A NATION OF THUGS
Refugees, gangs and racial punishment
Pluto Press Seminar
University of Sydney
Chris Sidoti
National Spokesperson
Human Rights Council of Australia
27 September 2001
INTRODUCTION
Earlier this year the
great story of Australian federation was enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame,
many very silly things were said and done - or rather many very serious things
were not said or done. We heard speeches and read articles and held
celebrations in honour of the great achievement. There was much discussion of
the driving influences for federation, most especially the great national
project. We were reminded, if we had known previously, or told for the first
time , if we did not, about Edmund Barton’s quotable quite, “A nation for a
continent and a continent for a nation”. There was virtually no mention of the
fact that one of the driving influences was racism, the perceived wish to unite
the continent to keep it white. The omission of any mention of this issue was
entirely predictable, of course. It would have spoiled the triumphalism. And
besides racism in Australia has always been something practised, not something
discussed.
The sad truth is
that racism was at the heart of federation. The federal constitution excluded
Aboriginal people from the national census and denied the federal parliament
the power to legislate for their well-being. The enactment of the White
Australia Policy was the first policy law passed by the new federal parliament.
Looking back on more
than two centuries of Australian history since British colonisation I see two
pre-occupations, even obsessions: racism and punishment, especially locking
people up. Indeed there were there from the first day, when Arthur Phillip
planted the British flag at Sydney Cove. Australia was colonised for the
purpose of locking people up. And that colonisation required the dispossession,
deprivation and deaths of the original inhabitants of the continent.
These two national
obsessions remain evident in today’s Australia. We continue to lock people up
at rates far greater than almost any country in the world except the United
States. Those locked up are disproportionately indigenous people. We are also
unique among democratic countries in imposing mandatory detention on asylum
seekers who arrive without an entry visa and almost all of them are from Asia
and Africa. Our two obsessions crystallise and are integrated in the treatment
of non-Anglo Australian offenders and of boat people.
CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT
As I have indicated
the effect of racism in the criminal justice system is seen most clearly in the
imprisonment rates of indigenous Australians. In spite of the reports and
recommendations of important national inquiries including the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the
National Inquiry into the Removal of Indigenous Children, indigenous people
continue to be imprisoned at rates that for young people exceed 20 those of
other Australians and for adults are still many times the rates for other
Australians. Mandatory sentencing laws in Western Australia and, before the
recent change of government, the Northern Territory targeted Aboriginal
children and young people most of all, exacerbating their disproportionate
imprisonment rates. Media and public outrage is especially harsh in dealing
with young offenders and young offenders of indigenous or Middle Eastern or
Asian background are most harshly treated of all.
We have seen that
many times in the public discussion of youth gangs in western Sydney over the
last ten years. These gangs are usually described in ethnic terms: Vietnamese
or Chinese drug gangs, Lebanese rape gangs. In each instance the ethnicity of
the gang members is of little or no relevance whatsoever. Some years ago there
were fights in the Bankstown and Marrickville areas between gangs described as
Vietnamese and Lebanese gangs. There was public and political uproar that
resulted in an intensive investigation of the situation by a number of
organisations. The conclusion then was that ethnicity was virtually irrelevant
to the gang development and behaviour, that the pattern was classic adolescent
male gang behaviour rather than being ethnically or racially motivated. I am
convinced that the same is true today of the much publicised Lebanese rape
gangs. The gang rape of young women is a crime of the utmost seriousness but it
is not necessarily racially or ethnically related. The recently widely reported
gang sexual assaults are serious juvenile crimes and should be dealt with as
such, not as racial warfare.
Gangs have always
been part of life in Bankstown. I should know. Piers Ackerman, Alan Jones, John
Laws, Bob Carr and Peter Ryan might live in trendy yuppie suburbs in inner,
eastern or northern Sydney but I have lived in Bankstown for almost all of the
last 43 years. I remember when we moved there in 1959 from the eastern suburbs,
how members of our extended family were concerned for our welfare out in the
wild west because of the gangs. And there were gangs in Bankstown then. There
were bikies of various varieties and of course the bodgies. There were
particular milk bars that, as a seven year old, I was told not to go into or
even walk past. A couple of years ago, soon after the furore about Vietnamese
and Lebanese gangs, I was talking about this to Bryan Brown, who also grew up
in the Bankstown area, in Panania where I now live. He told me of the gang
fights he experienced as a boy, including one memorable rumble when he was
chased by a knife wielding opponent. Those who say things have never been this
bad have very short memories. That by no means justifies crime today but it
puts it in a more accurate context and enables a more effective response.
Gangs are
problematic. They have always been problematic. They commit crimes, sometimes
the gravest crimes involving sexual assault and other forms of violence. But
their activities need to be attacked as criminal, not as racial or ethnic. A
response based on some racialised analysis misses the point and will prove ineffective
in combatting crime, which should be the principal concern of politicians,
police and media shock jocks.
While saying this, I
am not for a moment suggesting that there are no race based crimes in
Australia. There are. In fact over the past couple of weeks I have received
many reports from members of my family and friends of Moslem and Arabic people,
especially women, being abused, assaulted and in one case pushed over and
hospitalised. These crimes are based on race. There was also the torching of a
mosque in Brisbane in suspicious circumstances last Friday night. Similar
crimes committed during the Gulf War led to an inquiry into racist violence by
the Human Rights Commission. Its report recommended, among other things, that
federal parliament should introduce a new federal offence of racist violence,
applicable to acts of violence and intimidation with a racist intent. That
recommendation was rejected by the government of the time and has not been
accepted since. It should be. Events of recent weeks demonstrate again the need
to address not only violence itself but racially motivated violence. A new
offence would attach higher penalties to this kind of violence. And it would
also apply to gangs where there is evidence that their criminal activities are
racially based.
BOAT PEOPLE
Although this
seminar is examining a number of issues concerning racism in Australia, I am
compelled to devote most of my comments to the situation of asylum seekers. The
events of the last month concerning boat people seeking to enter Australia have
been for me among the most distressing for many years. For the first time in my
life I have been deeply ashamed to be an Australian.
These events must be
understood in their historical context - both the context of our twin
obsessions with racism and locking people up and the context of who we
ourselves are and where we come from. Almost all Australians are either boat
people or the descendants of boat people, those who came here seeking better
lives for themselves and their children.
The first boat
people, whom we call the First Fleet, and those who followed them in the first
half of the nineteenth century took this country by force from its original
peoples. In the second half of the nineteenth century others came seeking treasure
during the gold rushes. Then fear set in among those who had come here as boat
people. They feared immigration from Asia and so decided to federate their six
colonies into one commonwealth in part to prevent that fearsome eventuality by
creating an immigration policy for a continent, the White Australia Policy. The
fact that this year is the centenary of the White Australia Policy has been
conveniently overlooked in all the triumphal celebration of the centenary of
federation. December 23 next marks the centenary of White Australia - no longer
a Policy but in many ways still the practice.
During the twentieth
century a succession of courageous political leaders from both sides of
politics led Australia into the wider world. They gradually opened the doors to
more people who wanted to make their homes here and gradually abandoned the
racial basis of Australia’s immigration policy. They did not wait for public
opinion to lead them but led public opinion, convincing Australians that their
policies were not only right for Australia but just. Prime Minister Chifley and
Immigration Minister Calwell welcomed those from eastern and southern Europe
who fled the consequences of holocaust and war, even though many of those who
lived here at the time called the new-comers wogs and dagos and refos. Prime
Minister Menzies continued and extended their policies. Prime Ministers Gorton
and Whitlam challenged and then discarded formally the White Australia Policy.
Prime Minister Fraser responded compassionately to the flood of boats after the
end of the Indo-China war, even when some racists sought to inflame public
opinion against them by spreading false information about boat people being
billeted compulsorily with suburban families.
Since 1989, however,
the successors of these great men have led the nation down a slippery slope to
cold hearted, calculated rejection. Yes, Prime Minister Hawke showed great
humanity when he responded to the Tiananmen massacre by accepting tens of
thousands of Chinese students and their families. And yes, no Prime Minister
has shown more commitment to engagement with our region than Prime Minister
Keating. But their administrations began tightening the laws governing
unauthorised arrivals, that is, those who come to Australia without documentation
seeking to enter and obtain asylum. They introduced mandatory detention of all
unauthorised arrivals. They removed entitlement to damages for illegal
detention. They restricted access to administrative review of refugee
decisions. They built detention centres, little better than work camps, for the
long-term imprisonment of asylum seekers in the most remote parts of Australia.
Under Prime Minister
Howard these practices have been refined and taken to new heights of inhumanity
and absurdity, with the support of his accomplice, Opposition Leader Beazley.
Together they have turned their backs on the highest qualities of leadership,
vision and humanity shown by their predecessors. Mr Howard has betrayed the
legacy of Menzies, Gorton and Fraser and Mr Beazley the legacy of Chifley and
Calwell, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. Mr Howard may refuse to apologise to
indigenous people for the sins of the past because he says he was not
responsible but there is no way he can escape responsibility now and the judgement
of history for what he himself is doing today. Mr Beazley may cry over the
tragic stories of the stolen generations but in his attitudes towards asylum
seekers he perpetuates the evil that motivated the past policies of removing
children.
Contrast their
stands with that of the Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Cretien. He said
recently, “Let there be no doubt. We will allow no one to force us to sacrifice
our values and traditions under the pressure of urgent circumstances. We will
continue to welcome people from the whole world. We will continue to offer
refuge to the persecuted.”
The response to the
boat people is unjustifiable on the grounds of logic even if appeals to
humanity fall on deaf ears. It is totally out of proportion to the extent of
the problem. Unlike many countries in our region - poor, developing countries
like Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia - and unlike other
developed countries, those in western Europe and north America, Australia
receives only a handful of asylum seekers each year. We are an island nation a
great distance from those parts of the world that generate refugee flows. For
the ten years after 1989 the average number of arrivals a year was around 600.
The average has increased significantly in the past two years. Now around 4000
arrive each year. A significant increase but still not a significant problem.
Nonetheless the Howard Government persists in spending inordinately large sums
of taxpayers’ money to keep these people locked up for periods that very often
run into years. Many hundreds of those who have been locked up, for periods up
to five and a half years, have been children.
I am not going to go
through all the statistics and all the arguments about these policies. They are
already on the public record, in numerous reports of the Human Rights
Commission and of parliamentary committees, in addresses, articles and
publications of the UN High Commissioner for refugees, in statements by human
rights organisations and in many other forums, for anyone who is truly
interested to read and consider the issues involved. Unfortunately this is not
an argument about facts or ethics or even logic but a matter of prejudice. So
let me address the prejudice.
The events of the last
month have certainly been extreme even by Australia’s standards. We have seen
men, women and children detained on a foreign flagged merchant ship, first in
international waters and then in Australian territorial waters. We have seen
this foreign vessel stormed by military commandos who seized control of it. We
have seen people transferred against their will onto a naval vessel and then
taken on a very long sea voyage. We have seen a very poor, virtually bankrupt
country bribed to accept them and feed and keep them on a temporary basis. We
have seen what amounts to arbitrary detention, kidnapping and people
trafficking. People trafficking is ironic: the excuse given for these human
rights violations is the need to stop people-smuggling but here we are engaging
in it ourselves.
The Prime Minister
and his immigration minister accuse these people of queue-jumping. Perhaps they
would like to go to Kabul and Bagdad themselves and point out the orderly
migration queues. They call the asylum seekers illegals but they have not been
charged with or convicted of a violation of any Australian law. They call them
economic migrants before there has been any assessment of their claims for
refugee protection. They and their media mates on talkback radio vilify and demonise
them. Recently the Prime Minister has been reported as saying that these boat
people are “intimidating us with our decency”, a very odd grammatical
construction. I am unsure what exactly he means but I suspect he means that
they are exploiting our decency to secure their admission.
The truth, however,
is that for over 10 years our political leaders from both major political
groupings have been betraying our compassion. Most Australians are
fundamentally decent and compassionate but they respond to the propaganda woven
by politicians and media commentators. They have been betrayed by those who say
that Australians are hard hearted, unsympathetic, closed and cold. We are not
and we do not want to be. Our aspirations are to be people of decency and compassion
who reject inequality and discrimination and look for Australia to be a society
based on a fair go for all. We have often failed to live up to those
aspirations but they are the values we hold dear. We are all betrayed when we
are told we are otherwise.
And it’s not that
there are no alternatives. There are. During 1996 and 1997 several
non-government organisations developed a framework for an alternative detention
model. The Human Rights Commission developed that framework further and
recommended a complete new model in its report Those who’ve come across the
sea tabled in parliament in May 1998. This model permits the detention of
those who, on the basis of an individual assessment, need to be detained for
public health or public security reasons. But it provides an alternative for
those who do not need to be detained, the vast majority of asylum seekers. It
offers a model that is consistent with human rights requirements, effective in
processing asylum seekers efficiently and properly, humane and far less
expensive than the present system. But this recommendation was rejected by the
government.
The Human Rights
Council of Australia, of which I am now national spokesperson, has decided to
give higher priority in its work to these issues. It has engaged a campaign
coordinator for this purpose. His role includes further developing alternative
policy and program proposals, including costing the current system and proposed
alternatives.
I have been asked by
many journalists and media commentators whether the actions of recent
governments towards asylum seekers have damaged Australia’s international
reputation. Clearly they have and I don’t like that. I don’t like Australia’s
good name being blackened by our leaders. But I have a far more serious
concern. What they are doing is damaging us. It is destroying our hopes and
aspirations, our self esteem, our sense of honour, our compassion and our
decency. Our leaders, from both major political groupings, are turning us into
a nation of thugs. Look what they have done to us and what we are doing
ourselves.
In the account of the crucifixion of Jesus in the Christian scriptures, Jesus meets a group of women who “mourned and lamented for him”. He tells them, “Do not weep for me; weep rather for yourselves and for your children”. I do weep for the asylum seekers. But even more I weep for ourselves and for our children.