Earlier this week Aboriginal people from the Northern Territory announced that they would make a “Request for Urgent Action” to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). That Request will be considered by the CERD when next it meets in Geneva later this month.
This application was foreshadowed by George Newhouse in Crikey in late October last year. As he noted then:
Now that the federal government has rejected the findings of its own review board, Indigenous Australians like Barbara Shaw find themselves with no other recourse than to complain to the United Nations.
People don’t often do long road trips across Australia nowadays — particularly from Alice Springs to Canberra — most of us just jump in a plane to Sydney then catch the shuttle to the capital. But if you are a mob of blackfellas from the NT who started off poor, and are all the poorer for Macklin’s income-management regime which requires that you go cap-in-hand to Centrelink to spend your welfare money on discretionary things like airfares then you don’t have much choice other than to drive.
Which is what Barbara Shaw and a group of friends from the NT did a week or so ago — they chucked their money together, hired a small bus and set off to Canberra to make their voices heard about the NT Intervention. Two nights and three days later they drove into Canberra. Tomorrow they’ll turn around and do the return trip.
Johnny “Hooker Creek” Miller Japangardi and his wife Peggy Brown Nampijimpa are both members of the Order of Australia, that honour awarded for their long-time work with the Mount Theo substance abuse prevention program based here at Yuendumu.
Japangardi and Nampijimpa have joined Barbara Shaw and seventeen other Aboriginal people from across the NT in putting their names to the Request to the CERD committee.
Their Request for Urgent Action to the CERD committee is summarised as:
…aris[ing] from the flagrant breach by Australia of its obligations under the Race Convention … the Authors consider that it should remain a matter of serious concern to the international community that legislation overriding the race Convention can be implemented by the State party [Australia] with impunity. That is particularly the case when it concerns the fundamental human rights of Aboriginal people.
The Request submits that it is both the NT Intervention legislation, and the subsequent actions by Government and the readily foreseeable consequences of that legislation that have breached the race Convention and constitute continuing breaches of Australia’s obligations and that they:
…continue to constitute serious, massive and persistent racial discrimination against Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory and have constituted and continue multiple violations of the Race Convention.
The Request details the allegations of “serious, massive and persistent” racial discrimination and notes that one consequence of the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act is that it has led:
…Aboriginal people to perceive that it is acceptable and appropriate to discriminate against Aboriginal people from the NT and that they are less worthy of legislative protections afforded to other Australians.
…the NT Intervention has profoundly undermined the relationship between Aboriginal people of the NT and the Australian Government, having resulted in distrust, hostility and suspicion.
The Request particularises claims of 28 breaches of Australia’s responsibilities under 10 Articles or sub-Articles of the Race Convention, including provisions that relate to equality before the law, the right to participate in public affairs, the right to own property and the effective protection, by the Australian Government, of remedies against discrimination and the failure to provide effective measures to combat prejudice.
The Request is particularly forceful in relation to the notion that the removal of the Racial Discrimination Act and other actions related to the NT Intervention were “special measures” and that these “special measures” failed to meet the criteria for justification of application of such measures on a number of grounds.
The Request seeks a recommendation from the CERD Committee that it express its concerns (to the Australian Government) and make recommendations that the Australian Government:
(a) immediately take all necessary steps to bring an end to the exclusion of the Racial Discrimination Act in respect of the NT Intervention; and
(b) undertake that there will be no further implementation of the NT Intervention…until the Committee is satisfied that each of the measures is properly a “special measure” for the purposes of the Race Convention.
As George Newhouse noted in Crikey last October:
Barbara Shaw knows that Kevin Rudd is a former diplomat who understands the damage to Australia’s standing internationally if our nation were to join the ranks of Ethiopia, Belize, Chile, Nicaragua, Philippines, Brazil and Peru which are currently subject to CERD’s Early-Warning Measures and Urgent Procedures
And Rudd’s bureaucrats will have their work cut out for them. Relationships between Australia and the CERD Committee were poisoned during the Howard years, initially by the Howard Government’s outrage that a UN Committee would deign to examine, and then criticise its action in relation to racial affairs. As David Marr wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2005 on Australia’s response to an earlier CERD committee report:
The committee’s report … in 2000 produced one of the great dummy spits of the Howard year, with the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, roaring: “We won’t cop it any longer. We are a democratically elected government in one of the most liberal and democratic countries you will find on Earth. And if the United Nations committee wants to play domestic politics here in Australia, then it will end up with a bloody nose.”
By 2005 many of the Australian NGO’s that had previously provided effective representation of the interests of Aboriginal Australians at the UN had either been neutered or, like the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, defunded by the Howard Government. ATSIC was soon for the chop.
Notwithstanding these disadvantages, Aboriginal interests prevailed. Marr reports that in March 2005 the CERD Committee:
…again gave Australia the thumbs-down. The language was far more diplomatic this time. Half a dozen positive findings were followed by a list of nineteen “concerns and recommendations”. Many had been raised before in 2000. ATSIC, native title, stolen generation, reconciliation, constitutional protection from racial discrimination, mandatory sentencing, the over-representation of Aborigines in prisons and the fate of HREOC may be dead issues in politics back home, but they’re still alive in Geneva.
Barbara Shaw and the twenty countrymen and women that have joined her in the Request for Urgent Action to the CERD Committee may well thank John Howard and his minions for their years of antagonism of the UN and its Committees. If nothing else the Howard years drew attention to the many egregious failings by his governments to accord equality and justice to Aboriginal people.
How the Rudd Government responds to the Request to the CERD will be a real measure of any distinction between the Rudd and Howard governments and how they treat Aboriginal people in this country.
He can’t do much worse.
Goodonya Bob indeed! Everyone in the Rudd govt should be ashamed at the travesty of the Intervention. I got so sick of the nonsense, that “if you’re against the intervention you’re supporting pedophiles”. Call me a cynic, but as soon as Howard and Brough announced it, I smelt a rat! They’d known of the so-called accusations, there’d been ??? reports, and they were ignored, and in the year of a Federal Election, this need was urgent? Right! Oh yes, they had to remove the Racial Discrimination Act in order to do it, and also the right to land ownership? Then I read that there were lots of applications in the pipeline for uranium and other interests, and said, ah-ha, that’s it! And under Native Title Act, they could do this for five years! How interesting!
Nothing that has happened since has convinced me of the need for the intervention, certainly not the way it’s been conducted. If they tried this in the rest of the community, the shock jocks would be screaming! What about child sexual abuse/domestic violence in the rest of the community? Do men who abuse kids lose their land, their home? Professional men? No! Do their families lose the right to handle their own money? Of course not!
If the publicity from taking action to the UN forces this govt to confront its racist behaviour, it will be worth the effort. Only today I watched The Apology again on Message Stick, and cried (again)at the outpouring of emotion by those people whose lives were torn apart by the horrific racist policies of removing children – there were new tears (from me)at the waste of an opportunity to stop the bullying and torment; educate the bigots about the true history – and really put in place just and humane policies! It’s very sad indeed!
Goodonya Bob. Someone has to tell it. A pity hardly anyone is listening.
Meanwhile out of Jenny Macklin’s office emanate “Media Releases” perpetuating the horror stories of dysfunctional societies and a deep chism between the men (“the perpetrators”) and the women and children (“the victims”).
One of the latest missives from Jenny Macklin’s office includes a gratuitous link to a New York Times article that quotes one of the people Bob’s story is about. This quote is then repeated in the Media Release and attachment. I know this person quite well and have no doubt whatsoever that the quote is out of context.
The people that put this stuff out ought to be ashamed using a Government office for propaganda purposes. Anything to justify the continuation of that travesty known as the Intervention.