BY KIM BULLIMORE
SYDNEY — While Prime Minister John Howard was preparing to speak at the handover of the Document of Reconciliation at the Sydney Opera House on May 27, a group of protesters from the Indigenous Students Network (ISN) and their supporters were getting ready to stage a protest against him, both outside and in.
The document is the culmination of 10 years of work by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and was supposed to take Australians, black and white, forward into a more positive future. But since his election, John Howard has done everything possible to undermine and discredit indigenous people and their call for justice and has repeatedly stated his refusal to sign the document, which includes an apology for the wrongs of the past.
As a group, we decided that Howard did not deserve to be treated with respect at this ceremony.
Green Left Weekly had obtained a media pass to attend the event and contacted the ISN, offered to make it available to the network. We chose to send one activist inside, me, while the rest of the network would coordinate the protest against the PM in the Opera House forecourt outside.
When the document arrived at the Opera House by boat, the ISN and its many supporters donned gags stencilled with the word "silenced" to symbolise the attempts by Howard and his government to isolate indigenous people.
Inside, I waited until Howard began his address. Then I leapt up from the media pit in the front row of the concert hall and unfurled my banner emblazoned with the Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal flags and the statement, "No Reconciliation without Justice".
I then began to shout the demands we had decided on: a treaty and real land rights; overturn mandatory sentencing; apologise and compensate the stolen generations; and restore funding to Abstudy.
The PM attempted to ignore me and continue his speech but many others in crowd began to call out for him to apologise. There were even some people up the back of the hall who unfurled smuggled-in banners of their own. As Howard ploughed on, the calls for an apology became louder and louder. By the end of his speech, three quarters of the crowd had stood up and turned their backs on him.
While all this was going on inside the concert hall, the other members of the ISN, lead by Joel Bray, Corrie Hodson and Lori-lee, took off their gags and started chanting and calling out for justice for indigenous Australians.
I was expecting to get dragged off by security guards within seconds of unfurling my banner, but they never came near me. I was able to walk out of the ceremony unhindered and join the rest of our group outside, who were already being interviewed by national and international media.
We protested not because we don't believe there should be reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous people but because we believe that reconciliation can only come about when there is equality and justice, which there definitely isn't now.
Our protest affirmed that, until there is real justice and real equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, there can be no reconciliation — and it well and truly spoiled the PM's hypocritical attempt to appear to be anything other than a racist.
[Kim Bullimore is a student at the University of Canberra, an activist in the Indigenous Students Network and a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]