It’s time to heal wounds
OIT TOOK DECADES TO EXTRACT AN APOLOGY FROM THE PRIME MINISTER FOR THE STOLEN GENERATIONS.
UR PM said this week that Australia shouldn’t be importing issues from the United States, and that we “don’t need to draw equivalence here”. Except, we do.
It’s been just over 25 years since the landmark Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and not a lot has changed.
There have been more than 430 deaths of indigenous Australians in custody since 1991, and the death of George Floyd at the knee of an arresting officer is a stark reminder of this.
In 2004, the death in custody of Palm Island man Mulruni Doomadgee was met with shock by the entire community.
The anger and frustration of locals led to riots on the island, during which the arresting officer’s house and the police station were burned down.
That’s equivalence.
Only this week, the
Townsville Police Service advised a senior constable had been dismissed due to an incident of excessive force against a juvenile in custody in 2018.
Yet these two incidents decades apart are not the norm, they are the exception; the rift in the relationship between police and the indigenous community that emerged after Palm Island and the ensuing battles for justice led to the police service promising accountability and transparency.
Here in Townsville, police are under resourced yet have no reputation as a fear-based or racist culture, instead, displaying empathy and understanding of the challenges facing many in the indigenous community.
Police are called on to act as counsellors, mentors, social workers, psychologists and big brothers or sisters day after day. It can’t be easy.
And despite the confronting situations many police find themselves in at the hands of either intoxicated or drugaffected members of the public, we have been spared the endemic racism that has infiltrated many police departments overseas.
It took decades to extract an apology from the Prime Minister for Australia’s Stolen Generations.
John Howard refused, but Kevin Rudd stepped up to make the reconciliatory gesture on
May 26, 2008, moving a motion of Apology to Indigenous Australians, now National Sorry Day. Such small gestures, one simple word.
And yet for a leader to have shown such resistance towards healing is shameful.
The same goes for the unwillingness to include Indigenous Australians in the Constitution – what message are we sending here? A racially divisive one, that’s what.
The Aboriginal flag only flies from the Sydney Harbour Bridge one day a year, what does that say?
Will we ever walk the walk instead of talking the talk by jettisoning the Union Jack and combining the ‘deadly’
Aboriginal flag in the corner, surrounded by the traditional Southern Cross?
Townsville was named to honour slave trader Robert Towns.
We even have a statue honouring this sad history, yet after seeing the Governor of Virginia decide it was time to remove the state’s statue of Robert E. Lee, I can’t help but wish our town would right matters by adopting a culturally significant name for the ages.
Respect existence, or expect resistance.
After all, isn’t it ‘Advance Australia’?
#Blacklivesmatter