The Indigenous Social Justice Association (ISJA) released this open letter on November 22
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Next year, on February 14, will be the 10th anniversary of the killing of the young Aboriginal man, TJ Hickey, as a consequence of the pursuit by the then Redfern police.
For nine long years, the Hickey family has been campaigning for justice and for the proper legal punishment of those directly responsible for TJ’s death.
We would like to invite you and your organisation to assist both the Hickey family and ISJA to make this 10th anniversary rally and march the biggest to date. Of course, we all would have much rather not reached this 10th anniversary point but we have and we, therefore, now need to come together in true solidarity to obtain real justice on behalf of the Hickey family.
We strongly urge you to be a positive part of this upcoming anniversary.
But there is another reason for us to write to you, and using this painful activity as an invitation, we would like to propose to use this message as a serious reminder that we need to apply the same type of solidarity in all our individual, but overlapping struggles for social justice.
ISJA understands, as we know that you do too, that with the election of the Tony Abbott government, our areas of work and struggle are going to be very much under attack. It will become much more than necessary for our organisations to build much stronger and more united campaigns to be able to resist the right-wing attacks from the Abbott government.
Already there have been attacks against Aborigines, LGBTIQ activists, trade unions and their members, the unemployed, and the list goes on and will continue to grow. The born-to-rule brigade is certainly back in power and we must resist their every move at every opportunity.
We have noted that many times our areas of work and actions have much common ground and again, to restate the obvious, a common effort will make our members more aware of the needs of unity. Indeed, the maxim that “an injury to one is an injury to all” has never rung so true.
ISJA would like to invite everyone to a meeting to find out how to build an alliance of joint support and action.
Our practical strength must lie in our joint solidarity work. Abbott and the NSW state governments will surely be joining forces to force us to our knees. This must not be allowed to happen and by our unity in action we can stop it.
[The meeting will be held on December 5 at 7pm at the Redfern Community Centre, adjacent to The Block.]