Saturday 23rd of November 2024
Home » Blogs » John Richardson's blog

welcome to country ....

welcome to country ....

Australia has again declared war on its Indigenous people, reminiscent of the brutality that brought universal condemnation on apartheid South Africa. Aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years. In Western Australia, where mining companies make billion dollar profits exploiting Aboriginal land, the state government says it can no longer afford to "support" the homelands.

Vulnerable populations, already denied the basic services most Australians take for granted, are on notice of dispossession without consultation, and eviction at gunpoint. Yet again, Aboriginal leaders have warned of "a new generation of displaced people" and "cultural genocide".

Genocide is a word Australians hate to hear. Genocide happens in other countries, not the "lucky" society that per capita is the second richest on earth. When "act of genocide" was used in the 1997 landmark report 'Bringing Them Home', which revealed that thousands of Indigenous children had been stolen from their communities by white institutions and systematically abused, a campaign of denial was launched by a far-right clique around the then prime minister John Howard. It included those who called themselves the Galatians Group, then Quadrant, then the Bennelong Society; the Murdoch press was their voice.

The Stolen Generation was exaggerated, they said, if it had happened at all. Colonial Australia was a benign place; there were no massacres. The First Australians were victims of their own cultural inferiority, or they were noble savages. Suitable euphemisms were deployed.

The government of the current prime minister, Tony Abbott, a conservative zealot, has revived this assault on a people who represent Australia's singular uniqueness. Soon after coming to office, Abbott's government cut $534 million in indigenous social programmes, including $160 million from the indigenous health budget and $13.4 million from indigenous legal aid.

In the 2014 report 'Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Key Indicators', the devastation is clear. The number of Aboriginal people hospitalised for self-harm has leapt, as have suicides among those as young as eleven. The indicators show a people impoverished, traumatised and abandoned. Read the classic expose of apartheid South Africa, The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond, who told me he could write a similar account of Australia.

Having insulted indigenous Australians by declaring (at a G20 breakfast for David Cameron) that there was "nothing but bush" before the white man, Abbott announced that his government would no longer honour the longstanding commitment to Aboriginal homelands. He sneered, "It's not the job of the taxpayers to subsidise lifestyle choices."

The weapon used by Abbott and his redneck state and territorial counterparts is dispossession by abuse and propaganda, coercion and blackmail, such as his demand for a 99-year leasehold of Indigenous land in the Northern Territory in return for basic services: a land grab in all but name. The Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion, refutes this, claiming "this is about communities and what communities want". In fact, there has been no real consultation, only the co-option of a few.

Both conservative and Labor governments have already withdrawn the national jobs programme, CDEP, from the homelands, ending opportunities for employment, and prohibited investment in infrastructure: housing, generators, sanitation. The saving is peanuts.

The reason is an extreme doctrine that evokes the punitive campaigns of the early 20th century "chief protector of Aborigines", such as the fanatic A.O. Neville who decreed that the first Australians "assimilate" to extinction. Influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis, Queensland's "protection acts" were a model for South African apartheid. Today, the same dogma and racism are threaded through anthropology, politics, the bureaucracy and the media. "We are civilised, they are not," wrote the acclaimed Australian historian Russel Ward two generations ago. The spirit is unchanged.

Having reported on Aboriginal communities since the 1960s, I have watched a seasonal routine whereby the Australian elite interrupts its "normal" mistreatment and neglect of the people of the First Nations, and attacks them outright. This happens when an election approaches, or a prime minister's ratings are low. Kicking the blackfella is deemed popular, although grabbing minerals-rich land by stealth serves a more prosaic purpose. Driving people into the fringe slums of "economic hub towns" satisfies the social engineering urges of racists.

The last frontal attack was in 2007 when Prime Minister Howard sent the army into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to "rescue children" who, said his minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, were being abused by paedophile gangs in "unthinkable numbers".

Known as "the intervention", the media played a vital role. In 2006, the national TV current affairs programme, the ABC's 'Lateline', broadcast a sensational interview with a man whose face was concealed. Described as a "youth worker" who had lived in the Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu, he made a series of lurid allegations. Subsequently exposed as a senior government official who reported directly to the minister, his claims were discredited by the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists. The community received no apology.

The 2007 "intervention" allowed the federal government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands in ways with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty reported, a 40 per cent lower mortality rate.

It is this "traditional life" that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on Indigenous organisations. The homelands are seen as a threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia. It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a spectre on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.

The current political attack was launched in the richest state, Western Australia. Last October, the state premier, Colin Barnett, announced that his government could not afford the $90 million budget for basic municipal services to 282 homelands: water, power, sanitation, schools, road maintenance, rubbish collection. It was the equivalent of informing the white suburbs of Perth that their lawn sprinklers would no longer sprinkle and their toilets no longer flush; and they had to move; and if they refused, the police would evict them.

Where would the dispossessed go? Where would they live? In six years, Barnett's government has built few houses for Indigenous people in remote areas. In the Kimberley region, Indigenous homelessness - aside from natural disaster and civil strife - is one of the highest anywhere, in a state renowned for its conspicuous wealth, golf courses and prisons overflowing with impoverished black people. Western Australia jails Aboriginal males at more than eight times the rate of apartheid South Africa. It has one of the highest incarceration rates of juveniles in the world, almost all of them indigenous, including children kept in solitary confinement in adult prisons, with their mothers keeping vigil outside.

In 2013, the former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me that the state was "racking and stacking" Aboriginal prisoners. When I asked what she meant, she said, "It's warehousing."

In March, Barnett changed his story. There was "emerging evidence", he said, "of appalling mistreatment of little kids" in the homelands.  What evidence? Barnett claimed that gonorrhoea had been found in children younger than 14, then conceded he did not know if these were in the homelands. His police commissioner, Karl O'Callaghan, chimed in that child sexual abuse was "rife". He quoted a 15-year-old study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. What he failed to say was that the report highlighted poverty as the overwhelming cause of "neglect" and that sexual abuse accounted for less than 10 per cent.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a federal agency, recently released a report on what it calls the "Fatal Burden" of Third World disease and trauma borne by Indigenous people "resulting in almost 100,000 years of life lost due to premature death". This "fatal burden" is the product of extreme poverty imposed in Western Australia, as in the rest of Australia, by the denial of human rights.

In Barnett's vast rich Western Australia, barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited communities for which his government has a duty of care. In the town of Roeburne, in the midst of the booming minerals-rich Pilbara, 80 per cent of the indigenous children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media that causes deafness.

In 2011, the Barnett government displayed a brutality in the community of Oombulgurri the other homelands can expect. "First, the government closed the services," wrote Tammy Solonec of Amnesty International, "It closed the shop, so people could not buy food and essentials. It closed the clinic, so the sick and the elderly had to move, and the school, so families with children had to leave, or face having their children taken away from them. The police station was the last service to close, then eventually the electricity and water were turned off. Finally, the ten residents who resolutely stayed to the end were forcibly evicted [leaving behind] personal possessions. [Then] the bulldozers rolled into Oombulgurri. The WA government has literally dug a hole and in it buried the rubble of people's homes and personal belongings."

In South Australia, the state and federal governments launched a similar attack on the 60 remote Indigenous communities. South Australia has a long-established Aboriginal Lands Trust, so people were able to defend their rights - up to a point. On 12 April, the federal government offered $15 million over five years. That such a miserly sum is considered enough to fund proper services in the great expanse of the state's homelands is a measure of the value placed on Indigenous lives by white politicians who unhesitatingly spend $28 billion annually on armaments and the military. Haydn Bromley, chair of the Aboriginal Lands Trust told me, "The $15 million doesn't include most of the homelands, and it will only cover bare essentials - power, water. Community development? Infrastructure? Forget it."

The current distraction from these national dirty secrets is the approaching "celebrations" of the centenary of an Edwardian military disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 when 8,709 Australian and 2,779 New Zealand troops - the Anzacs - were sent to their death in a futile assault on a beach in Turkey. In recent years, governments in Canberra have promoted this imperial waste of life as an historical deity to mask the militarism that underpins Australia's role as America's "deputy sheriff" in the Pacific.

In bookshops, "Australian non-fiction" shelves are full of opportunistic tomes about wartime derring-do, heroes and jingoism. Suddenly, Aboriginal people who fought for the white man are fashionable, whereas those who fought against the white man in defence of their own country, Australia, are unfashionable. Indeed, they are officially non-people. The Australian War Memorial refuses to recognise their remarkable resistance to the British invasion. In a country littered with Anzac memorials, not one official memorial stands for the thousands of native Australians who fought and fell defending their homeland.

This is part of the "great Australian silence", as W.E.H. Stanner in 1968 called his lecture in which he described a "cult of forgetfulness on a national scale". He was referring to the Indigenous people. Today, the silence is ubiquitous. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales currently has an exhibition, 'The Photograph and Australia', in which the timeline of this ancient country begins, incredibly, with Captain Cook.

The same silence covers another enduring, epic resistance. Extraordinary demonstrations of Indigenous women protesting the removal of their children and grandchildren by he state, some of them at gunpoint, are ignored by journalists and patronised by politicians.  More Indigenous children are being wrenched from their homes and communities today than during the worst years of the Stolen Generation. A record 15,000 are presently detained "in care"; many are given to white families and will never return to their communities.

Last year, the West Australian Police Minister, Liza Harvey, attended a screening in Perth of my film, 'Utopia', which documented the racism and thuggery of police towards black Australians, and the multiple deaths of young Aboriginal men in custody. The minister cried.

On her watch, 50 City of Perth armed police raided an Indigenous homeless camp at Matagarup, and drove off mostly elderly women and young mothers with children. The people in the camp described themselves as "refugees... seeking safety in our own country". They called for the help of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

Australian politicians are nervous of the United Nations. Abbott's response has been abuse. When Professor James Anaya, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People, described the racism of the "intervention", Abbott told him to, "get a life" and "not listen to the old victim brigade".

The planned closure of Indigenous homelands breaches Article 5 of the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). Australia is committed to "provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for... any action which has the aim of dispossessing [Indigenous people] of their lands, territories or resources". The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is blunt. "Forced evictions" are against the law.

An international  momentum is building. In 2013, Pope Francis urged the world to act against racism and on behalf of "indigenous people who are increasingly isolated and abandoned". It was South Africa's defiance of such a basic principle of human rights that ignited the international opprobrium and campaign that brought down apartheid. Australia beware.

The Secret Country Again Wages War On Its Own People

 

lest we forget ....

ANZAC Day is about forgetting. Who remembers that Gallipoli was a defeat? That a number of returning soldiers, scarred by the reality of war and what they had experienced, became socialists and communists to fight for a society where war no longer existed?

Who remembers that revolutions in Russia and then Germany ended the First World War?

Who remembers the mass working class opposition to conscription which defeated referendums in 1916 and 1917. Why aren’t they remembered? Perhaps because they don’t fit into the ruling class agenda of unity of nation rather than divisions into class?

The defeated conscription referendums or the New South Wales 1917 general strike are more a symbol of our ‘nationhood’ than soldiers on a god forsaken bit of shore invading Turkey.

The Gallipoli nation building myth arose as a consequence of the class divisions in Australia and the outbreak of class struggle globally and in Australia as a response to the war that the victorious working class revolution in Russia in 1917 epitomised and represented in concentrated form.

The creation of myth and the forgetting go hand in hand. They are part of the ruling class strategy of creating an image of Australia and Australians that bears little relation to the truth.

History tells a very different story about our ruling class and its brutality. That brutality began with Invasion Day, 26 January 1788. The genocide against Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders began then.

Terra nullius was a fiction to justify the invasion and brutal dispossession of peoples who had lived here for 65000 years. This was genocide. Mabo and Wik and Native Title legislation are not about reversing that. They too are about forgetting the remembering.

Henry Reynolds estimates that, between 1788 and 1920, 20,000 Aboriginal people fell defending their land in an ongoing war against the invaders. The Indigenous population dropped from, on conservative estimates, 300,000 at the time of the invasion to 70,000 130 years later.

Many of these people died because of disease, itself a consequence of the invasion, but they also died as a result of the consequences that flow from genocide and dispossession – murder, poverty, alienation, loss of social structure, alcoholism, racism, lack of food, stolen generations to name a few.

Genocide against Aboriginal people is one theme that runs through the history of the last 227 years. The failure to recognise that genocide is another ongoing theme.

ANZAC Day, the supposed symbol and celebration of  the ‘nation’ that is Australia, denies this most obvious truth – Australian society was founded on the genocide of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and that genocide continues today.

Aborigines were not passive victims of the white invasion. In and around Sydney, for example, Pemulwuy was a famous freedom fighter defending his land and life. From 1790 to 1802 he waged a sporadic, and then more concerted, guerrilla war against the white invaders.

There are many Indigenous freedom fighters white settler society ignores; fighters who in a less racist society would be honoured for their stance and the courage of their resistance.

Where are our monuments to these fallen heroes?

It was Marx who wrote that the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the mind of the living. This is true in two senses for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

First the consequences of the invasion continue today. The war against Aborigines, what I describe as genocide, has fundamentally alienated many Aboriginal people from their land, their identity, their culture and themselves. For example there is a shocking 17-year gap in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

The second aspect of being trapped by the past is that the policies of dispossession and genocide are being implemented even today.

The Howard Government invaded the Northern Territory in 2007 to further the destruction of our Indigenous people’s links to their land and culture. 1788 is being repeated today.

The religious ceremony of forgetting that is ANZAC Day is worshipping at the altar of that genocide.

Disgracefully the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments continued Howard’s racist Northern Territory intervention, an invasion clearly aimed at further dispossession of aboriginal people and their complete subjugation to the dictates of their white masters around grog, what they can buy, how much they can spend and whose land it really is. Abbott continues the invasion.

The Stolen Generations represented an attempt to wipe out Aborigines through forced assimilation.

The intervention and other policies are about removing Aboriginal people from their land, often for the benefit of mining companies.

In Sydney three years ago cops shot two young Aboriginal men for joyriding and then dragged one of those wounded, with a bullet in his neck, from the car and beat him. The ongoing and systematic police brutality against Aboriginal people is not some aberration – it is part of a racist system continuing its genocide against the original inhabitants.

Dispossession, the Stolen generations, deaths in custody, poverty, early morbidity, these are all consequences of a war against the original inhabitants, a war that has never ended.

Like the warriors of old, Aborigines today need to and do fight for justice. We must join them. Relying on Labor will not work. The Abbott government will further Labor’s racist agenda, if we let them.

Now is the time for Aboriginal people and their millions of supporters to mobilise and force the Government to recompense the stolen generations, withdraw the troops and other agencies of force from the Northern Territory and elsewhere, introduce land rights that recognise sovereignty and prior ownership and set up a system of compensation for the loss of sovereignty. Stop the war on indigenous Australians. Negotiate now.

Protests against the forced closure of 150 Aboriginal communities in Western Australia have already been big, the most notable being the one in Melbourne where 5000 people shut down the city centre.

Aboriginal groups across Australia have called further demonstrations against this aspect of genocide for 1 May. Details of the protests can be found here. Join in the fight for justice and freedom. Join these demonstrations. That is where our strength lies, tens of thousands of us on the streets united against racism.

Let’s unite and fight to stop the brutal war against Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders now.  Let’s start by stopping the genocidal closure of 150 Aboriginal communities in Western Australia. Let’s resist.

Lest we forget – Aboriginal resistance to genocide

vale uncle Ray ….

It is with deep sadness that Solidarity has learnt of the passing of Uncle Ray Jackson overnight. The news is a serious blow to the movement for Aboriginal freedom and to the struggle for socialism.

No one embodied determination and devotion to the struggle for justice more fully than Wiradjuri warrior Ray Jackson. Every waking moment, even through his final years when he constantly battled ill health, Ray was organising, writing and agitating for change, most often in his capacity as President of the Indigenous Social Justice Association. Ray was on call 24 hours a day for Aboriginal people being persecuted by police or so-called “child protection”, housing or other racist government agencies. He was constantly planning the next protest march, the next conference, the next media release in the fight against the systematic abuse of his people. His role will be irreplaceable.

Ray was stolen from his family during the Second World War, a fact worth remembering during the current frenzy of Anzac nationalism. In 1943 his father was killed fighting in New Guinea. Ray recalled, “His death led to me being taken from my Aboriginal mother. No War Widows’ Pension for her, just the taking of her children due solely to her Aboriginality. Such was the thanks for his contribution.”

Like so many of the Stolen Generations, his forcible removal meant Ray lost all contact with his Aboriginal family. In recent years, Ray played a crucial role in helping to establish the Grandmothers Against Removals, a network of families fighting the epidemic of Aboriginal child removal still gripping the country today.

Ray was special in terms of his commitment to the socialist transformation of society, and had been a member of the Socialist Alliance and Freedom Socialist Party. He deeply understood the connections between capitalism’s attempts to destroy Aboriginal communities and the way it wages unending war, destroys the environment and exploits working people everywhere. While racist Australian politicians beat the drums of fear about Muslim immigration and lock up asylum seekers, Uncle Ray organised a series of ceremonies to present Aboriginal passports to refugees. Among the recipients were the family of Hamid Kehazaei, the asylum seeker killed as a result of medical negligence on Manus Island last year.

Uncle Ray argued that Aboriginal people were “the first socialists” and believed deeply that a society based on collective decision making, peaceful co-existence and respect for the land were essential features of Aboriginal society. He was convinced a world without bosses or oppression was possible if workers and oppressed peoples grew strong enough to rid the world of capitalism. He gave his life to this struggle.

Deaths in custody campaign

Much of Ray’s day to day activism focussed on winning justice for Black deaths in custody and stopping the ongoing, systematic murder of Aboriginal people at the hands of police. I worked closely with Ray on a number of cases and always marvelled at how he made sure every excruciating detail was understood and every police assertion was challenged. He fought to make sure that families of deaths in custody victims had all the support they needed—from independent forensic experts, to the best available legal counsel, to an angry crowd willing to march on the police station.

This tireless work was acknowledged in 2013 when the French Government awarded a Human Rights Laureate award to the Indigenous Social Justice Association. Many of the families championed by Uncle Ray are yet to win justice, including the family of TJ Hickey. The struggle to ensure that inquest is re-opened is just one of many that will need to be carried on with Ray’s spirit guiding us forward.

His work against police brutality was not restricted to Aboriginal deaths, with Ray insisting that the links constantly be made with the role police play in enforcing racism and class divisions across society. One of many fights he took up was justice for Roberto Curti, the Brazilian student tasered to death by NSW Police in 2012. He took every opportunity to challenge the corrupt practice of “police investigating police”.

Recently 2000 people marched in Sydney against Aboriginal community closures. Uncle Ray played a crucial role in initiating this protest and making sure that the march finished at the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy, drawing the links between the atrocity of forced closures taking place in remote areas and fight to rebuild Aboriginal community housing at the Block. Ray was advertised to speak at the rally, but couldn’t make it because he was hospitalised with pneumonia. The afternoon before he died, just out of hospital, Ray had visited the fire at the Redfern Tent Embassy, making plans for the next stage of the struggle. We must ensure the upcoming march on 1 May is loud in tribute for this tireless warrior.

Uncle Ray was a key link binding together many groups and struggles here in Sydney, across Australia and indeed across the world. His compassion and patience welcomed many people into the struggle and ensured they had a meaningful role to play. His passing is a tragic blow. But he lives on in the struggle. Solidarity sends its condolences to all Ray’s friends, family and comrades. Rest in Peace with your ancestors my dear Uncle, you have earned this rest more than anyone.

Farewell Ray Jackson, tireless fighter for justice and Aboriginal rights

have done nothing but fight for justice...

No justice: Aboriginal Legal Service chief

Aboriginal Legal Service chief executive Dennis Eggington said it was a harsh outcome.

"I think the Collard family have come to the realisation that they're not going to get justice from any kind of legal system that took their children away from them," he said.

"I think it's par for the course that governments past and present continue to be in this undeclared war against WA's first nations peoples.

"Here we have a family who had the children removed because they were Aboriginal people.

"The duty of care that the State Government had to these people when they were institutionalised was thrown out the window with the children being sexually and physically, terribly abused.

"To me it's a very clear message whether it's to the Collard family, or to future litigants who feel that they've been treated unfairly, or the duty of care has been abandoned by the Government, to 'don't come after the Government because we will continue to protect our so-called innocence in all of this'."

Mr Eggington said he hoped the Government would not seek payment.

"You'd hope that the state recognised what happened to the family because the story's right and the story's true," he said.

"The Collards have done nothing but fight for justice for what's happened to them."

Mr Eggington said the legal service would meet with the Collards next week.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-09/stolen-generation-family-must-pay-court-costs/6457256

a continuation of patriarchal colonialism...

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has carefully selected a set of Indigenous advisors who will tell him exactly what he wants to hear, writes Natalie Cromb.

An Indigenous Affairs advisor to Tony Abbott recently had to issue an apology following his poor taste costume to an American themed event – his choice – a Confederate flag shirt.

Unless you have been living under a rock or are a culturally sheltered white affluent right wing Australian, you would know that the Confederate flag is used by white supremacist hate groups in America in much the same way the Southern Cross flag was used by those in the race riots at Cronulla in 2005. Put simply, to wear this flag as a shirt at all, let alone in the cultural climate post black massacre in the U.S., you are either at the zenith of human stupidity or a blatant racist; either way, you certainly should not hold a senior position advising the government on matters of race.

This begs the question: what qualifies a person to be an Indigenous Adviser in Australia under the Abbott Government? Is there a criteria?

The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Nigel Scullion, was born in England, arrived in Australia in his teens and only just prior to becoming elected to the Australian Senate in 2001 did he relinquish his dual citizenship. A white Englishman entrusted with a portfolio of responsibility affecting the most marginalised population in Australia for 227 years. The Indigenous population marginalised by his mother country. Appropriate? Apparently so.

Perhaps I am being unfair? Surely there are some Indigenous people that get to have a say? Isn't there?

Of course there is.

Tony Abbott announced the formation of the Indigenous Advisory Council in September 2013 when he appointed – yes, you guessed it – Warren Mundine as chairman.

Warren Mundine’s appointment in this capacity sets the tone of how this government approaches Indigenous affairs in this country — a continuation of patriarchal colonialism.

read more: https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/tony-abbotts-indigenous-advisors,7960