By Karen Fredericks
SYDNEY — The Aboriginal Legal Service has launched a campaign against Sydney's bid to host the Olympics in the year 2000 — despite claims by bid officials that Aboriginal people in NSW support the bid.
Activists from local land councils and sporting, arts and other community groups gathered at the legal service in Redfern on October 28 to support the campaign to inform the members of the International Olympic Committee, and the international community in general, of the human rights abuses against Aboriginal people in Australia.
"Australia is a racist country", said Paul Coe, chair of the legal service, in his opening comments at the launch. "It is a colonial regime. Its laws are based on a legal fiction. Despite the High Court's decision in Mabo, where it was held that 'Terra Nullius' [the concept that Australia was uninhabited at the time of Cook's landing] no longer applies, a new racist form of imperialism called 'discovery' has been substituted. For the first time they have said native title exists, but that native title can be extinguished by any act of state.
"We the Aboriginal people know that a precedent was set some 20 years ago, when the Olympic movement said that South Africa would not be allowed to participate in the Olympics because of institutionalised racism and oppression of human beings. The same conditions apply in this country."
Coe said letters had already been sent to all members of the International Olympic Committee outlining the continuing oppression of Aboriginal people. He said the committee members, and members of all the other bidding committees, would also be sent video compilations, including footage from Cop it Sweet, the ABC documentary on police harassment of Aboriginal people in inner-city Sydney, and home-video footage of police officers play-acting black deaths in custody at a party in outback Australia.
Coe said the service was currently compiling statistics indicating that government strategies, such as the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, were having no real effect. Amongst other atrocities, he said, there has been an increase, Australia-wide, of 25% in the arrest rate of Aboriginal people since the close of the inquiry. A further 34 people had died in police or correctional services custody, 11 of them in NSW.
"We will be tabling all these figures", he said. " We'll also be tabling the Human Rights Committee report on racist violence ... to the United Nations, and all the bidding committees. When I address the United Nations, at the commencement of the year of indigenous peoples on the 10th of December, I'll be making it quite plain, on behalf of the National Aboriginal Legal Service Secretariat, that Australia is not a fit and proper country to host an Olympic games. This country practises institutionalised racism and has a policy of genocide towards Aboriginal people."
The community campaign against the bid has received support from local land councils such as Worimi, Wiradjuri, Metropolitan, Mogo and Nambucca, as well as community groups such as the Redfern Allblacks, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the Redfern Aboriginal Dance Theatre, the Mudjinigal Women's Centre and the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Watch Committee. Their protest gives the lie to a Sydney Morning Herald report on October 6 that declared "Sydney's bid for the 2000 Olympic Games has won the backing of the Aboriginal community, whose support is regarded as essential if [the bid] is to be successful".
According to the article, the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, "the elected body which represents Aboriginal interests in the state", voted unanimously to support the bid, thereby providing the required "perception of racial harmony" which so enhanced Atlanta's bid for the 1996 games.
In a letter of support for the campaign against the bid, the Worimi Local Aboriginal Land Council has said that it "considers the support for the bid given by the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council to be that of the Council members only, and in no way reflects the views of Aborigines of NSW". The letter confirms that there was "no consultation prior to the release of the article in the SMH".
Jenny Munro of the Metropolitan Local Land Council told Green Left she believes the problem lies with the land council legislation, and particularly with amendments which have made councillors less accountable to their local communities than to the NSW government. She said that although the legislation says councillors should report back to their locals and take the opinions of their locals to state level, that is not what happens in practice, and there is very little communities can do to call their councillors to account, except vote them out at the next election.
Munro said community activists had gone outside the land council structure to mount this campaign, so as to be able to have a voice independent of the government.
"This protest is being mounted by community-based organisations, where we began from", she said. "The government wants to ignore the initiatives of the community-based organisations and set up statutory government bodies like the Land Council to thwart communities and their initiatives for self-determination."
Cecil Patten, of the Redfern Allblacks Football Club, summed up the attitude of the community activists at the launch of the campaign when he said, "What chance have our children of becoming Olympic athletes under the present system? Until the human rights problems are looked at within this country and our sovereignty is recognised, our children will go nowhere and we will not support Sydney's bid for the Olympics."