'They want a peaceful Olympics'

Wednesday, May 28, 1997 - 10:00

By Chris Spindler

SYDNEY — Jenny Munro, chairperson of the Metropolitan Lands Council, traces the reconciliation process back to one of the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody.

"It was one of the first things that the federal government picked up on, and it organised the whole process. Reconciliation representatives were supposed to be representatives of the community, but were hand-picked by the government, so you were never going to get anyone in the process who was critical of the government or its policies or past practice."

She says she disagrees with the process "because I think it's just another tool like all the other tools used to con Aboriginal people. I think it's fairly obvious with the current political leadership in Australia that Aboriginal people will continue to be the lowest on the ladder.

"Look at the Wik debate: it's dispossession all over again. The racism is so entrenched that it questions our right to own and control things. It's only been a right recognised for the last three or four years, and look what it's done — it's turned the whole country on its ear. Now they want to remove that right and do it all again. How many times have we got to dance this dance with the master?"

Munro adds: "A racist prime minister has been elected, and Hanson is just a sideshow to the real show of Howard and the direction that they are going, with the Wik negotiations as an example. The 'disendorsement' of Hanson [during the March 1996 election campaign] was like the land rights we got — the disendorsement you get when you haven't got it.

"Now they have the gall to pull the con of reconciliation internationally and internally, after the pastoralists have put the boot into us again and terra nullius has been revisited after the comeback against Wik."

Munro believes that the pressure for reconciliation is due to the Olympics. "That's why they're pushing on reconciliation so hard now. They want a peaceful Olympics. They don't want black fellas standing up in front of cameras, in front of South Africa, Europe and America, saying this is how we are treated here and giving people the evidence."