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).