at our own local history, finding something and then it just basically got out of hand on a full blown investigation, took me across Australia and different places, all the national archives, everywhere, tracking down all this information on this aeroplane flight.
Kimberley Price: And through his passion for stamps and history, Geoffrey Wotherspoon continues to engage his community. He'll soon start passing his knowledge on to the next generation with school holiday programs.
Annie Guest: Kimberley Price with that report. Thanks for joining me for PM, I'm Annie Guest. The podcast of the full PM program is available on the ABC Listen app. That's where you'll find ABC News Daily with Sam Hawley each weekday morning. We'll be back at the same time tomorrow. Good night.