Across Australia, Indigenous activists and their supporters have offered solidarity to the residents of Redfern Block. Brisbane Murri activist Sam Watson spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Marce Cameron about the reaction.
Watson, who will stand for the Senate as a Socialist Alliance candidate in the next federal election, helped organise a community meeting in Brisbane to discuss the problems in Redfern.
“As an Aboriginal person, as a Murri parent and grandparent, I feel absolutely devastated by the death of that young lad in Redfern”, Watson said. “We send our love and solidarity to the family and community of TJ and we stand with them during these times of sorry business.”
Watson argued that the incident had exposed “the lies and half-truths, all the bullshit about the Coalition government’s brand of social experimentation”. Aboriginal people, he said, had been “marginalised, terrorised, oppressed and hunted” under PM John Howard.
“Every single Aboriginal person in this land now knows that the massacres and murders are still going on”, he said.
“That’s why we’re having a mass community meeting — so that we can organise after-hours patrols of our community to monitor the safety and security of our young people.”
Watson is scathing about the police, arguing that they harass not only black people, but protesters: “There’s no safe place in Australia. All police forces are party to this horrendous campaign to crush and destroy any form of dissent.”
Watson pointed out that the royal commission into deaths in custody — itself a product of a community campaign — had produced 239 recommendations that were not implemented, and the deaths in custody rate has not slowed.
“What we need to do is to make the police and those who control the police power structure, from the police union to the police minister, accountable to the community. I’ve been involved in the provision of legal services to Aboriginal communities for 34 years. In this time I’ve never known a single police officer to be charged or convicted of any attempt of violence against an Aboriginal person.
“The cops can kill an Aboriginal child tonight and they can walk away scot free. If any member of the public goes and knocks off a cop they’ll be dead in a couple of hours. What we have is a regime of terror and brutal repression designed to entrench the ruling class and deny ordinary working-class people any rights at all.
“If we don’t have the right to live, we have nothing. The NSW police took away TJ’s right to live and unless we do something about this, that little lad’s life will be on the hands of every Australian, and a blight upon our national dreaming”.
From Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004.
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