Aboriginal deaths in custody: the product of a racist system

By Hamish Chitts

On March 14 another Aboriginal person died in custody, this time in a Perth police watchhouse. He was 33 years old. His completely preventable death is one of over 300 that have occurred since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody issued its final report, with 339 recommendations, in April 1991. This latest victim of the racist “justice” system became quite ill in the watchhouse and was taken to hospital, then dragged back to the watchhouse, taken to hospital for a second time only to be brought back again to the cell where he would die.

In February, an 18-year-old Aboriginal man was on remand at Brisbane’s Arthur Gorrie high-security prison on misdemeanour charges when he became ill and later died in hospital. After initially receiving a headache tablet, he was repeatedly refused medical attention by prison staff and suffered in agony for 10 days. Other prisoners had to carry him around and when they protested to prison guards, one of the guards made the comment: “If he can go to the toilet, there’s nothing wrong with him.” It was only when the teenager became unconscious and fellow Aboriginal prisoners kept yelling and bashing on walls that he was taken to hospital. He died four days later on February 20. The cause of death has not been released.

At a 200-strong March 11 rally outside Queensland’s parliament the deceased’s mother told reporters: “I was treated badly at the hospital, very bad. I was sleeping on the floor in the hospital and then I was sent away from his bed the night before I lost him.” When asked by a reporter if this was by health workers or by prison officers she replied, “By the prison officers”.

March 11 was also the day when a new coronial inquest began into the 2004 death of 36-year-old Cameron Doomadgee (also known as Mulrunji) in the Palm Island watchhouse. This new inquest for the benefit of the Queensland Police Union has been called to officially and legally rewrite history. In 2006, acting state coroner Christine Clements found Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley was responsible for Mulrinji’s death. Two autopsies found that Mulrinji had died from internal bleeding due to a ruptured liver and speen. He also had four broken ribs. These are the kind of injuries normally seen after a high-speed car crash.

A year later Hurley won an appeal against Clement’s findings in the Townsville District Court, which ordered a new coronial inquest. Last June, the Queensland Court of Appeal ruled Clement’s findings be set aside, but it also found the process of the decision made by the Townsville court was “flawed”.

The Mulrinji case demonstrates that little has changed since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The commission found that while black prisoners did not die at a higher rate than whites, Aboriginal people were much more likely to be incarcerated in the first place. While Aboriginal Australians comprise 2% of the general population, they make up about 20% of the prison population. “In every single Aboriginal death in custody since 1991, police officers across the six [Australian] states and two territories routinely and fundamentally ignored the royal commission’s key recommendations”, Sam Watson, deputy director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, told the media.

The police in every state and territory were built in part on the dispossession, harassment, murder and attempted genocide of Aboriginal people. The police and prison guards are armed bodies of people that systematically harass and repress Aboriginal people. This situation is not unique to Australian capitalist society. The racist oppression of indigenous peoples by law-enforcement agencies is a common feature in the developed capitalist “democracies” that grew out of British capitalist settler colonies.

US government studies, as well as those of US and international civil and human rights organisations, have consistently found that Native Americans are disproportionately subject to human rights violations at the hands of law enforcement officers, ranging from pervasive verbal abuse and harassment, racial profiling, routine stops and frisks based solely on race to excessive force, unjustified shootings and torture. The Ojibwe News reported on January 31, 2003, how a police car pulled into the parking lot of a public housing project in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and police officers dragged two Native Americans, a man and a woman, out of the squad car. The officers physically abused them both, beating the man until he lay unconscious then left both of them outside in the parking lot in subzero weather. Witnesses reported that the man’s chest and head had been urinated on during the incident.

The American Friends Service Committee has reported that indigenous women detained in a Maine jail were routinely subjected to visual body cavity searches as a matter of policy whereas similarly situated white women were not. One US federal court of appeal has described the practice as “demeaning, dehumanizing, undignified, humiliating, terrifying, unpleasant, embarrassing, repulsive, signifying degradation and submission” — requiring women to bend over and expose their genital areas to officers, and were routinely accompanied by sexual and racist verbal abuse.In Canada, at a prison 200 km north east of Toronto on October 3, 2006, a native prisoner, Martin Blackwind, cut a major artery in his left arm. He pressed his cell emergency button, which brought him to prison officials’ attention. They provided no first aid and took ten minutes before calling an ambulance. Blackwind remained locked in his cell bleeding to death. The May 21, 2008 Intertribal Times reported that both corrections staff and fellow inmates have said that Blackwind’s race played a role in his death.

On December 5, 1998, Frank Joseph Paul, a 47-year-old native Canadian living in Vancouver, was arrested by two Vancouver police officers for being intoxicated in a public place. He was taken to a Vancouver police department jail but instead of being put in the jail’s sobering up facility, he was removed from the lockup, placed into a police van, and left soaking wet in an alleyway in East Vancouver. Paul’s body was found in the same alley the following morning. He had died of hypothermia. It took almost 10 years of campaigning to get Paul’s case investigated. When the inquiry concluded in 2009 it admitted that the “justice system failed Mr. Paul”. It made some recommendations but just as these inquiries go in Australia or the US, they are purely to protect the system, not indigenous people, by appearing to take action.

At the beginning of the Paul inquest in 2007, journalist and author Warren Goulding warned: “Inquiries, in particular, are expensive, unwieldy devices that generally do little more than pad the bank accounts of lawyers. It’s a mechanism used by government when it is no longer possible to ignore the issue or the injustice that has been done. There’s little to fear from most inquiries. They are conducted with a great deal of civility and faithful servants recycle previous recommendations and tender a few new ones that are too unrealistic to be implemented, too wishy-washy to be of any real value or, almost always, simply shoved under the carpet. Occasionally, government gets lucky and is able to boast about implementing a specific recommendation simply because it’s something they’ve had on the table anyway.”

Aboriginal leaders in Australia are again calling for a new royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. A new royal commission might put the spotlight on the systemic murder of Aboriginal people in custody and reveal it to a wider audience, but Goulding’s warning about such inquiries in Canada should be kept in mind. No-one should have any illusions that the results of a new royal commission will be any different from the one that concluded in 1991. Its well-meaning recommendations have simply been ignored by a police force and a prison system that enforces the racist oppression of Aboriginal people that is endemic to Australian capitalist-ruled society. As Malcolm X said shortly before his assassination in February 1965: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia

Speaking tour increases support for Ampilatwatja walk-off

By Hamish Chitts

During October, Richard Downs, an elder of the Alyawarra-speaking community from the Northern Territory township of Ampilatwatja (300km north-east of Alice Springs) toured major eastern Australian cities to raise support for a protest camp established 3km from the township. A group of 30 elders and leaders from Ampilatwatja had set up the camp after walking off their land on July 14 to protest against the racist Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) being perpetrated against their and other remote Aboriginal communities by the Rudd Labor government.

Downs’ tour has not only raised awareness about the suffering of Aboriginal people under the NTER, but it has drawn financial support from some unions allowing the Alyawarra to begin building a more permanent and sustainable community outside the bounds of the NTER. While the NTER was sold to people in 2007 by the Howard Coalition government and the federal ALP leadership as a “tough love” solution to an alleged wave of child abuse and the shortage of housing and other basic amenities in impoverished Aboriginal communities, in reality the NTER has done nothing but strip away what little control these communities had over their affairs.

Both the Howard and Rudd governments have used the NTER to bully the communities into signing their land over to the NT and federal governments with 40-90 year leases. Since the introduction of the NTER two years ago, neither the federal nor the NT government has built a single house in any community. The NTER and Northern Territory Housing management of Ampilatwatja has done nothing to fix sub-standard housing or broken septic systems that leak ankle-deep raw sewage into some houses and into a playground. In May the government shut down the community-run store.

At the time of the walk-off, Downs said in a media release: “The Federal Minister, departments and Government Business Managers (GBMs) have not shown any compassion, understanding or respect towards our leaders and my people. Our people are demoralized, hurt, embarrassed, outcaste on their own community. We no longer have any rights to exist as humans in our own country.”

In a letter to federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, Downs stated: “Under your GBM’s and intervention team’s poor management, my people and community is in disarray. Malfunctioning with dust, rubbish and poor housing with leaking sewage. People have no motivation, no self esteem, no direction. You took away our independent community store. What will you take away from us next?”

At an Aboriginal Rights Coalition public meeting in Brisbane on October 17, Downs spoke about the results of his visits to Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, which had raised the projected $20,000 required to sink a water bore at the campsite, with most of the money coming from supportive trade unions. Downs told the Brisbane meeting that unions were also helping to set up a water pump and a shower and toilet block that will run on solar power. There are also plans to begin erecting permanent buildings also running on renewable energy and the community has received offers from permaculturalists to establish self-managed food sources for the camp.

The walk-off and support from unions and non-Aboriginal people in the eastern states is drawing comparisons with an earlier milestone struggle for Aboriginal land rights. On August 22, 1966, 200 Aboriginal stockmen of the Gurindji people and their families walked off the Wave Hill pastoral station in the NT, owned by a British aristocrat Lord Vestey. Conversations between these stockmen and Dexter Daniels, the Australian Workers’ Union Aboriginal organiser, about their low wages and poor working conditions, had led to the walk-off.

Led by Vincent Lingiari, the stockmen set up camp in a river bed (Victoria River). The camp moved before the wet season of that year and in 1967 the Gurindji people settled some 30km from Wave Hill Station at Wattie Creek (Daguragu), in the heart of their traditional land, near a site of cultural significance. The Gurindji strike soon developed into a struggle to reclaim some of their land. Well-known writer and socialist Frank Hardy helped raise the Gurindji's cause through Communist Party and union contacts. The strike lasted from 1966 to 1975 and during this time Lingiari, Billy Bunter Jampijinpa and others toured Australia, with the support of unions, to address public meetings and build support for their cause.

What turned the tide for the Gurindji was their own determination to stand their ground. This impressed non-Aboriginal working people who in turn brought pressure to bear on capitalist politicians to act. In 1975, the Whitlam Labor government, under pressure from a growing Aboriginal land rights movement, finally negotiated with Vesteys to give the Gurindji back a portion of their land. Dagaragu would eventually become the first cattle station to be owned and managed by an Aboriginal community, today known as the Murramulla Gurindji Company.

Since the British invasion in 1788 to this day, the suffering of Aboriginal people has always been directly linked to the theft of their land. Even after the land was forcibly seized and secured by the military and police, the fact that Aboriginal people continue to assert their ownership of their lands continues to pose a problem to Australia's capitalist rulers. It is no coincidence that the latest government-run attempt to dispossess Aboriginal people of their land is concentrated in NT.

Before the NTER began, 45% of the NT’s land and 80% of its coastline was owned by Aboriginal communities. The NT also represents a stronghold of different Aboriginal cultures with Aboriginal people making up 75.6% of the population outside of major towns. Almost all speak an Aboriginal language as their first language.

Through their walk-off, the Alyawarra are providing an example of resistance to cultural genocide for other Aboriginal communities under the yoke of the NTER. They are also providing an example to all working-class people that resistance to the oppressive policies of capitalist governments is possible. To support the Alyawarra or for more information, visit http://interventionwalkoff.wordpress.com.

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia

ALP strangles Aboriginal communities for land

By Hamish Chitts

Recent reports and revelations have conclusively shown that the Rudd Labor government is using the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) policy to dispossess Aboriginal people. Under the Australian government’s “emergency protection measures”, the situation for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory has become worse. The government and the corporate media then blame Aboriginal culture for the dire situation, rather than the government’s own systemic neglect of the provision of adequate services, and the resulting extreme poverty of Aboriginal communities.

Gap widening
At the Council of Australian Governments meeting in Darwin on July 2, Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin released a report titled Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage. The report, compiled every two years by the Productivity Commission, measures 50 economic and social indicators of disadvantage between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The latest report found no improvement in 80% of the indicators for Aboriginal people. They live in greater poverty and have poorer housing, poorer education and poorer employment prospects. Aboriginal people die on average 17 years younger than non-Aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal children under four years die at three times the rate of other Australian children.

More Aboriginal people in the NT are being imprisoned. Aboriginal people are 13 times as likely to end up in jail as non-Indigenous people. The imprisonment rate for Indigenous women and men has increased by 46% and 27% respectively since 2000. These increased rates not only reflect a racist system in which police more readily target Aboriginal people, and judges more often impose prison sentences on Aboriginal people. It is also due to Aboriginal people in the NT being jailed for minor offences under new NTER laws that apply only to Aboriginal people living in town camps or remote communities.

Capitalist politicians and the corporate media have justified the racially targeted NTER laws by citing high rates of substance abuse, violence and child abuse. These are realities in many remote Aboriginal communities, but are not due to some cultural or genetic quirk. All around the world and in pockets of Australian cities, the same social problems at similar rates can be found among non-Aboriginal people. Contributing factors include poverty, a sense of hopelessness, the sexist values of capitalist society and higher than average rates of imprisonment, especially when any of these factors are combined with overcrowded housing.

Overcrowding
In Darwin, NT Shelter executive officer Toni Vine-Bromley told ABC News on July 5, “Overcrowding creates conflict and family dysfunction and all those kind of problems. It also impacts on people’s health, their ability to study or get an education, or get food in the fridge and all those things that are really what you would just normally take for granted.”

The 2004-05 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey estimated that 127,546 Aboriginal people aged 18 years and over lived in overcrowded households (one or more additional bedroom required). This accounted for 27% of all Aboriginal people aged 18 years and over. There were around 1 million other Australians living in overcrowded households in 2004-05, 5% of all other persons aged 18 years and over. Approximately 14% of Aboriginal people were living in households that required two or more additional bedrooms, compared to 1% of other people. The same survey found the NT had the highest proportion of Aboriginal people aged 18 years and over living in overcrowded households (65%).

Most experts studying Aboriginal disadvantage agree that the main problem in remote Aboriginal communities and town camps is overcrowded and inadequate housing. Yet the July 4 Australian revealed that not one of the hundreds of new houses promised in 2007 for remote communities has been built. NT Aboriginal affairs minister Alison Anderson revealed on July 23 that only 30% of the $672 million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program would go to building houses. She told the Australian: “It was quite openly told to us that there will be 15 per cent administrative costs going to government, 40 per cent for the alliance (building) partners, and another 15 per cent for indirect costs, whatever that is, that leaves 30 per cent that will hit the ground.”

Moreover, the federal and NT governments have refused to offer new housing or services unless Aboriginal people sign 40- to 99-year leases handing their land to both governments. If there were genuine concern about Aboriginal poverty, these governments would fix housing in communities that governments have neglected for decades, without any demands. But the priority of these capitalist governments is the theft of Aboriginal land.

Refusal to consult
The July 6 National Indigenous Times reported on leaked documents revealing that Macklin was advised by her department against formally consulting with Aboriginal people over the compulsory acquisition of their land because it would be “too expensive”, would tie up too many resources and was unlikely to get the outcome the government wanted. The advice was “read, agreed and noted” by Macklin on March 26, just one week before the government endorsed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Some of the documents focus on the NTER legislation and a much-publicised promise by Macklin to amend the laws to comply with the federal Racial Discrimination Act (RDA). The NTER legislation remains the only federal law exempt from the RDA, allowing a host of racially discriminatory government actions, including the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land. When the NTER began, the federal government said it was compulsorily acquiring the land to prevent any delay in the provision of housing. Macklin was also warned that if she brought the NTER legislation under the RDA, there was a “significant risk” the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land would not survive a court challenge.

The federal government is using the threat of acquisition without compensation to push Aboriginal communities to sign the leases. Those communities that were able to resist the pressure may be able to challenge compulsory acquisition of their land when the NTER laws are made no longer exempt from the RDA in either September or October. However, Macklin has been told by government solicitors that “some minor legislative amendments” to the NTER act will reduce the risk of court challenges.

The pro-capitalist Rudd government hasn’t built houses in remote Aboriginal communities in over two years with a budget of nearly $700 million. Compare this failure with socialist Cuba, a poor Third World country, and how it is meeting its housing problems. Last year hurricanes hit Holguin and Las Tunas, two of Cuba’s eastern provinces, destroying many houses. In Holguin, 53% of the more than 124,000 houses affected have been rehabilitated or reconstructed. In Las Tunas, hurricanes Ike and Paloma damaged more than 80,000 homes, of which 32,000 have been totally restored. Cuba can do this because it assigns resources according to social need, not according to the profitability of capitalist businesses.


From Direct Action Sydney, Australia http://directaction.org.au/

Macklin seizes Alice Springs Aboriginal town camps

By Hamish Chitts

Whenever Australian capitalist politicians have talked about protection, welfare and reconciliation in relation to Aboriginal people they have actually meant dispossession, forced cultural assimilation and racial oppression. The capitalist class knows that much of its wealth has been gained at the expense of Aboriginal people through the takeover of their lands. The only way these rulers were able to take possession of the Australian continent was through a 200-year campaign of ethnic cleansing of its original inhabitants.

In the latest chapter in this saga of dispossession and racist oppression, federal Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin announced on May 24 that she would use the racist Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) legislation to compulsorily acquire control over 16 Alice Spring town camps. This move, made at the start of Reconciliation Week followed a decision of the Tangentyere Council, acting on behalf of town camp residents, to reject a 40-year lease deal that would have removed all Aboriginal control and management of camp housing and put decision-making and resources into the hands of Northern Territory and federal governments. While the NTER legislation expires in 2012, Macklin said the law nonetheless allowed her to make a permanent acquisition of the town camps. “It’s forever. It’s not a 40-year lease, it’s a compulsory acquisition”, she declared.
History of dispossession

In 1872 the Alice Springs Telegraph Station was established. This was the beginning of Aboriginal dispossession in the area, with the presence of the of the telegraph station attracting pastoralists who took land around the precious permanent water supplies. This invasion and theft of natural resources was resisted by the Aborigines and in 1881 the South Australian colonial authorities sent paramilitary police to quash the uprising. The troopers were already experienced in the bloody suppression of Aboriginal people in lands further south and by 1891 they had killed over 1000 Aborigines around Alice Springs. Faced with this onslaught, Aboriginal resistance in central Australia ceased to be an armed struggle, but their struggle against to dispossession has continued to this day.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Aborigines who had been dispossessed from the best hunting grounds began to gravitate to the developing township of Alice Springs. Denied residence within the township itself, they set up camps on its fringes. In 1940, the government forced most Aboriginal town camp dwellers to move to three permanent reserves — Hermannsburg, 150 kilometres west of Alice Springs; Jay Creek, 50km west; and Little Flower Mission at Arltunga, 110 km east of Alice Springs. Wartime labour shortages led the Australian government to establish a reserve for Aboriginal workers on the edge of Alice Springs at the old telegraph station. Despite a strong push to remove other camp dwellers from the town area, they persisted in residing around Alice Springs.

Throughout the 1960s the Alice Springs Town Management Board used police and welfare officers to look for health hazards, child neglect, drunkenness and general untidiness to evict individual town camp dwellers and to put pressure on all of them to leave. However, this pressure largely failed and the camps became important places not just for Aborigines who wanted to permanently live near Alice Springs but also for those who needed a place to stay when they had to access health, dental and other services that are only available in the town.

Tangentyere Council

A group called “Tunkatjira” was formed in 1974 by Aborigines to assist the town camps to gain land, shelter, public services, transport, firewood and garbage collection. Through decades of struggle, at times strengthened by the land rights campaign, this group, now known as Tangentyere Council, became the umbrella group for the 18 town camp associations around Alice Springs. The council manages public housing and waste management but, unlike the Alice Springs town council, is also responsible for aged care, community policing, employment and training services.

Tangentyere Council is an Aboriginal owned and controlled organisation governed by an executive of representatives from the 18 town camps. It employs around 170 people. The internal planning of the camps adheres to traditional customs — camp planning constraints include the need to provide areas for different family groups, temporary accommodation for people who have to leave houses following a death, the need for visitor camping, and sacred site protection.

There are 188 houses and 72 tin sheds in the camps, usually overcrowded due to gross underfunding of housing construction by successive federal and NT governments. The myth that Aboriginal community organisations receive more per capita government money than non-Aborigines is completely false. The money that they do receive has to maintain services like aged care which, in areas predominantly inhabited by non-Aboriginal Australians, is administered by separately funded state or federal government agencies.

As with all past attacks on Aboriginal communities, the Rudd government claims to be acting for Aborigines’ own “welfare”. Macklin’s media release on the compulsory acquisitions stated: “Anybody who has been to the Alice Springs town camps knows that action is drastically and urgently needed. Living conditions in the camps are appalling. Acute overcrowding and sub-standard housing combined with alcohol abuse, despair and hopelessness have led to desperate and dangerous consequences. The camps have been the sites of horrific crimes. For vulnerable women and children in the camps, the basic human right to a safe and healthy life is simply absent.” Macklin, however, deliberately failed to acknowledge is that these conditions are the result of decades of gross government underfunding of housing and other social services for NT Aborinigal communities, and more than 130 years of government-backed racist oppression.

The Alice Springs Aboriginal town camps have special purpose leases from the NT government. The federal government has been trying to force Tangentyere Council to sign a 40-year lease that would hand over control of the camps’ housing assets, extracting rent and managing tenants to the NT Department of Housing. Aboriginal community councils across the territory in NTER-prescribed areas are being pressured to sign leases with Canberra ranging from 40-90 years giving control of land use and housing to the federal or NT governments. If they do not sign, these communities will not receive urgently needed new housing and other infrastructure that most white Australians would take for granted.

Control over housing

Tangentyere Council proposed a community housing model on a three-year trial basis, but the federal government won’t allow Aboriginal control of housing. The Howard Coalition government offered Tangentyere Council $60 million for infrastructure upgrades if it accepted government control over the camps for 40 years. The Rudd Labor government upped this to $100 million and then to $125 million, but each time the council has refused. Tangentyere Council wants its Central Australian Affordable Housing Company to manage the new housing, including determining who would go to the front of waiting lists. “There’s no contest that the housing requires a major upgrade”, the council’s lawyer, Danny Gilbert, of Gilbert and Tobin, told the May 25 Australian. “They want their affordable housing company to be given the role. They’re prepared to sign an agreement that says if we fail, you can terminate the agreement.”

The Australian reported that the government “fears favouritism and nepotism under this counter-proposal and insists the camps’ housing be handled by government to avoid such problems”. This racist slander doesn’t even stand up to logic. The council did not refuse hundreds of millions of dollars in government funds because its leadership is corrupt and seeks personal power. It refused because the camp residents fear the high rate of evictions and predicted rent increases under NT government management. Many Aboriginal people who have been former tenants of Territory Housing have already experienced evictions, with the most common reasons being cooking kangaroo tail in their backyards or having relatives from remote communities visit them. Camp residents will have nowhere else to live if evicted from their homes by Territory Housing, which already has a three-year waiting list.

The federal government’s compulsory acquisition of the town camps is due to take effect on July 6. The May 25 Australian reported that Sydney lawyer George Newhouse, who is acting on behalf of town camp residents in a separate UN complaint against the NTER, claimed Macklin is facing legal challenges to her compulsory acquisition decision. The May 29 Sydney Morning Herald reported that PM Kevin Rudd had told reporters Labor intended to continue with the previous Howard government’s intervention into remote NT communities, despite promising to reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act, which was suspended by the NTER legislation.

From Direct Action Sydney, Australia http://directaction.org.au/

Mona Mona people fight Qld government land grab

By Hamish Chitts

In the small community of Mona Mona, just north of Cairns, some 150 people met last December 9 with Linda Aplet, the director-general of the Queensland government’s Department of Communities. Aplet told the gathering that 1600 hectares of Mona Mona land would be reduced to a mere 100 ha, to be held in trust by Mona Mona people, while the bulk of the land would be made into a national park. The people of Mona Mona would no longer be able to live on their land and would be allowed to camp on the 100 ha only on weekends.

This decision was a complete surprise to residents, who angrily rejected this attempt as another in a long line of injustices visited upon them and their ancestors by the governments of Queensland and Australia. "We’re not going to be bullied any more. We’ve been bullied all our lives", responded Mona Mona Action Group chairperson Gerald Hobbler.

In far north Queensland in 1913, large numbers of predominantly Djabugay people were rounded up and forcibly taken to the Seventh Day Adventist-run Mona Mona Mission. Reserves and missions were set up throughout Queensland under the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (1897). This act was a response to some new colonial-settlers’ uneasiness at the outright slaughter being perpetrated by other white settlers and the Queensland Native Police against Aboriginal people to clear land for white settlers. Under the guise of protection, the act enabled the colonial authorities to remove Aboriginal people forcibly from land useful to the occupiers and place them in church- or government-run prisons. Until the 1970s, mission superintendents and their superiors had complete control over Aboriginal people’s lives, including where they lived, where they worked and who they could marry. At Mona Mona, the mission authorities used unpaid Aboriginal labour to cut and mill timber and farm the land.

In 1962, Mona Mona Mission was closed, and some of its residents were forcibly removed to Palm Island, which was used by the Queensland government as a penal colony for Aborigines who resisted the occupiers’ laws. From the late 1960s, some Djabugay people and former residents moved back to Mona Mona and built houses. Since that time, the people of Mona Mona have been completely neglected by the Queensland government, which for decades has failed to provide basic infrastructure like running water or electricity, not to mention assistance with housing.

On the Djabugay Community website, resident Judi Enoch said after the December 9 meeting: "I take offence to the fact that is suggested that we, Indigenous People, do not have the capacity to manage (our own) land. We have done this for generations. Mona Mona people are entitled to amenities like water, power, sewage and housing just as any other Australian. This is a social justice issue that these rights are being denied to us here in Mona Mona." The community has said it won’t shift and drafted a resolution declaring: "As a result of the Mona Mona meeting dated December 9th 2008 ... it is clear that the Mona Mona people will not move from Mona Mona and that we outrightly reject the carve-up of Mona Mona lands. Further negotiations are required with government to ensure the preservation of the approximately 1600 hectares of Mona Mona reserve for cultural, historical and residential purposes under a Mona Mona trusteeship."

On February 23, a meeting was held between the defiant Mona Mona Action Group and the Queensland government departments still keen to steal their land. Afterwards Glenis Grogan from the Mona Mona Action Group said of the government, "They came to the meeting to implement the decisions" made previously.

For more information or to offer support, visit the Facebook group Save the Town of Mona Mona or email ngoonbi@optusnet.com.au.

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au

Labor steps up racist NT land grab

By Hamish Chitts

After PM Kevin Rudd’s February 13 official apology to the Stolen Generations, media outlets around the world hailed him as a great humanitarian friend of Aboriginal people. That day’s New York Times reported that “Rudd opened a new chapter in Australia’s tortured relations with its indigenous peoples on Wednesday with a comprehensive and moving apology for past wrongs and a call for bipartisan action to improve the lives of Australia’s Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.” In his official apology, Rudd spoke of creating a “future where this parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.”

Rudd would make a great snake-oil seller because for all his lofty words over the past year, his government has begun the biggest and most coordinated attack on the rights of Aboriginal people since the Stolen Generations. Rudd and his modern “protector” of Aborigines, Jenny Macklin, assisted by state and territory governments, have put in place laws and policies that together can only mean one thing for Aboriginal people — cultural genocide.

In June 2007 the Howard Coalition government used the Little Children are Sacred report into child abuse in remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities to invade these communities under what it called the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER). At the time, many saw it as just a stunt by an unpopular government looking for ways to boost its chances in the upcoming federal election. However, the Rudd Labor government has not only maintained the NTER, but also extended it.

The real intention of the NTER is the theft of more Aboriginal land through the destruction of Aboriginal culture and links to land where it is strongest. The size of the Aboriginal land holding in the NT is considerable — 45% of the land and 80% of the coastline. 70% of Aboriginal people in the NT live on native title land. Aborigines make up almost a third of the NT’s population. Outside of Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine and Tennant Creek, 75.6% of NT residents are Aborigines. The first language for most people is an Aboriginal language. Many speak several Aboriginal languages before they learn English. Cultural and social practices continue to be overwhelmingly informed by traditions that predate European settlement.

The NTER measures apply to “prescribed areas”. These include all land held under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) 1976, all Aboriginal community living areas and all Aboriginal town camps — some 600,000 sq km. Prescribed areas encompass more than 500 Aboriginal communities, over 70% of Aboriginal people in the NT and directly affect 45,500 Aboriginal men, women and children.

To enable the NTER, the federal Racial Discrimination Act (1975) was explicitly suspended and the protections of anti-discrimination law in the NT were removed. Macklin has said the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act for Aboriginal people in the NT will continue until at least June 2009. Under the NTER, racist measures have been implemented, such as the withholding of 50% of the social security payments of all Aboriginal people in the NT.

Instead of receiving regular social security payments, some 13,000 Aborigines receive store cards that dictate where they can shop and what they are able to buy. Some cards are only for Woolworths, others are for Coles. Therefore, purchases are limited to what these stores stock. Some communities literally rely on the irregular delivery of food parcels. Others have to travel hundreds of kilometers to get to their nominated store. Many can no longer budget, and have no money to attend funerals, ceremonies, or even buy Christmas presents.

A statement from women at a Prescribed Area People’s Alliance (PAPA) meeting in Alice Springs on September 29 said: “For old people the intervention is bringing up bad memories of the past, the old days, the ration days, the dog tag days and the mission days.”

The NTER is forcing Aboriginal people away from their traditional lands to already overcrowded town camps in Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine and Tennant Creek. As part of the NTER, all Aboriginal land in the NT has been compulsorily acquired by the federal government for five years and instruments of local self-democracy like community councils have been replaced by government-appointed “business managers”.

None of the NTER measures have improved the lives of those it was claimed it would help. Even Rudd’s handpicked NTER review board reported in October that the “single most valuable resource that the NTER has lacked from its inception is the positive, willing participation of the people it was intended to help”. The September 29 women’s statement from PAPA also commented on the outcomes of over one year under the NTER: “There’s no new houses, schools or anything for communities. They’ve only built new houses for the new intervention staff. We had programs created by the community for our community. We wanted more support for them. Community programs have been taken away. They’ve taken away our night patrol, community bus and women’s centres.”

Apparently though for the Labor government and its corporate masters, these measures aren’t working quickly enough to remove Aboriginal people from their land, so land councils in prescribed areas are being pressured to sign leases ranging from 40-99 years giving control of land to the federal or NT governments. If they do not sign, then communities will not receive urgently needed houses and infrastructure that most white people would take for granted.

Macklin has threatened to withhold funding for new housing in the 19 Alice Springs town camps after the Tangentyere Council raised objections to the proposed leasing agreements. “It’s not just about giving the government security for money spent, it’s about establishing absolute clarity about who is responsible for the management of public housing in these communities”, she told the November 25 Melbourne Age. This marks a major departure from the self-management regime established 30 years ago under which all aspects of housing were controlled by Indigenous housing authorities and community councils.

In partnership, the federal and NT Labor governments have flagged not providing future funding to smaller and more remote communities, known as “outstations” or “homelands”, that they deem unviable. In an October 26 message, the Gumatj clan, at the MataMata Homeland in northeast Arnhem Land stated: “People out here on the homelands are both saddened and angry. However, they are defiant, that no matter what the government does, they will not leave their sacred lands and their law. The government will be condemning them to a life of extreme poverty. Is this ‘closing the gap’? Is this ‘reconciliation’? They call this a representative democracy. What a joke — what representation do my family have out here? What say do they have in deciding on legislation that directly affects them and their children and their property?”

NT education minister Marion Scrymgour has announced that Aboriginal languages cannot be used in NT classrooms, except for one hour a day in the afternoons. Most affected are nine bilingual schools across the NT where people do not speak English as a first language in some of the few places left in Australia where Indigenous languages are still spoken fluently in everyday life. The governments claim that this an effort to address poor educational outcomes in Aboriginal communities yet the fact that the bilingual schools have better results in English than the English-only remote schools shows that this is another attack on Aboriginal culture. This attack has been fully backed by the Rudd government. Acting PM Julie Gillard said on November 20: “For Indigenous Australia, English is the language of further learning and English is the language of work.”

Attempts to destroy Aboriginal culture assist land theft by trying to break the strong link Aboriginal culture has with the land and which ties Aboriginal people to the homelands. Under the laws of capitalist Australia, if Indigenous culture is lost, if Aborigines move into towns and stop living on or going to their traditional lands, then native title becomes extinct.

Governments are going to great measures to transform Aboriginal land into crown land. Under Rudd’s leadership, these latest attacks on Aboriginal people have been increased in the NT and extended to affect Aboriginal people in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia. Labor is making these attacks because in recent years remote Aboriginal communities have been successful in opposing the establishment of new uranium mines and nuclear waste dumps.

With an expected increase in global use of nuclear power, the price of uranium has rapidly increased and the big mining companies have been pressuring Australian governments to allow the opening of more mines and the establishment of a nuclear waste dump. The forced or coopted loss of Aboriginal control of their land is an important step to achieving this.

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au

Free Lex Wotton – political prisoner

By Kathy Newnam

A 400-strong rally was held in Brisbane on November 1 as part of the campaign to free Lex Wotton, an Indigenous community leader from Palm Island, who was found guilty on October 24 of “rioting with destruction” by an all-white jury in Brisbane’s District Court. Wotton was singled out for his participation in the protest on Palm Island that took place following the death in custody on November 19, 2004, of Mulrunji Doomadgee, a 36-year-old Palm Island man, at the hands of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. Despite admitting responsibility for the death, Hurley was subsequently acquitted of manslaughter by an all-white jury in Townsville on June 19, 2007.

In the week following the murder, Palm Island residents demanded justice and were met with a massive increase in police repression. At a community meeting on November 26, 2004, the autopsy report into Mulrunji’s death was read out. The report found that the massive injuries, including four broken ribs, a ruptured spleen, a torn portal vein and his liver being cleaved in two were as a result of an “accident”.

The murder of Mulrunji was the 147th Aboriginal death in custody since the 1987-91 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Most of these deaths were hidden from the public. The protest that took place on Palm Island, which involved at least 400 people (at least 10% of the population of the island), was instrumental in bringing the murder to public attention. As a result, political pressure was bought to bear on the Queensland government which was the main reason that Hurley was eventually charged.

But the capitalist “justice” system has many an escape clause to protect its own — and staging the trial of Hurley with an all-white jury in the racist heartland of Townsville was only the beginning. The prosecution failed to call key witnesses and other evidence of murder was disallowed in the trial. The collusion between the Queensland Labor government and the Queensland Police Union ensured that, as usual, the racist criminal “justice” system would look after its own. On the other hand, the same “justice” system will bring its full weight down on those who resist racist police violence.

Immediately following the uprising of November 26, 2004, Palm Island was put under police siege. An illegal state of emergency was imposed and the anti-terrorism squad sent to the island. The squad spent the night illegally detaining those suspected of involvement in the protests; smashing into homes, carrying out illegal searches, brutalising and bashing residents, including attacking them with Taser electric shock guns and police dogs. There were reports of police pointing rifles at children. Police told residents that they could kill them and no-one would know what had happened. Wotton was arrested by 50 police and Tasered while standing outside his house with his hands raised. The police then went into his house and forced his children to lie face down on the ground with guns to their heads.

The raids and illegal detentions continued into the week following the protest. At least 80 heavily armed police continued to lay siege to the island. During Wotton’s trial, evidence was presented of a 22-year-old woman who was detained for a day without food and dressed only in a nightgown then pressured into giving a statement against Wotton. Eighteen men, three women and two children were arrested and flown off the island to Townsville. One man, David Bulsey, was unable to return to his home and his eight children for six months because of the bail conditions. He was subsequently acquitted by a Townsville court.

This show of brute force had nothing to do with “restoring order” as claimed by the Queensland government and police. There was no physical threat. But there was a political threat — and the force used was commensurate with how seriously the authorities took this threat. The Palm Island protest posed a serious public challenge to the immunity given to police who kill Aborigines in custody. Similarly, to protect this immunity immense resources are put into the cover up of Aboriginal deaths in custody — which are not so much about protecting individuals like Hurley as they are about protecting a racist system of intimidation and control. The protest on Palm Island set an example that the police could not allow to go unchallenged. If Indigenous people rose up in mass protest every time there was an Aboriginal death in custody or instance of racist police brutality, the police force’s power to intimidate and control Aborigines would quickly erode.

The brutal state repression of Aboriginal resistance has been a critical function of the police throughout Australia’s history. This repression was, and still is, essential in the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land. The social devastation that Aboriginal communities face today is a direct result of this dispossession and the attempts to disperse, disorganise and crush any resistance to it.

The intensification of this repression that is currently taking place in remote Aboriginal communities affected by the federal government’s Northern Territory “emergency intervention” can be directly linked to the mining companies’ increasing thirst for access to land — which requires a roll back of the gains of the land rights movement. An example of this intensified repression was the military-style police raid on Kunoth, a town camp in Alice Springs, on the night of October 9. According to a statement issued by the Alice Springs-based Intervention Rollback Action Group, “Police jumped over fences, displayed rifles, pushed and abused residents and trained a red laser light on the chest of one man, perhaps from a taser or a gun”.

Aboriginal resistance to this sort of police repression is presented as being an act of aggression in order to justify further repression. The corporate media plays a central role in this, acting to fuel racist bigotry in order to undermine the other working people’s solidarity with Aboriginal people struggling for their rights. This tactic — of presenting the resistor as the aggressor — is also used internationally. It is used particularly successfully by the Israeli government and the Western media to justify the Zionist state’s occupation and repression of the indigenous Palestinians. A 2001-02 study by the Glasgow University Media Group in Britain found that 90% of British students did not know Israel was occupying Palestine and some who believed that the Palestinians were the occupiers!

This is what the Queensland government, police and corporate media have attempted to do in their singling out of Lex Wotton. He was targeted and charged on concocted evidence to draw attention away from the cause of the Palm Island uprising and to make an example of him. His case is being used as an attempt to re-win ground that the police lost in the massive public exposure of the brutal murder of Mulrunji and the subsequent cover up. As part of this effort, the corporate media reported just days after the guilty verdict was handed down against Wotton that the 22 police on Palm Island on the day of the uprising would receive “bravery awards” at a ceremony in Townsville on November 3 — four days before Wotton’s sentencing in the Townsville District Court. Not a single cop was injured by the Palm Island protesters.

Lex Wotton is a political prisoner. He is behind bars for speaking out against the murder of his friend. He is behind bars because he is an esteemed leader of his community. Meanwhile, Hurley and the hundreds of other cops who have murdered in cold blood, walk free. When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

Intervention review expected to back land grab

By Hamish Chitts

On September 29, the Rudd government announced that it would give a 2-week extension to the review board and panel of experts handpicked to look at the federal government’s intervention into remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. A cursory glance at the participants in this review reveals why they were selected and how all of them are likely to make personal gains if the NT’s Aboriginal lands are opened up to capitalist exploitation.

On June 7 the pro-intervention, Murdoch-owned Australian summed up the review’s anticipated outcome: “The intervention in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities will be strengthened after the Rudd Government yesterday unveiled a 14-member group dominated by pro-intervention thinkers to review its successes and failures.” This 14-member group consists of a three member “Review Board” supported by an 11-member “independent expert group”. The three are Peter Yu, the long-time director of the Kimberley Land Council, Marcia Ella-Duncan, the former chairperson of the NSW Aboriginal Child Sexual Assault Taskforce, and Bill Gray, a former long-serving Indigenous affairs department bureaucrat.

In May 2006 (after an ABC TV Lateline story on abuse of children in remote Central Australian communities), Yu called for the Australian military to intervene, insisting that Canberra had to do “just like we have done in the Solomon Islands, just like we have done in East Timor, just like we are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq”. Despite feigned moral outrage by media and politicians no emergency response occurred in 2006, but Yu’s comments and mining-friendly attitude through the Kimberly Land Council put him in good favour when politicians decided to use the 2007 report on child abuse in remote NT communities to make large areas of Aboriginal land available to big business.

Yu helped whip up hysteria soon after the intervention by telling ABC radio on July 11, 2007, about the government’s offer to send troops into Western Australian Aboriginal communities: “If there was some designated program in relation to building roads or helping building houses or developing the infrastructure, working in relation to training in particular sorts of skills, in governing skills or management administration skills, I’d take the army, take the navy, take the air force as well.”

Gray and Ella-Duncan have both made careers under various governments tinkering at the edges of Aboriginal disadvantage while not upsetting the politicians or the system that keeps this disadvantage in place. Not long after her appointment to the Review Board, Ella-Duncan told the June 16 Australian: “You could probably look back at earlier comments of mine and realise that while I didn’t necessarily support all of the measures introduced into the Northern Territory by the Howard government, I certainly welcomed the strong political leadership, and it’s something we’ve been advocating for in NSW from the state government and the Aboriginal community as well.” She also stated that intervention should take 15 years to be effective.

The 11-member “expert group” is comprised of more bureaucrats and industry experts who also profit from this tinkering at the edges of Aboriginal disadvantage. It includes John Taylor from the ANU Centre For Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. The centre receives funds from the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaCSIA), and the Australia Research Council, as well as from industry partners including mining giant Rio Tinto. The centre advocates “Privatisation of Central Australian communities” as the solution to Aboriginal poverty, meaning that big business should throw these communities a few crumbs while it exploits their labour and their land for huge profits.

Another member is Neil Westbury, once the highest-ranking NT public servant, who is part of the Remote Focus Group that released a “prospectus” last month arguing that in remote areas there is a looming crisis of an exploding Aboriginal population that shows few signs of migrating to metropolitan cities. It claims this not only has the potential to impact negatively on the profits of mining companies, but that these communities are like Pacific island “failed states” and could pose a threat to national security requiring armed intervention.

As of July 1, the NT government reorganised all local councils in rural and remote areas into eight “super” shire councils. Three members of the “independent expert group” have benefited from the creation of larger councils — Michael Berto is now CEO of Roper Gulf Shire Council, Ronald Lami Lami is chairperson of the West Arnhem Shire Transition Committee and Mavis Malbunka is vice president of the Ntaria Council. All these councils (as any around the country) seek to encourage business investment into their shires.

As the intervention clears the way for more mining, these shire councils will gain revenue not just from the mines but also from rates on miners’ housing and the smaller businesses that spring up around the mines. These heads of these councils therefore have a direct interest in the continuation of the intervention. It’s no wonder that on February 2 Malbunka said: “Income management is a great help for Aboriginal people; in Hermannsburg I hear no complaint about income management.”

David Ross is the director of the Central Land Council and is also member of the advisory group. Ross, like Yu, has the same interest in increased mining and the personal wealth it can bring as the new shire councils do. Ross stated on November 12, 2003, in response to a Minerals Council suggestion that land councils are a barrier to mining company profits: “I contend that the kilograms of gold currently being shipped out of Tennant Creek would not be happening without the involvement of a well-resourced and experienced representative body such as the Central Land Council.”

Group members Donna Ah Chee, deputy director of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress (health care service), and Vicki Gillick, coordinator of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, have gained their places through their conservative views on tackling the social and health problems that are a result of poverty. Speaking about alcohol abuse, Ah Chee told ABC News Online: “We can’t treat it as a symptom; we do have to treat it as a cause and we have to deal with it.” This is despite the volumes of research that show that rates of alcoholism, substance abuse and associated problems in any community around the world increase as its standard of living drops.

Gillick told ABC radio’s November 27 Law Report: “Certainly my personal view is that I don’t believe any parent has the right to blow their brains on drugs, or grog, and neglect their children, and I think that welfare reform aimed at dealing with that should apply across the board.” The views expressed by Ah Chee and Gillick suit the federal government’s portrayal of the intervention as “tough love”, hiding its true intent — the continuation of over 220 years of theft of Aboriginal lands — and the obscuring of the fact that the low standard of living in remote Aboriginal communities is a direct result of deliberate government policy and neglect.

The only group member to have made some public criticism of the intervention is Mark Wenitong, the senior medical officer at Apunipima Cape York Health Council and past president and founding member of the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association. When the intervention began in 2007, Wenitong raised concerns about the lack of consultation with Aborigines and the possible negative effects of intrusive compulsory health checks. However, in an interview with Triple J Radio’s Hack program, Wenitong said he thought the intervention, if done right, was a chance to “fund healthcare, education and infrastructure on an ongoing basis”. Wenitong’s belief that the intervention was actually about government concern for Aboriginal children shows considerable naivete.

The review’s expected endorsement of the intervention should come as no surprise: PM Kevin Rudd and Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin handpicked a group that would give them the review outcome they wanted.

Aboriginal deaths in custody: Protests to demand justice

By Kathy Newnam

Protest actions are being planned for Brisbane in October when Lex Wotton faces court. Wotton has been portrayed by the Queensland police, government and establishment media as the leader of the “riot” that occurred on Palm Island on November 26, 2004. A police station and residence were destroyed after a police report on the death of community member Mulrunji Doomadgee was read at a public meeting; the report concluded that his death was an accident. The October protests will call for the dropping of all charges against Wotton and demand an end to Aboriginal deaths in custody.

Since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, there has been an increase in Aboriginal people dying in custody. During the commission itself, which ran from 1987 until 1991, just under one Aborigine per month was dying in custody. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, there were 14 Indigenous deaths in custody in 2004; 15 in 2005 and 10 in 2006. In 2006, Indigenous Australians accounted for 30% of all deaths in police custody. These rates are higher than in South Africa at the peak of the apartheid regime’s brutality.

In the 1980s a strong campaign against Aboriginal deaths in custody was spearheaded by the National Committee to Defend Black Rights. In response to this campaign, the Hawke Labor government established the royal commission. It was presented with 124 deaths in custody between 1980 and 1989, of which it investigated 99. However, not a single police or jail officer was charged. The commission made 339 recommendations, half of which aimed at keeping Aborigines out of jail, with the emphasis being on prison as a last resort. Seventeen years later, those recommendations are still not being implemented.
Over-policing

According to a 2006 Australian Medical Association report titled Undue Punishment? Aboriginal People And Torres Strait Islanders In Prison: An Unacceptable Reality, Indigenous people accounted for 22% of prisoners in 2005 despite being only 2.4% of Australia’s population. Imprisonment rates are even greater for young Indigenous people, who are 19 times more likely to be imprisoned than other Australians. According to NSW-based organisation Justice Action, which campaigns on criminal justice and prison reform, in July 2006 Indigenous people made up 39.7% of the prison population; by January 2007, this figure had risen to 41.7%.

Over-policing is the main reason for this over-representation. Indigenous communities are routinely subject to a greater level of surveillance and intimidation. Police use certain laws to harass and intimidate Aboriginal communities; one example is known as the “trifecta” — offensive behaviour, resisting arrest and assaulting police. In this way, a charge can be concocted against people whose only “crime” is coming into contact with police.

Police powers, such as search and remove powers, are also over-used in areas with a high Aboriginal population. A 2001 study by the Aboriginal Justice Advisory Council (AJAC) found that in Bourke, police used their powers at a rate 492 times the NSW average, and Aborigines were searched at 30 times the average NSW rate. The study also found that police used their “move on” powers at 321 times the average NSW rate in Walgett, 173 times in Moree and 145 times in Broken Hill. The study also found that in 10 areas in NSW with high Indigenous populations, Aboriginal women were locked up for intoxication at 40 times the rate of non-Aboriginal women and that detention for outstanding warrants was 14.4 times higher for Aboriginal men, 16.5 times for Aboriginal women.

This racism continues throughout the “justice” system. According to AJAC, 10% of Aboriginal defendants were refused bail in 1999, compared with 4% of non-Aborigines. The majority of Aborigines in prison are serving short sentences for minor offences. According to Justice Action, if all the Indigenous people currently serving sentences under six months were given a non-custodial sentence, the number of Indigenous prisoners would be reduced by 54%.
Systemic racism

This systemic racism is justified by politicians and the corporate media in terms of “law and order”. Both major parties regularly resort to racist fear-mongering to justify increased police powers, or to whip up scare campaigns at election time. They readily attack the most marginalised in society, but never mention the devastating impact of the structural racism. They point to symptoms of this in Aboriginal communities — high levels of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, substance abuse — and turn it around to blame the victims.

The “justice” system perpetuates the dispossession of the Aboriginal people — according to the AMA’s Undue Punishment? report, more than 30% of Indigenous prisoners were taken from their parents as children and a third of those were never returned. Among Indigenous people in prison, 31% of women and 21% of men reported that their parents had been forcibly removed from their families as children.

Australia and its “justice” system were built on attempted genocide against the Aboriginal people and the theft of their land. Ongoing dispossession is at the heart of the high rate of incarceration of Aborigines and the continuing immunity of police and prison officers who kill Aborigines in custody. This immunity amounts to state-sanctioned murder, and is an important weapon of control and power.

It is not just a product of corruption or turning a blind eye to a few “bad apples”. Those responsible for deaths in custody are not only immune from punishment, but are often promoted. After the murder of Mulrunji on Palm Island on November 19, 2004, the police officer responsible, Sergeant Chris Hurley was transferred to a cushy post on the Gold Coast. Recently, he was awarded a $100,000 payout, ostensibly for “loss of belongings” in the fire at the Palm Island police residence that took place during uprising after the release, on November 26, 2004, of the autopsy results. These detailed the extent of Mulrunji’s injuries — four broken ribs, a ruptured liver, spleen, portal vein and internal bleeding that caused death — but whitewashed the injuries as being the result of a scuffle.

The resulting uprising of more than 400 Palm Island residents (10% of the population of the island) brought the death into public view — setting it apart from so many other black deaths in custody that take place every year. This public attention and pressure from the campaign eventually resulted in Hurley being charged with manslaughter. His subsequent acquittal, despite admitting in court to causing the death of Mulrunji, confirmed how rigged the “justice” system is against Aborigines. He was tried in the racist heartland of Townsville by an all-white jury, and key evidence in the case was disallowed.
Cover-ups

The extent of the cover-up of deaths in custody was also revealed in a 2005 civil case brought by Letty Scott against prison officers involved in the death of her husband, Douglas Scott, in Darwin’s Berrimah prison on July 5, 1985. Letty Scott fought a 20-year battle for justice, gathering overwhelming evidence of murder that was presented in the court case, including the exhumation of her husband’s body and forensic examination which found that his injuries could have been inflicted only by prolonged assault and torture.

The trial bought to light that the cover-up went beyond the NT government, police and the prison system, involving complicity in the cover-up from the doctor employed to carry out the original autopsy, scientists called upon to give forensic evidence for the defence and the royal commission itself — Douglas Scott’s death was one of the 99 cases it investigated.

During the trial, Letty Scott stated that the royal commission was “a lawyer’s picnic on the blood of Aboriginal people”, that it had been “set up to cover [up] the murder of our people”. She detailed how she had been completely disempowered by the commission and not allowed to talk about any evidence of murder, but only about the “arguments and dysfunctions”. Further, she had not approved of the statement that was submitted to the commission by her appointed legal representative, supposedly on behalf of the Scott family. The commission did not hear from eyewitnesses to Douglas Scott’s murder. Other key evidence, including Polaroid photos of his body hung from the prison ceiling, was withheld from the commission.

Despite the overwhelming evidence presented in the 2005 trial, the court dismissed the case for murder while finding that it was “unable to be satisfied that the deceased took his own life”. The NT government took no action on this finding, despite the fact that it was contrary to the original inquest and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, both of which found that Douglas Scott had committed suicide.

The case demonstrated once again how stacked the “justice” system is against Aboriginal people. While murderers walk free, the full weight of the law is brought to bear against those who speak out for justice. It is this system of injustice, not freedom fighters like Lex Wotton, that should be on trial.

Intervention review expected to back land grab

By Hamish Chitts

On September 29, the Rudd government announced that it would give a 2-week extension to the review board and panel of experts handpicked to look at the federal government’s intervention into remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. A cursory glance at the participants in this review reveals why they were selected and how all of them are likely to make personal gains if the NT’s Aboriginal lands are opened up to capitalist exploitation.

On June 7 the pro-intervention, Murdoch-owned Australian summed up the review’s anticipated outcome: “The intervention in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities will be strengthened after the Rudd Government yesterday unveiled a 14-member group dominated by pro-intervention thinkers to review its successes and failures.” This 14-member group consists of a three member “Review Board” supported by an 11-member “independent expert group”. The three are Peter Yu, the long-time director of the Kimberley Land Council, Marcia Ella-Duncan, the former chairperson of the NSW Aboriginal Child Sexual Assault Taskforce, and Bill Gray, a former long-serving Indigenous affairs department bureaucrat.

In May 2006 (after an ABC TV Lateline story on abuse of children in remote Central Australian communities), Yu called for the Australian military to intervene, insisting that Canberra had to do “just like we have done in the Solomon Islands, just like we have done in East Timor, just like we are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq”. Despite feigned moral outrage by media and politicians no emergency response occurred in 2006, but Yu’s comments and mining-friendly attitude through the Kimberly Land Council put him in good favour when politicians decided to use the 2007 report on child abuse in remote NT communities to make large areas of Aboriginal land available to big business.

Yu helped whip up hysteria soon after the intervention by telling ABC radio on July 11, 2007, about the government’s offer to send troops into Western Australian Aboriginal communities: “If there was some designated program in relation to building roads or helping building houses or developing the infrastructure, working in relation to training in particular sorts of skills, in governing skills or management administration skills, I’d take the army, take the navy, take the air force as well.”

Gray and Ella-Duncan have both made careers under various governments tinkering at the edges of Aboriginal disadvantage while not upsetting the politicians or the system that keeps this disadvantage in place. Not long after her appointment to the Review Board, Ella-Duncan told the June 16 Australian: “You could probably look back at earlier comments of mine and realise that while I didn’t necessarily support all of the measures introduced into the Northern Territory by the Howard government, I certainly welcomed the strong political leadership, and it’s something we’ve been advocating for in NSW from the state government and the Aboriginal community as well.” She also stated that intervention should take 15 years to be effective.

The 11-member “expert group” is comprised of more bureaucrats and industry experts who also profit from this tinkering at the edges of Aboriginal disadvantage. It includes John Taylor from the ANU Centre For Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. The centre receives funds from the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaCSIA), and the Australia Research Council, as well as from industry partners including mining giant Rio Tinto. The centre advocates “Privatisation of Central Australian communities” as the solution to Aboriginal poverty, meaning that big business should throw these communities a few crumbs while it exploits their labour and their land for huge profits.

Another member is Neil Westbury, once the highest-ranking NT public servant, who is part of the Remote Focus Group that released a “prospectus” last month arguing that in remote areas there is a looming crisis of an exploding Aboriginal population that shows few signs of migrating to metropolitan cities. It claims this not only has the potential to impact negatively on the profits of mining companies, but that these communities are like Pacific island “failed states” and could pose a threat to national security requiring armed intervention.

As of July 1, the NT government reorganised all local councils in rural and remote areas into eight “super” shire councils. Three members of the “independent expert group” have benefited from the creation of larger councils — Michael Berto is now CEO of Roper Gulf Shire Council, Ronald Lami Lami is chairperson of the West Arnhem Shire Transition Committee and Mavis Malbunka is vice president of the Ntaria Council. All these councils (as any around the country) seek to encourage business investment into their shires.

As the intervention clears the way for more mining, these shire councils will gain revenue not just from the mines but also from rates on miners’ housing and the smaller businesses that spring up around the mines. These heads of these councils therefore have a direct interest in the continuation of the intervention. It’s no wonder that on February 2 Malbunka said: “Income management is a great help for Aboriginal people; in Hermannsburg I hear no complaint about income management.”

David Ross is the director of the Central Land Council and is also member of the advisory group. Ross, like Yu, has the same interest in increased mining and the personal wealth it can bring as the new shire councils do. Ross stated on November 12, 2003, in response to a Minerals Council suggestion that land councils are a barrier to mining company profits: “I contend that the kilograms of gold currently being shipped out of Tennant Creek would not be happening without the involvement of a well-resourced and experienced representative body such as the Central Land Council.”

Group members Donna Ah Chee, deputy director of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress (health care service), and Vicki Gillick, coordinator of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, have gained their places through their conservative views on tackling the social and health problems that are a result of poverty. Speaking about alcohol abuse, Ah Chee told ABC News Online: “We can’t treat it as a symptom; we do have to treat it as a cause and we have to deal with it.” This is despite the volumes of research that show that rates of alcoholism, substance abuse and associated problems in any community around the world increase as its standard of living drops.

Gillick told ABC radio’s November 27 Law Report: “Certainly my personal view is that I don’t believe any parent has the right to blow their brains on drugs, or grog, and neglect their children, and I think that welfare reform aimed at dealing with that should apply across the board.” The views expressed by Ah Chee and Gillick suit the federal government’s portrayal of the intervention as “tough love”, hiding its true intent — the continuation of over 220 years of theft of Aboriginal lands — and the obscuring of the fact that the low standard of living in remote Aboriginal communities is a direct result of deliberate government policy and neglect.

The only group member to have made some public criticism of the intervention is Mark Wenitong, the senior medical officer at Apunipima Cape York Health Council and past president and founding member of the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association. When the intervention began in 2007, Wenitong raised concerns about the lack of consultation with Aborigines and the possible negative effects of intrusive compulsory health checks. However, in an interview with Triple J Radio’s Hack program, Wenitong said he thought the intervention, if done right, was a chance to “fund healthcare, education and infrastructure on an ongoing basis”. Wenitong’s belief that the intervention was actually about government concern for Aboriginal children shows considerable naivete.

The review’s expected endorsement of the intervention should come as no surprise: PM Kevin Rudd and Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin handpicked a group that would give them the review outcome they wanted.

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au

NT intervention continues racist land-grab

By Hamish Chitts

The first anniversary of the federal government’s racist “emergency” intervention into 73 remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory was marked by protests in Australia’s major cities by Aboriginal people and their supporters. The protests called attention to the real intent of the intervention, which is to continue stealing Aboriginal land.

Governments have practised and fostered racism against Aboriginal people since the beginning of European colonisation. When Pemulwuy led the first organised Aboriginal armed resistance against the invaders of Sydney Cove, from December 9, 1790, until his murder in 1802, senior officers of the New South Wales Corps persuaded Governor Arthur Phillip not to report this resistance for what it was. The governor’s reports to London played down or omitted battles against Pemulwuy’s warriors and characterised the resistance as minor criminal incidents by troublesome natives influenced by escaped convicts.

British military officers saw the potential for becoming rich and powerful landholders, and did not want this jeopardised by any treaty that the British government might seek to make with Aboriginal tribes if they knew there was strong resistance to the colony. As these officers and other fortune seekers established their power and became part of the tiny ruling class of Australia, they set the stage for the distortions of history and racist characterisations of Aboriginal people that persist to this very day. Only through racism can the capitalist ruling class continue to take what it wants from Aboriginal land.

Brough’s forerunners

In June last year, the then-minister for Indigenous affairs, Mal Brough, justified the “emergency” intervention like this: “What I’ve actually done is legislated to say to people, if you want to unlock the value in your land, if you want to again have the chance to be able to aspire to something — home ownership, jobs, cultural awareness, bringing up a child in a healthy environment — then you can do so.”

Brough’s feigned concern for Aboriginal people and their culture is similar (though updated for a 21st century audience) to that expressed by John Bleakley, Queensland’s chief protector and director of native affairs from 1914 to 1942, who in 1919 said of Aborigines, “It is only by complete separation of the two races that we can save him from hopeless contamination and eventual extinction, as well as safeguard the purity of our own blood”. This was Bleakley’s justification for removing Aborigines from their land and confining them to reserves and to church-run missions. While Bleakley was a fervent advocate of racial segregation and Brough advocates racial integration, both policies involve the taking of land from Aboriginal people under the guise of their “best interests”.

Despite claims by Brough and the ALP, which supported the NT intervention, that it is a necessary emergency response to child abuse in remote Aboriginal communities, the measures that have been implemented are more about acquiring land than the safety of children. These included:

• Deployment of additional police to Aboriginal communities, leading to greater repression and incarceration for minor offences.

• Bans on alcohol, which, rather than treating alcoholism or its causes, force those who are dependent on alcohol into bigger towns, where they can maintain their addiction.

• Compulsory acquisition of townships, currently held under the federal Native Title Act 1993, through five-year leases, which removes community ownership of the land.

• Removal of customary law and cultural practice considerations from bail applications and sentencing in criminal proceedings.

• Suspension of the permit system that required permission from Aboriginal communities to enter their land.

• Quarantining of a proportion of welfare benefits to all recipients in the designated communities and issuing them with electronic debit cards that can be used only at Coles or Woolworth stores in larger regional centres.

• The abolition of Community Development Employment Projects.

These measures, not surprisingly, have resulted in an exodus from the affected communities, with people moving into larger regional centres like Darwin, Katherine and Alice Springs. This is putting extra pressure on already inadequate housing in these towns. Small community-run stores in the targeted Aboriginal townships no longer receive income because their former customers must travel — hundreds of kilometres in some cases — to a Coles or Woolworths store where they can use their debit cards.

Clearing out remote communities

Now the federal government is considering a report from the heads of the intervention taskforce that recommends assessing which communities are “viable” in the longer term and planning future investment based on those assessments. Asked by reporters on June 21 if this meant moving people from smaller communities to larger centres, Jenny Macklin, the federal Labor minister now responsible for the intervention, replied, “It certainly recommends that this is an issue that needs to be examined”.

Macklin added: “I think it’s critical to look at this from the point of view of making sure that children go to school and that parents can get work. We are concentrating the new homes in the larger communities, they are growing rapidly, there is very significant population growth. There will be upgrades in some of the other communities, but we are concentrating the largest effort in some of the larger communities.”

Under the present laws, this removal of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands could have permanent ramifications. A key part of the process of gaining native title over crown land is proving to a court that those making the claim have maintained a connection with the land. If the intervention continues for 10 years, traditional owners of land may legally lose their native title claim. This would also have a devastating effect on the cultural heritage that Brough and Macklin claim to be protecting. As particular places and the ceremonies and stories connected with them are central to Aboriginal cultures, any disconnection from their land amounts to an erosion of their culture.

Taking the children away

The federal, state and territory governments, which are now all in Labor’s hands, are also establishing government-funded boarding schools for Aboriginal children, but run by private Christian organisations like the new boarding college on Melville Island. In March, Macklin said the federal government was committed to building three extras hostels in the NT as well as the one in the north Queensland town of Weipa.

The Labor governments seek to encourage Aboriginal parents from remote communities to send their children to boarding schools by threatening to quarantine all of the parents’ social security payments, or through the promise of “good education” in comparison to under-funded and neglected local government schools. Macklin asserts that children are better off at boarding school because, as she claimed on April 2, “What’s happened in these communities has been an insidious creeping decline. It’s been generations in the making, producing dysfunctional, despairing communities paralysed by violence, abuse, neglect and despair.”

A similar justification was made the Queensland parliament in 1965 during debate on a bill to allow the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their parents: “No group of children is more neglected than those who are living with their coloured parents in the fringe-dwelling areas of many of our country towns. I want that unfortunate group of people to be included in the children and youth of the state whose well-being it is proposed to promote, safeguard and protect by the introduction of this bill.”

A better example

As mining companies and pastoralists in Australia look forward to getting more Aboriginal land, something very different is happening in Venezuela. There, the government of President Hugo Chavez, which is leading the effort to build “21st century socialism”, is working with indigenous communities to eliminate the injustices they face.

In 2002 the Chavez government changed the name of Columbus Day to Day of Indigenous Resistance. Can anyone image Australian PM Kevin Rudd even suggesting replacing “Australia Day” (the officially sanctioned annual commemoration on January 26 of the beginning of European colonisation) and making December 9 an officially sanctioned Day of Indigenous Resistance?

The Venezuelan government has set up Mission Guaicaipuro, a government-funded program that seeks to restore communal land titles to indigenous communities and to protect their cultural rights. Named after an indigenous chief, Guaicaipuro (1530-1568), who led native resistance against the Spanish colonisation of Venezuela, the mission is run by the indigenous communities themselves, in partnership with the government.

On February 25 the Chavez government announced that it would confiscate at least 3000 hectares of the British meat-packing tycoon Lord Vestey’s 13,600-hectare Charcote cattle ranch so that indigenous people can move about freely. The Vestey Group had fenced in 200 Yaruro people, who could not leave the property without the company’s permission.

In the 60s and 70s the racist policies of segregation and forced assimilation, including the kidnapping of the Stolen Generations, were presented by governments as in the best interests of Aboriginal people. Far too many non-Aboriginal people took those governments at their word. Today there is no excuse for doing so. Regardless of how the policy is justified, the real intent has been and remains the theft of Aboriginal land for exploitation by the same class of wealthy people who enrich themselves through exploiting the labour of all working people.

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au

Invasion Day Brisbane 2008

Hamish Chitts, Brisbane

26 January 2008

Photo by Owain Lewis Jones

January 26 1788 is a day of infamy, a day when representatives of the British Government and Monarchy claiming the entire continent of Australia as their own, stole the land from the hundreds of nations who already lived there. Around 300 Murris and their supporters rallied and marched through Brisbane’s streets today to observe Invasion Day, to remember warriors who have passed on and to protest against the systemic racist oppression imposed by Federal, State and Territory governments.

In front of Queensland’s State Parliament leading Murri activist Sam Watson chaired the rally. He highlighted recent Aboriginal deaths in custody in Brisbane and Darwin and called for a minute silence to remember the many Aboriginal people who have died in police custody. After this was observed Watson introduced the first speaker, Dennis Walker of the Noonuccal people.

“The incarceration rates are up, the deaths in custody rates are up I don’t like it, I don’t know who does, except those who may profit from it I guess.” said Walker. Walker explained that Australia was claimed under false pretences and that by their own laws the British crown, parliament and subsequent Australian parliaments’ occupation of the land is illegal. He said that the only way to end this illegal occupation and to stop the genocide that is still being brought upon Aboriginal people is through a treaty. Walker spoke of his efforts to discuss a treaty with the Premier of Queensland, Anna Bligh and her hypocrisy refusing to talk now when she has claimed to support a treaty in the past (when she wasn’t Premier). He finished by calling on people to converge on Canberra on 11 and 12 February (the first days of Federal parliament) - joining people from around Australia to demand justice for Aboriginal people. “If Rudd won’t deal we should go overseas and ask for the overseas community to treaty with us so we can get rid of the oppressor.”

A full transcript of Walker’s speech can be read here.

Sam Watson reiterated the point that by their own laws the British and subsequent occupations of Aboriginal lands are illegal. In 1770 despite meeting many senior Aboriginal tribal leaders as he charted the East coast of Australia Captain Cook claimed the entire continent for King George III on the basis that it was "terra nullius" (uninhabited land). This legal lie remained in force until the 3rd of June 1992 when the Mabo Decision ruled that Cook had no basis to extinguish existing Aboriginal ownership of the land.

Wayne Wharton, of the Kooma people told the crowd how his children educate their school teachers about whose land this really is. He warned that the Rudd Government is no different from the previous one and that they’ll hand pick who they decide represents Aboriginal people and that they will pick them on the basis that these representatives will be willing to sell out their own people. Wharton urged the Brisbane community to became the ‘Brisbane Blacks’ of the 1970’s and 80’s, a strong cohesive militant community which set the example and took the lead in the struggle for Aboriginal rights. He highlighted the importance of Lex Wotton’s trial in April and the importance of people turning out in numbers to support him.

A full transcript of Wharton’s speech can be read here.

The crowd then marched from parliament through the city to Musgrave Park. The march stopped at several places along the way the hear speeches. In front of the Executive building of the state government there were speeches about the failure of the Queensland government to repay tens of millions of dollars it stole from Aboriginal workers under the so called protection laws. Outside the building that used to house the Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs Sam Watson remembered the many protests and confrontations with police that had happened there.

Photo: Dennis Walker falls as he runs across car roofs from police outside the old Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, George Street, Brisbane, 23 November 1971. (the car drove off)



After crossing the river the protest marched to the edge of a government sponsored Australia Day festival at Southbank. Here Lionel Fogarty and Wayne Wharton educated festival goers with speeches on the true nature of Invasion Day. The protest chanted “thief, thief, thief!” before marching on to Musgrave Park where a festival of Aboriginal music and culture was held at Jagera Hall.