As Kylie would say "especially for you" KEVRAI
Australia a RACIST COUNTRY, and it is official! We are yet to unveil our racist layers.
Australians, like all people in general, are a caring people however sadly we continue to live in layers of racism which the Australian identity has failed to unveil. Many Australians have a hostile denial of our collective racist identity and of our discriminatory maltreatment of certain peoples. Since the day I was born into this country I have felt the layers of racism, and brutally so. I have been made aware of the colour of my skin, of my parents' country-of-origin, of the fact that I must assimilate in order to have prospects of personal advancement. One day I realised how deep to the bone racism cut. I realised that both my Masters and my PhD research were clearly linked to the racism I have felt. All three projects were research into racism and the pursuit of remedies and closure. However my own personal experiences pale compared to my Aboriginal brothers and sisters and to our Asylum Seekers. However we all suffer alongside them, either through our hostile denial or feelings of shame at our nation's collective racism.
When people call for an end to mandatory detention of our Asylum Seekers, who demonstrated tremendous courage to leave their homelands, we are really calling for an end to racism. When we call for an end to Aboriginal disparity and the effects of our crimes upon them which have led to inter-generational poverty, we are really calling for an end to racism. Those who do not call for an end to this racism, inadvertently support racism, and they are caught up in the racist layers yet unveiled. In their confusion they become self-regarding, not understanding how to fathom other-regarding apothegms and virtues, and instead compound racism and its hurts with perpetual imposts.
During 1999 the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination took unprecedented steps in forewarning Australia that it is perpetuating its historical and hostile racist identity. The Committee scolded Australia for not working to significantly eliminate Aboriginal peoples disadvantage. This year the UN Periodic Review Committee slammed Australia's mandatory detention policies and the impost of the Military Intervention upon the Aboriginal folk of the Northern Territory. We now have the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, a South African, describe what I have at all times known during the 49 years of my life, "a racist Australia". The Commissioner described similarities between Apartheid South Africa and Australia, and she called for an end to mandatory detention and indefinite incarceration of our Asylum Seekers. The Commissioner slammed the Northern Territory Intervention, and described the hurt for the victims of racism, for this impost was most certainly a layer of racism, and hence volatile injustices have transcended. The principle of Aboriginal advancement by Aboriginal peoples is still not understood by most Australians. If it was things would be different. West Australia is as bad as it gets in Australia in trying to displace racism. I have often fought harder than I should in the pursuit of equality, formal and substantive, and in the elimination of racism. The greatest shock for me was when I struggled to have practices implemented in a particular tertiary institution, which should be a bastion of identity-formation and higher knowledges, and where one high ranking staff member said to me, in front of a witness, 'Gerry, why do you bother, what do these blacks want, an education? Send them back to the bush where they belong'.
Between February 21 to 25 the Australian Human Rights Commission visited Villawood Detention Centre, one of 24 Detention Centres, which have cost six lives in eight months and in which thousands have been traumatised, have committed self-harm, and many who have descended into mental and physical despair, and who have evidently realised the layers of racism in this country, as I often did as a young child, in that in fact they are not welcomed and are unwanted. The Commission released its report and findings and prefaced the report with the frustration that they have spent more than a decade in the call for reforms to Australia’s system of mandatory and indefinite immigration detention.
Australia, in the context of its economic wealth and its status among the OECD nations, is one of the abject failures in terms of equality and justice for all peoples and in terms of eliminating racism. Australian governments will not comprehensively fund Aboriginal communities and they will not allow Aboriginal advancement by Aboriginal peoples whatever their political and cultural persuasions and settings, which like the rest of us are many. Australian governments have allowed for horrific living conditions to manifest in the Northern Territory, in its Central Desert, in the East Arnhem, and in other parts of Australia. The Australian government stands in the way of home ownership by Aboriginal folk and furthermore is trying to uproot them from their right to own their cultural and historical lands, that is what is left of them. One only has to visit the Aboriginal camps outside Kalgoorlie-Boulder, to view the squalid conditions our governments have in fact created. These communities are as worse as anything in the the Apartheid communities outside Soweto and Johannesburg. We have many Kwandebeles in Australia. It only takes six months to build a suburb in the southern and northern corridors of Perth with the full suite of community infrastructure including Broadband however it takes forever and a day to toss up a shack for Aboriginal folk in some community hub far removed from the remnants of their cultural lands.
The Australian Human Rights Commission raised its concerns at Australia's bungling snail like bureaucracy in that they take forever and a day to 'process' the applications of our Asylum Seekers. Once again our racist layers contribute to this snail like pace and the relative inactivity. When someone cares about something or someone they are active and not inactive. The detention of our Asylum Seekers is actually unlawful in these illegal facilities however justice is costly. People who have not committee any crime will never accept that it was lawful or any form of moral propriety for them to have been incarcerated for extraordinary long periods. Australia is perpetuating a racial crisis and its legacy will be borne by future generations. Many people have been incarcerated for more than two years and many people who have now gained citizenship were incarcerated for four years. There appears to be an effort by our Asylum Seekers to hang in for about a year however at the year mark it appears a threshold is reached where they begin to break down into depression and various clinical disorders. How long can they bow down and keep smiles on their faces to those who for the record do oppress them? The Commission described a critical overarching factor in that Australia's mandatory detention system permits indefinite detention. They described that there is no set time limit and the general inability for people to be able challenge their detention before a judge. And as of April there were over 1,000 children in Australia's mandatory detention centres thus breaching Australia's obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The major recommendation from the Australian Human Rights Commission is that the Australian Government should end the current system of mandatory and indefinite immigration detention, and in other terms that Australia should eliminate one of its most brutal layers of racial discrimination.
As a young child I had hoped the day would arrive that our unfolding human rights language would sweep away the last embers of racism, and my father would promise me that this would happen and most certainly in the lifetime of my own children if not in my time as a child. However we have stopped this journey for the time being. In 1992 the Keating led ALP introduced the horror of mandatory detention for our Asylum Seekers. During the last ten years we have lived the Tampa, the Royal Australian Navy disgracefully turning back boats of Asylum Seekers from September 2001, the horrors of Woomera, Baxter, Port Hedland, Villawood, etc., and then the notorious invasion that is the Northern Territory Military Intervention. Navi Pillay stated the truth, a truth that most of us one way or another do know and Australia is a racist country. As soon as most Australians admit this we can move to the next phase, away from the vacuum of inhumanity and start the journey to equality and humanity, and during the journey one by one unveil our racist layers and discover one another.
Gerry Georgatos
Masters in Social Justice Advocacy, Masters in Human Rights
PhD in Law researcher in Australian Deaths in Custody
Convener, Human Rights Alliance
