BY SUE BOLAND
Imagine that you are taken to an isolated prison. You have no idea if you are to be imprisoned for days, months or years. You are totally cut off from the outside world, denied access to newspapers, radio and television. You aren't allowed to make even telephone or letter contact with anyone outside the prison.
Imagine another situation. You are 12 years old, and you're hanging around with two mates. The three of you are abducted by six police officers in the early hours of the morning and taken to a remote area of swamp land outside the city. The police remove your shoes and threaten to cut your fingers off and throw you in the river. The police then drive off, leaving you to walk 14 kilometres back to the city, with no money and no shoes.
Both of these situations occurred in Australia. The first describes conditions experienced by refugees in migrant detention centres.
While the second situation relates to a specific incident involving three Aboriginal children in Queensland in 1994, examples of police harassment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are commonplace in all states.
Attorney-general Daryl Williams responded to recent UN criticism of Australia's human rights record by declaring that issues here are "minor" compared to "arbitrary arrest, detention and execution, and having your arms chopped off for belonging to the wrong political party".
But Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and some migrant groups are often subject to arbitrary arrest, and you will be mandatorily detained if you are a refugee fleeing a country which executes and mutilates people for belonging to the wrong political party or ethnic group, and you haven't arrived "legally".
Deliberate campaign
Prime Minister John Howard and his ministers are engaged in a carefully orchestrated campaign to undermine sympathy for, and solidarity with, Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and refugees.
The government's denial of the authenticity of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) 1997 report on the stolen generations of indigenous people is comparable to the position argued by Holocaust deniers such as David Irving.
There is an overwhelming body of documented evidence of successive governments' attempts to exterminate the Aboriginal race by removing children from their parents in an attempt to "breed out" their Aboriginality.
When the federal government continues to deny the existence of, and government responsibility for, the stolen generations, it is giving the policy a stamp of approval.
Hearing Howard complain that it is not the responsibility of the "current generation" to apologise for the actions of past generations, you would think that the policy of removing indigenous children died out in the last century. But the policy was still in existence during the early 1970s, when Howard was a member of the NSW Liberal Party state executive.
Add to the government's denial of the stolen generations the misleading statements and distortions that are released to the media by Howard and other ministers regarding refugees and other issues affecting indigenous people, and a clear pattern of racist provocation emerges.
The Sydney Morning Herald's Adele Horin checked up on some of the "facts" released to the media by the immigration minister Philip Ruddock. He accused Iraqi and Afghan refugees of "double dipping" by sending their benefit to their families overseas while scrounging off charities to support themselves here. After a few phone calls to check Ruddock's "evidence", Horin was informed by Ruddock's office that he was just "hypothesising", she wrote on August 12.
Scapegoating
The government is implementing economic policies which risk arousing hostility from the vast majority of the electorate. The government needs only a small swing against it at the next federal election, and it will be out on its ear.
According to a Parliamentary Library analysis reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (August 30), the Labor Party needs a uniform two-party preferred swing of only 0.8% to win government. What better reason to divert hostility away from the government and towards "greedy" Aborigines, refugees, single parents and unemployed?
However, it's far from guaranteed that Howard will be successful with his racist scapegoating. The hundreds of thousands who joined the walks for reconciliation and the widespread public support for the right of Kosovar refugees to stay in Australia indicate that Howard's campaign could backfire.
This is why the government seeks to conceal the full extent of its racist policies.
The government:
- keeps refugees in total isolation in remote detention centres. All workers and visitors have to sign a secrecy agreement before being allowed access;
- cut the HREOC budget by 40% in 1997 and the ATSIC budget by $470 million in 1996, making it difficult to document the effects of government policy on indigenous people and refugees;
- threatens loss of funds to organisations which speaks out against its policies. The Refugee Council of Australia has been threatened with funding loss if it continues making public statements in support of detained refugees;
- threatened Amnesty International with "serious consequences" if it continued to publicise the case of a Somali asylum-seeker the government was seeking to deport;
- introduced a law which prohibits the ombudsman and HREOC from initiating contact with refugees in the detention centres;
- prohibited publication of the findings of a government inquiry concerning a Chinese asylum-seeker who had undergone a forced abortion after being deported to China when almost nine months pregnant;
- announced that it would cut cooperation with UN human rights committees, including restricting committee visits to Australia to investigate human rights complaints.
The government would not take such measures if it was fully confident of winning the support of the majority of Australians for its program.
Long record
The government's record of racism towards indigenous people is extensive. It includes:
- refusing to pay compensation to members of the stolen generations, despite the fact that they are more likely to be unemployed, imprisoned or homeless than Aboriginal people who weren't stolen;
- refusing to overturn mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory and Western Australia;
- refusing to force state governments to address rampant racism in the state police forces, prisons and criminal justice systems. Amnesty International reports in 2000 and 1999 document many incidents of severe bashings of Aboriginal prisoners and detainees by police and prison officers, some of which have resulted in death;
- refusing to implement the major recommendations of the 1988 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody;
- overturning the property rights of indigenous people by virtually extinguishing native title;
- denying most Aboriginal workers in Aboriginal communities wages equivalent to those of workers in country towns who do the same type of work;
- making no attempt to compensate Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who served in the armed forces and weren't entitled to equal wages with non-indigenous soldiers until 1986;
- introducing legislation to override the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act and enable the construction of the Hindmarsh Island bridge. The government argued that it had the right to pass racist laws;
- falsely claiming that indigenous communities receive too much funding. According to research by John Deeble reported in the Australian Medical Association magazine, spending on indigenous health is no higher than it is for "other Australians in the same income category";
Refugees
If this record of racism towards indigenous people is shocking, so too is the record towards refugees.
In 1999, the government, with the support of the Labor "opposition", introduced laws which deny refugees who arrive "illegally" the right to apply for a permanent protection visa.
Once they prove that they are genuine refugees, they are granted only a temporary three-year visa; then they have to reapply and prove their status all over again. If their partner and children are still overseas, they are not allowed to join them in Australia.
The new laws even deny refugees the right to apply for the temporary protection visa if they could have been entitled to apply in another country before coming to Australia. A Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald that if these laws had existed then, he would have been denied refuge in Australia.
In the camps, immigration department officials withhold from refugees information about their rights. If asylum seekers don't use the "correct" words in the initial interview, they are considered non-genuine and are prevented from applying for asylum.
HREOC has received many complaints over a number of years about the use of chemical restraints in the centres. Refugees have been involuntarily injected with Largactil, Valium and other sedatives.
The government is doing everything possible to maximise the number of refugees deported. Almost all of the 4000 Kosovar and the 1500 East Timorese refugees were forcibly deported. Many of the deported Timorese had no shelter when they returned to East Timor. Many of the Kosovar refugees couldn't return to their homes, which were now within Serb enclaves; some have been shot since returning.
Even if refugees do prove their case, their lives don't get any easier. Refugees are being dumped in various cities, with virtually no money (in one case only $50) and no entitlement to unemployment benefits or English classes. To emphasise exactly how vicious the federal government is, Ruddock wrote to a number of charities asking them to deny assistance to the refugees.
The Australian government is truly vicious in its attacks on the rights of indigenous people and refugees and thoroughly deserves harsh criticism by the UN for human rights abuses.