Australia has shown it’s not serious about empowering Indigenous people. Now our voices must be heard
As a client at the local youth services in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), my first involvement with mainstream media was being interviewed by SBS Insight for their investigation into mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory, some 20 years ago.
The fixer for the show, David Selvarajah Vadiveloo, was a Tamil-Australian former human rights lawyer and cricketer turned filmmaker and community facilitator. My defence of Aboriginal youth during group interviews led to an invitation to join a fledgling media unit he was setting up within an Arrernte community learning centre.
He taught me – along with central and eastern Arrernte youth from town camps – basic digital video production and editing skills. I fondly remember cutting vision from the old Alice Springs jail to Rage Against The Machine’s Settle For Nothing, the chorus lyrics “Caught between my culture and the system, Genocide”.
Guidance from Selvarajah saw us produce a short documentary on how mandatory sentencing breached the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child, citing imprisonment of Aboriginal children being a “last resort”. The convention also includes specific references to ensuring Indigenous children’s access to diverse media in their languages, to education that is non-discriminatory and the right to their own culture, religion and language.
The spate of First Nations deaths in custody this past month stands as a stark reminder of the systemic infliction of racism. This occurs in Australia through discriminatory legislation such as mandatory sentencing, bottle-shop beats and policies such as the Northern Territory intervention, imposed by former Liberal prime minister John Howard.
Blak bodies and minds are never immune from colonisation. Even though I may have been raised by a white mother and had a private school education, the daily reminder of what I am is written in the glares of young shop-workers, in the fists and subordination of police, the bemoaning of Aboriginal street crime in Alice Springs on our television screens.
This is despite the fact that Mparntwe is the service centre for some 500 communities across three states and the NT, and that a large percentage of the regular income for businesses in town relies heavily on clientele from remote Aboriginal communities.
“Crime and punishment” has always been popular for those on the right, but even NT Labor has run with the “tough on crime” baton.
I drafted this article as I prepared to head to another remote community within the PAW (Pintubi, Amnatjere and Warlpiri) Media region, to deliver training to Aboriginal youth, similar to that delivered to me just over two decades ago. As I did this, I wondered whether governments and the wider Australian community even support advancement for First Nations peoples. Or are they more inclined to support the continuation of colonial oppression, within which active attempts at genocide are thinly veiled behind political jargon, legalese and racist legislation?
We Blak peoples and communities are forced to hold our breath, wondering what the next instalment of #AnotherDayInTheColony has in store for us; which essential services might be defunded next, how many more roadblocks will be put in place “for our betterment”.
This is proven by the current mainstream media fixation on the death of a rich old prince overseas, completely overshadowing First Nations people’s deep concern about the continuing deaths in custody and the failure by successive governments over the past 30 years to implement all the recommendations from the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody.
Mandatory sentencing still continues in the NT. Zac Grieves has languished in a Darwin jail for a decade and is set for another two years for a murder he didn’t physically commit, even after the judge accepted his version of events. Aboriginal children such as those during the Don Dale saga are still held in youth detention despite another useless royal commission and calls to #RaiseTheAge.
If Australia isn’t serious, which it repeatedly proves it is not, then it is up to our First Nations communities to act ourselves for our own empowerment.
I’m no legal or justice expert, but there are plenty of strong Blak voices on this topic that also call for an adequately resourced public review of the implementation of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody recommendations by states, territories and at the national level. This must include a joint review committee made up of at least 51% First Nations representation.
One of the sistas working in this arena said “as a ‘public servant’ I can only make good policy on the expert voices of community advocates”. This should be a guiding principle for all of us.
Blak bodies and minds are never immune from colonisation