It now seems likely that a reportfrom Queensland’s Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) into the way police dealt with that death in custody will be finished by the end of the year.  Precisely what is made public and what happens from there is still unknown, but the CMC’s credibility will be stake almost as much as that of the Queensland Police service. 

There have been growing criticisms of a perceived ineffectiveness of the CMC, as well as allegations that elements within the CMC may be too close to the government and the police.  A report today in The Australian that the Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Commissioner, Alan MacSporran, has “accepted a brief to represent the Queensland Police Service at the second coronial inquest into Doomadgee’s death, to be held in February” will do little to quell those concerns.

It is hard not to perceive a justice system operating on double standards when Aboriginal people accused of being involved in a riot on Palm Island, after an initial official announcement that Mulrunji’s death was accidental, were quickly arrested and charged, while so little has happened in response to the death itself and the clear indications of malpractice in the way police investigated it. 

There has been more than sufficient evidence provided to the first inquest, as well as at the trials of some of the accused rioters, to warrant a major investigation. The people of Palm Island, and the many people of Queensland and beyond who support them, are still waiting. Let’s see what the CMC delivers.

I mention this because the legislature in the USA state of California has recently “approved a landmark bill to apologize to the state’s Chinese-American community for racist laws enacted as far back as the mid–19th century Gold Rush”

This piece in Time magazine notes

The apology is the latest in a wave of official acts of remorse around the globe. In 2006, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a similar apology, expressing regret to Chinese Canadians for unequal taxes imposed on them in the late 19th century. Last February, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to his country’s Aborigines for racist laws of the past, including the forced separation of children from their parents. Five months later, the U.S. Congress formally apologized to black Americans for slavery and the later Jim Crow laws, which were not repealed until the 1960s. And most notably, in 1988 the U.S. government decided to pay $20,000 to each of the surviving 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned in camps during World War II. Says Donald Tamaki, a San Francisco–based attorney who helped overturn wrongful WWII-era convictions of Japanese Americans: “Part of what a humane society does is recognize past injustices and address them.”

The local Los Angeles Times notes

They helped build California — but were treated with contempt.  … ..  The resolution comes as Chinese American historians delve into the desperate lives of the Chinese immigrants who in the 19th century did some of the most dangerous work in building California.

They could not marry, they could not own property and they performed the most undesirable jobs: ditch diggers, canal builders, house boys. They were banned from most shops and public institutions and were the target of racist violence that went unpunished.

If I have one criticism of the apology for the practices which created the Stolen Generations, it is that it leaves far greater acts of racial discrimination unacknowledged.  Far worse injustices have been inflicted on Indigenous Australians since colonisation, but there is little awareness of many of them. Other systemic and severe racial discrimination towards other groups also occurred during that period.

I don’t think an endless ‘apology-thon’ is the best way of dealing with this, but I do believe a more clear cut acknowledgement and recognition of systemic crimes of the past helps every nation.  Many nations have blind spots where they cannot acknowledge past (and present) wrongs – whether it is Japan’s war crimes in the Second World War, Turkey’s treatment of Armenians, Indonesia’s actions in West Papua, China’s actions in Tibet, or Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. (just to name a few)

Formal apologies are as big a benefit to those who make them as it is to those who they are directed towards.  You can never fully move forward until you fully recognise how you got to where you are. And you can’t learn from the things you did wrong until you can acknowledge that the wrongs occurred.

A sign of the initial success of this campaign is the growing number of governments and political leaders who have signed on to it, making a public pledge to prioritise this fundamental issue and promote policies and devote resources to achieving the goal.  The harder part is ensuring these pledges are followed through and close attention is paid to assessing progress.

Of course it’s one thing to aim to achieve something, but quite another to reach agreement on how to achieve it.

The differences of opinion over the effectiveness of the Northern Territory intervention shows the importance of ensuring enough evidence is collected to impartially assess progress. Unfortunately, that issue has been extremely polarised from the outset. Almost every opinion and piece of evidence is immediately assigned in the pro or anti camp and added to the stockpiles of weaponry each side seeks to wield against the other.

There’s nothing wrong with differences of opinion of course; contests of ideas are an essential part of developing the best policies. But when winning the ideological contest becomes more important than achieving the policy outcome – an outcome which in this case is supported by almost everyone – than it makes it much harder to get progress.

When it comes to the NT Intervention, the evidence and information I’ve paid most attention to is that which comes from people and agencies actually working on the ground in the relevant communities – particularly those have been there working hard against the odds since well before the Intervention appeared.

Even in those cases, there seems to be significantly different reports coming from different communities. This is perhaps not as surprising as it might seem, as there are wide variations in the circumstances, resources, histories and local leadership across communities.

This article from the SMH by Irene Fisher, from Sunrise Health Service in the NT, and Larissa Behrendt, an academic and Aboriginal woman based at UTS, presents evidence of a significant rise in anaemia and low birth weight in babies in the period since the Intervention started.  Sunrise Health Service covers 112,000 square kilometres of the Northern Territory east of Katherine so they are well placed to assess the affects.  The article suggests some of the problems stem from the compulsory welfare quarantining which is applied to almost every Aboriginal community in that region.

By contrast, this report from the ABC quotes federal Minister Joe Ludwig saying figures show that ninety per cent of quarantined income is being spent on essentials.  What may be significant in these figures is that they also include Western Australia and Queensland, not just the  Northern Territory.

In the case of the income quarantining being trialled in parts of Cape York in Queensland, the process is not compulsory.  It is only applied after a decision made by a body called the Families Responsibility Commission, which includes significant input from local Aboriginal leaders.   This report from the ABC’s AM program earlier this week indicated that “about 30 people across the communities have been placed on conditional welfare management, while hundreds more are on voluntary welfare management.”

This is a big difference from compulsory quarantining of the income of every single Aboriginal person in a community. Even with the small numbers who have been subjected to compulsory income management on Cape York, it has only occurred following a defined process which involves the person affected and with key input into the process from senior local Aboriginal figures. That’s a big difference to a bunch of people in Canberra just telling you your income is being quarantined no matter what.

The report also suggests an increase in attendance rates at primary school and a higher proportion of money being spent on food and clothing.

It may be that there are lessons that can be learned from the different approaches being taken in Cape York compared to the Northern Territory, despite the significant differences between (and within) the two places.  We’d certainly have a better chance of assessing those lessons if we could do so without having each piece of information being assessed for its usefulness in a political battle, rather than in the context of a fundamental human rights struggle.

Like many people, I’ve followed the events surrounding the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee in police custody with interest and a lot of dismay. For a good outline of the issues surrounding that 2004 death, I recommend having a look at the book “Gone for a Song” by Jeff Waters.

A comment left on my personal web site drew my attention to a Google video website detailing allegations of police activities in the vicinity of the Free Lex Wotton benefit. It includes some video and sound footage – the video is fairly poor quality, but does provide some extra context.

The text accompanying the video is as follows:

Police Target Lex Wotton Benefit – West End, Brisbane

Two arrests were made following police harassment of a Palm Island Indigenous man leaving a benefit gig held to support Lex Wotton’s family. Lex Wotton is currently serving a 6 year jail sentence for his part in a community protest in response to the cover-up of the death in custody of fellow Palm Island resident Mulrunji Doomadgee in November 2004.

The gig was an alcohol free all ages live music event held as part of regular Saturday night activities at Blackstar Coffee Roastery in West End, none of which previously had attracted any police interest.

“From the start of the benefit gig, which included performances about black deaths in custody, uniformed police in unmarked cars patrolled the street, driving past at least five times before stationing two police cars and a police wagon at the end of the street. Despite no incidents at the event the police clearly expected to make arrests” said Robert Nicholas, one of the organisers from the Aboriginal Rights Coalition.

An Indigenous man from Palm Island who had attended the event was walking home when he was stopped at the end of the street by ten police officers who questioned why he was at the event.

Several concerned people walked up the street and asked police why they were not letting the man go home, to which they replied that he needed an ‘escort’. “We told them that one of us would walk home with him, and that he didn’t require a police escort or presence. At this point they started becoming very agitated and calling us ‘ignorant left-wingers’.

For full Media Release please email arcbrisbane@gmail.com

This might  seem fairly minor to many people (unless you happened to be the people being arrested), but it is very reminiscent to me of Brisbane in the 1980s (and no doubt prior to that) when there was constant (mostly) low level police intimidation of political activists.  There has been a lot of improvement since then in many respects, but I hear regular comments from a range of people – far beyond just political or Indigenous activists – that relations between police and Aboriginal people are not much better now than there were 20 years ago.

It also details the hurdles put in his way by the South Australian government to frustrate his efforts to access archival documents.   More details of that are told here and here.

The amount of material that has been published demonstrating the reality of the practices that created the Stolen Generations is voluminous.  However, some still try to propagate the notion that the whole thing is a myth, so every extra volume of material showing not just the reality of the practice, but also the enormity of it, is valuable.

However, there was a curious contrast between two separate stories published today.  One, in The Australian newspaper, said the job creation scheme was “being jeopardised by federal government bureaucrats who are creating roadblocks and not sticking to their end of the deal.”

It quoted from a letter Mr Forrest had written to the Prime Minister, which stated that “surprisingly the economic downturn is not a risk to the Aboriginal Employment Covenant.  Rather, employers will not sign up to the AEC unless they know there are improvements in the government system for training and support and that the AEC is involved through the whole process.”

No prizes for guessing who leaked that letter.

At the same time over in the Sydney Morning Herald, an article reported views from indigenous academic, Professor Marcia Langton, that “hundreds of Aboriginal workers had lost their jobs as the mining industry sheds employees and deals with Aboriginal contractors collapse.  Miners had not been targeting indigenous workers, but their growing reliance on indigenous employees and contractors had left them exposed.”

Marcia Langton is also on the steering committee of the AEC.

One could hardly blame Mr Forrest or the AEC if they decided to reduce their original target given the major economic decline, including in the mining industry, which has occurred since the plan was first announced.  It was an ambitious goal even at the time – although I hasten to add we should encourage ambitious efforts to make major improvements in the situations faced by many Indigenous people.

But it is hard not to see Mr Forrest’s letter as, at least in part, an attempt to shift the blame on to government and its bureaucrats when the target isn’t reached.

Australian of the Year, Aboriginal academic and activist, Professor Mick Dodson, has made the rather unremarkable point that many Indigenous Australians don’t feel overly positive about using January 26th to celebrate Australia Day.

Prof Dodson said “Many of our people call it invasion day but I think Australia is mature enough now to have the conversation about that. And let’s get on with it.”

Kevin Rudd agreed that “it is natural and right from time to time, that there will be conversations about such important symbols for our nation.”

To show how interested he was in paying attention to that conversation, Mr Rudd indicated he would not support the idea, regardless of what everyone else said.

“Let me say a simple, respectful, but straightforward no,” he said.

Mr Rudd’s response not only ignores any national conversation which does occur, but also dismisses the  Roadmap for Reconciliation, the actioning of which was one of only 6 recommendations from the final report of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 2000.  Adopting these recommendations is part of the Labor Party’s official platform.

Meanwhile, many readers on the Daily Telegraph’s website did their best to show that Prof Dodson was wrong in believing that Australia is now mature enough to have a conversation on the topic, unleashing a volley of vitriol and abuse not overly different to what has been thrown at Indigenous Australians in this country for the last couple of centuries.

Calls to change Australia Day are manna from heaven for right-wing radio shock jocks and history warriors, so it’s no surprise Kevin Rudd wants to shut down debate on it straight away and get us all back to pondering how bad the economy is.

But it is not only Indigenous Australians who feel that 26th January is not the best day to celebrate our unity as a nation.  Many of the millions of Australians who are not of British heritage are also likely to find another day more meaningful.  Plenty of other people who, like me, have some British ancestry, also feel the same.

All of my ancestors arrived in the Australian colonies at various times throughout the 19th century.  But I still don’t believe the anniversary of the establishment of the British colony of New South Wales should be used to celebrate Australia’s nationhood.

It is not just that this date marks the start of a dispossession, displacement and killing of Aboriginal Australians far more brutal than our nation is still able to admit or acknowledge.

I also don’t see why a nation which has become independent from the country which colonised them would celebrate their national day on the anniversary of colonisation. Most other nations with this sort of history celebrate on the date of independence, not the day of colonisation.

Republicans might argue that Australia will not be fully independent until we no longer have the British Monarch automatically serving as our head of state.  But in a legal sense, Australia is now a fully independent nation.

The date when Australia came into existence as a country was January 1st 1901, when the various colonies became states as part of the federation of Australia.  Some Australians would probably not support January 1st as Australia Day, because we already have a public holiday on that day, and they wouldn’t want to lose a public holiday.

There is something to be said for celebrating a new nation at the start of a new year, but the process of federation also contained aspects which were far from inclusive of all who lived here at the time.  Not only did Indigenous Australians still have far lesser rights under the law.  A key driver of federation was a White Australia mentality, and many non-white Australian residents – especially Chinese, other Asians and south sea Islanders – were subject to widespread deportation at various stages because they were not British (and not white).

At the time of Federation, all ‘Australians’ were still British subjects.  There was no such thing as an Australian citizen until 1949.  Even after that date, Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who served from 1949 – 1966, was comfortably able to say he was “British to his bootstraps”.

According to this information sheet from the National Archives:

Throughout the 1960s, Australian citizens were still required to declare their nationality as British. The term ‘Australian nationality’ had no official recognition or meaning until the Act was amended in 1969 and renamed the Citizenship Act. This followed a growing sense of Australian nationalism and the declining importance for Australians of the British Empire. In 1973 the Act was renamed the Australian Citizenship Act. It was not until 1984 that Australian citizens ceased to be British subjects.

The right to appeal decisions in Australian Courts to the British Privy Council was  not finally abolished until the 1980s.  The power of the British Parliament to legislate for Australia was not legally removed until the adoption of the Australia Act in 1986.  This Act came into force on 3rd March, but I think that’s a bit too obscure for most people to want to claim that as Australia Day.

Some people have suggested we shouldn’t change the date of Australia Day, given how much angst and controversy it would probably cause, but instead change what the day celebrates.

As the first Citizenship Act came into operation on January 26th 1949, this date could be reshaped as a celebration of what being a citizen of Australia is all about.  More people currently become Australian citizens on this day than any other day of the year, so acknowledging it as Citizenship Day has some merit.

We could then have another day as Australia Day. Apart from January 1st as the anniversary of Federation, some have suggested 27th May as the anniversary of the 1967 referendum which enabled Aboriginal people to be counted in the national census.  Australian football legend Ron Barassi has expressed support for this date.

Barassi said recognising the May 27 date would be the next step on the path to reconciliation.
He said it would be a natural progression after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said “sorry” to the indigenous population last year.

“Australia Day is the day put aside to focus attention on just what a great country this is. But I reckon we’re celebrating the wrong day,” he said.

“I think we should change the date of Australia Day. We were invaders and conquerors in 1788 when the First Fleet arrived and we took this land from the Aborigines. “January 26 just doesn’t sit right with me and I’d prefer it were changed.”

Others have suggested February 13th would be appropriate as the anniversary of the federal Parliament’s apology for the Stolen Generation.  Personally, I am not so keen on this date, as the history regarding the Stolen Generations is only part – and far from the worst part- of the injustices inflicted on Indigenous Australians.

Despite Kevin Rudd having already said the answer is “no”, I agree with Prof Dodson, and others like chair of the Australia Day Council, Adam Gilchrist, that it is good idea to have this conversation and become more aware of our own history and what being Australian should be about.

However, I very much doubt there will be any movement on this topic until after the Australian people have agreed for Australia to become a Republic.  Once that last major symbolic linkage to our colonial past is gone (apart from the Union Jack on the corner of our flag ), perhaps we will be more capable of the sort of mature debate Prof Dodson has called for.

If Australia does become a republic, the anniversary of that date could also be a candidate Australia Day.  Of course, it would easy to have a Republic commence formally on the 26th January – although India already has that date as their Republic Day - but one of the other dates mentioned might be more suitable in any case.

For me, the ideal day would be the one marking when the Australian nation finally adopted a Treaty with Indigenous Australians, to mark us finally coming together as a united, reconciled and settled nation.  We will never really be into the post-colonial era until this happens.

However, despite this also being one of the recommendations of the final report of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation which Labor’s National Platform promises to implement, if we wait that long before looking to change the date of Australia Day, we could well be waiting a very long time indeed.

It strikes me that some of the commentary on Indigenous Affairs in this country has become so poisonous – not just among the media, but among sections of the Indigenous leadership itself – that the very object of the game has been forgotten.

It really rang a bell with me.  During my time in the Senate, there was no other policy area that came even close to frustrating me as much as Indigenous affairs when it came to the impossibility of having a rational discussion.  Every comment seemed to be slotted into a pre-determined polarised package of ideological positioning, and every commenter assigned to over-simplified opposing camps.

It is very hard to keep trying to debate issues on their merits when it seems to instantly degenerate into sloganeering.  Debate in this area seems to always be instantly sidetracked into the same old tired arguments and accusations, usually ignoring the core point that people were trying to make.

The recent controversy over comments by leading Indigenous educator Chris Sarra is a case in point.  His core point, and a very important one, is that Aboriginal communities often have to make do with service workers with a level of competence and commitment far below what would be acceptable in mainstream society.  He used the provocative term “white trash” to describe such people, causing a lot of argument about whether this was an offensive term or not.  Meanwhile, his core point was mostly ignored. 

I don’t think it is a desirable term to use in this context, but if he hadn’t used it, his overall comments probably would have been completely ignored. 

Bob Gosford, who lives in Yuendumu 300 kilometres away from Alice Springs, gives a great insight on his own blog into the sort of phenomenon Chris Sarra was talking about, using his own employment in an Aboriginal community as an example.

The jury’s verdict was a long time coming, but it was unanimous when it was finally delivered at around 9.45 pm – guilty on the single count of rioting with destruction.

The disturbance on Palm Island from which the charge arose was back in November 2004, when local residents reacted to an initial pathologist report into the death in police custody of local man Mulrunji Doomadgee, asserting that he had died after tripping up a step into the police station.

I wasn’t present that day and I didn’t hear all the evidence at the trial, so I can’t make any legal assessment of the verdict.  The National Indigenous Times has done extensive coverage to the evidence presented at the trial over the past couple of weeks. I have put a series of links to their reports at the end of this post.

I am disappointed, though not very surprised, at the verdict. I have met Lex Wotton many times over the last few years, on Palm Island and elsewhere. I mentioned him in some of the older pieces I wrote on my blog about Palm Island. In looking back through those, I am reminded just how long ago this seems and just how drawn out the case has been. Four years for Lex with charges hanging over his head, while the internal investigation into flaws in the original police investigation still hasn’t been released.

I believe Lex is a good man with leadership ability, who clearly wants a better future for his people and has put effort into helping others in making that happen. It’s hard to see what good will come from him being jailed. It is also obvious what message many people – black and white – will take in comparing this verdict and the police response to the uprising, alongside the lack of any consequences from the death of Mulrunji and the way the subsequent police investigations were conducted.

The sentence will be handed down on 7 November.

Links to reports in the National Indigenous Times:

• Jury retires as Wotton supporters rally 
• Jury to retire this morning after warning from Judge about reliability of evidence 
• Defence and prosecution wrap up their cases 
• Evidence phase completed; defence and prosecution prepare for summing up 
• Police witnesses tell of moments leading up to Palm Island uprising 
• Court resumes, with police witnesses still to come 
• Accused directed a stream of foul language at police, court hears 
• Wotton turned off water supply before fire: court 
• Key police witness accompanied to trial by officers, court hears 
• Second teacher tells court she saw petrol tin carried by another man 
• Palm teacher witnesses Wotton carrying red petrol drum, court hears 
• Wotton ordered Palm man to burn Hurley’s house down, court hears 
• Court hears of three assaults by Hurley in months leading up to death in custody and riot 
• Police held pregnant woman in custody for entire day in nightgown with no food, court told 
• Accused was trying to diffuse tensions, says Palm youth worker 
• Day three of Wotton trial begins with a splutter 
• Court watches videos of rallying cries from Palm Islanders

I will add links to any other post-verdict reports or commentary of value I find here:

• The Queensland Police Union show they’re happy to throw some rhetorical petrol into a flammable situation, getting stuck into Mike Reynolds, the Labor MP whose electorate covers Palm Island. Mr Reynolds reponds here.

from Chris Graham’s report in Crikey:

The scale of this injustice is hard to comprehend, and even harder to describe. So I won’t even try. I’ll just stick to the facts — the black and white of the issue.

These are the injuries sustained by black people at the hands of police in the days and months immediately surrounding the death in custody, and the uprising: Mulrunji Doomadgee suffered four broken ribs, a ruptured spleen a torn portal vein and a liver “almost cleaved in two” (it was held together by a couple of blood vessels). After his death, Mulrunji’s son Eric hung himself from a tree on Palm Island. The man who lay in the cell next to Mulrunji and comforted him as he died — Patrick Nugent — has also taken his own life. In the course of his arrest, Lex Wotton was tasered, as was a second Aboriginal man.
Now these are the injuries police suffered at the hands of black people during the November 26, 2004 uprising: One officer was hit in the stomach with a rock. Another was hit in the hip. Both suffered bruising.

Now to matters of criminality.

Lex Wotton has been convicted of inciting a crowd to move against police. It’s worth noting there was also substantial evidence presented at his trial — mostly by police — that Wotton ordered rioters to stop throwing rocks at officers and secured transport (later refused) to get police off the island safely. There was also video footage of Wotton trying to stop rioters from preventing a fire truck accessing the carnage.

Now here’s what we know the police did.

In June 2004 — five months before the killing and riot — Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley ran over an Aboriginal woman in a police vehicle. He didn’t stop to render first aid, and both he and a female officer present in the vehicle denied the incident had occurred.

In response, senior police in Townsville appointed a friend (and neighbour) of Hurley’s — Detective Senior Constable Darren Robinson — to investigate the matter. After doing nothing for a month, Robinson finally delivered his report to his superiors. His mate Hurley did nothing wrong, the entire complaint was fictitious. Robinson neglected to mention that he had not interviewed any witnesses, nor had he sought any medical evidence. Had he done so, he’d have discovered the injured woman, Barbara Pilot, had suffered a compound fracture to her leg, and her shinbone was sticking through her skin.

Robinson subsequently admitted on the stand during the Wotton trial that he lied in his report.

Three months later, in September 2004, Hurley assaulted a man — Douglas Clay — in the Palm Island police station. About half a dozen police — including his mate Robinson — witnessed the incident. Police denied an assault had occurred, but after the death of Mulrunji, the Crime & Misconduct Commission investigated, and found traces of Clay’s blood in the police cell.

In November, Hurley was implicated in the death of Mulrunji. Senior police from Townsville again appointed Hurley’s mate Robinson to the investigation. Robinson and several other police – including an Inspector of police from the Ethical Command unit sent to Palm Island to ensure the investigation was conducted properly – ate dinner and drank beers with Hurley that night. Mulrunji’s body was barely cold.

A few days later, detectives provided an interim report to the coroner’s office. They chose not to tell the coroner that an Aboriginal witness had seen Hurley assaulting Mulrunji on the floor of the police station. A pathologist’s report subsequently found Mulrunji had died as the result of a “fall”. It was some fall – his injuries were consistent with the sort of trauma you might see from a plane crash.

Chris Hurley — a white cop — was tried by an all-white jury, overseen by a white judge on a charge of manslaughter. He got off.

Lex Wotton — a black man — was also tried by an all-white jury, overseen by a white judge on a charge of rioting with destruction. He’s facing life. He may as well have a killed a copper — he’d be facing precisely the same jail time if he had. His family — wife Cecelia, and four children (two of whom are disabled) are without a father. His community is without a leader.

By contrast, police who lost property in the riot have been compensated.