Why we'll be protesting at the Olympics

Why we'll be protesting at the Olympics

BY SIMON BUTLER

The 400,000-strong reconciliation march across the Sydney Harbour
Bridge on May 28 demonstrated to the federal Coalition government that
a healthy anti-racism sentiment still exists among Australians. Despite
this, the government responded with an intensification of attacks on Aborigines,
refugees and migrants.

 

The push to demonise Aboriginal welfare recipients as ungrateful “bludgers”
and asylum seekers fleeing persecution as “illegals” and “queue jumpers”
reflects a growing desperation on the part of the Australian ruling class.

The Coalition is desperate to harness the votes of disaffected supporters
of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party. It also needs to politically isolate
anti-racist protests at the Olympic Games in Sydney next month. And it
needs to manufacture and maintain scapegoats for public anger about its
GST, welfare spending cuts, privatisation program and attacks on job security.

Aboriginal oppression

As the Olympics
loom, governments and corporations are going into overdrive to portray
Australia as tourist friendly and egalitarian. Those people who are concerned
about social justice must reply with the truth about this government's
record.

• 
  On July 26, a “compromise” was reached between Prime Minister
  John Howard and Northern Territory Chief Minister Denis Burke on mandatory
  sentencing. Mandatory sentencing has been condemned in Australia and internationally
  for resulting in disproportionately severe sentences against Aboriginal
  people in particular. The Howard-Burke deal, which was never more than
  a public relations exercise, has left mandatory sentencing almost wholly
  intact.

• 
  A 1999 report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the
  Australian Institute for Health and Welfare revealed that the federal government
  continues to neglect Aboriginal health. Aborigines face a shockingly high
  rate of infant mortality and have a life expectancy 15 years lower than
  non-indigenous Australians.

• 
  Ignoring recommendations in the 1997 Human Rights and Equal
  Opportunity Commission report Bringing Them Home, the federal government
  has continued to refuse to address the injustices suffered by the stolen
  generations. Instead of issuing a formal apology and providing compensation,
  the government defended racism in court in the Lorna Cubillo and Peter
  Gunner stolen children test case. Seizing on the ruling against Cubillo
  and Gunner last week, Howard vigorously rejected new calls for a government
  apology or a reparations tribunal.

• 
  The federal and South Australian Coalition governments are pressing
  ahead with a proposed nuclear waste dump in South Australia, against the
  wishes of, among others, the Aboriginal traditional landowners, some of
  whom suffered from the British nuclear weapons tests at Maralinga in the
  1950s.

• 
  In 1999, Abstudy, a program designed to assist Aboriginal people
  to undertake secondary and tertiary education, was all but abolished, with
  $18 million a year being cut from the program. This is despite only 29%
  of indigenous students completing the final year of secondary school (non-indigenous
  students have a 70% completion rate).

• 
  The 1998 amendments to the Native Title Act in effect extinguished
  native title and left the door wide open for the states and territories
  to pass further anti-Aboriginal land rights legislation.

• 
  The government has also made provisions to grant tax deductions
  to mining corporations for expenditures incurred in court battles against
  native title claims. The Aboriginal Legal Service, meanwhile, has been
  forced to scale back its services due to lack of government funding.

• 
  Most of the major recommendations of the 1988 Royal Commission
  into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody have not been implemented. The number
  of Aboriginal deaths in custody has continued to increase and indigenous
  people are still incarcerated at a rate 14 times that of non-indigenous
  people.

Repression of refugees

Another scapegoat for the Coalition has been refugees. Governments and
the mass media have been whipping up racist hysteria about an “invasion”
of “illegals” and “boat people”. Their offensive against asylum seekers
is intensifying.

• 
  A few weeks ago, asylum seekers imprisoned in the Villawood
  Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney were tear gassed, handcuffed and
  forcibly taken to the Woomera Detention Centre in central South Australia.
  The asylum seekers had been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the
  inhumane conditions inside the camp and to speed up their applications
  for refugee status. The hunger strike attracted solidarity protests outside
  the centre. The asylum seekers were moved to Woomera to head off more protests.

• 
  The government has sought revenge against some asylum seekers
  involved in the mass break-out of refugees from the Curtin, Woomera and
  Port Hedland Detention Centres in July. The authorities are prosecuting
  the most active and forthright defenders of fellow refugees' human rights.

• 
  The ideological offensive against refugees has been led by federal
  immigration minister Philip Ruddock. Ruddock rails against the supposed
  crimes committed by refugees who have been released from detention, including
  “rorting” the welfare system, and freely spending on expensive accessories
  such as mobile phones and inter-state travel. In fact, released refugees'
  access to government welfare is extremely limited. Ruddock has publicly
  urged private welfare agencies to turn away refugees.

• 
  In a test of how successful the government's anti-refugee propaganda
  has been, Ruddock raised the idea earlier this year that detained refugees
  be forced to work as unwaged fruit pickers. This proposal amounts to state-sanctioned
  slavery.

Silencing the critics

Those people prepared to criticise the Coalition's racist policies have
confronted either frenzied verbal attacks from government ministers or
funding cuts, or both.

• 
  Several United Nations committees have loudly condemned the
  Australian government's policies. Mandatory sentencing laws and the 1998
  Native Title Act have been found to contravene the UN Covenant on the Elimination
  of Racial Discrimination. Australia's policy of mandatory detention of
  asylum seekers is in breach of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
  The government's response has been not only to ignore these reports, but
  to order a review of Australia's involvement in the international treaty
  system.

• 
  In 1997, the federal government reduced funding to the Human
  Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission by 40%. HREOC has been a loud voice
  in opposition to government racism. There are now plans to abolish the
  position of human rights commissioner altogether.

• 
  Funding to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission
  has been slashed by $400 million as part of the government's aim of reducing
  ATSIC's autonomy and accountability to grassroots Aboriginal organisations.

• 
  Allies of the government can be found among the Aboriginal elite.
  Conservatives like Noel Pearson and Lowita O'Donahue have consistently
  parroted government platitudes. Pearson, who has become a darling of the
  capitalist media, has said that the government payments and other assistance
  available to indigenous people are corrupting influences that induce “welfare
  dependency”. He has called on the government to instead concentrate on
  enforcing law and order in Aboriginal communities.

The public disenchantment that flows from the closure of government services,
high unemployment and the increasing cost of living while real incomes
decline puts increasingly pressure on the government to find ways of distracting
public attention from its austerity policies and of sowing divisions between
working people.

Inciting racism does both. It must be actively resisted. The anti-racism
protests being planned to take advantage of the media attention that will
be on Sydney's Olympic Games are an important opportunity to do that (see
article on page 3).