An Open Plea to White Australia

Once a year I like to say why we should have Australia Day any day except January 26th.

But lately I don't just despair on behalf of Indigenous Australians: Australia is so unlike the country my (white) grandparents’ and parents’ generations fought so bloody hard to defend that the thought of celebrating anything Australian just makes me feel foolish. These days I imagine someone like my father, an enlisted soldier, thinking about fighting to save this country, and possibly deciding “nah, fuckit”.

If you haven't already seen it, here's the new “It’s not an Australia Day ad” ad. This lot deserve a free plug here just for ditching the original script they planned to use, which was unbelievably offensive.

Opinion about this ad is divided. At last someone’s taking a step towards truth in history; acknowledging the British were not the first to “discover” Australia, and that the country was already occupied when the British claimed it. And I kind of like the little digs about the boat people.

But is it promoting an ideal, or simply reinforcing mass delusion?

Of course, some pratt ruined it before even I had a chance to ruin it, complaining that the ad should mention Australia Day. His “reasoning” went like this;

The blacks would still be living under bark just surviving without the English. Now they have the rule of law.

This is such a common, negative opinion of Indigenous Australia that it proves the barbecue ad IS fantasy - too many Australians still believe that before the First Fleet arrived, Indigenous Australians couldn’t even organise a barbecue.

Okay. Not really his fault he is so ignorant

a) he might not have gone to school here or

b) he went to school here and he hasn't learnt anything in all the years since he left

Let's review all 3 of his key ideas

1) living under bark;

2) just surviving; and

3) the wonderful benefits of law.

History, Truth and Stereotypes

If those great twats Burke & Wills proved nothing else, they proved it takes something special to survive in Australia's harsh interior. (Burke shooting at the Aboriginal trying to help his dying arse was not the right sort of special).

Rob, you dickhead. What'll I do now?

Australia is vast and its ecosystems are varied; the native flora and fauna did not lend themselves to the development of western style agriculture. But just because there was no "western style" agriculture, this doesn’t mean all Indigenous Australians always lived on the edge of starvation or a purely hunter gatherer lifestyle – far from it.

1) Pre-invasion, the styles of Indigenous dwellings varied - people did not only live under simple bark humpies. There were stone dwellings in places like Dampier in WA, and at Lake Condah in Vic, and permanent dwellings elsewhere made of other materials.

Sometimes the crude bark slabs we see in pictures were the equivalent of a garden shed on an allotment – somewhere to stay out of the sun while gathering food until it was time to go back “home” to a more substantial dwelling.

Mr Australia Day's stereotype is of a stupid black man unable to do more than put one sheet of bark over his head after 60,000 years of trying. Like most lazy thinking, it’s just rude.

2) Aquaculture was practised in many places in Australia before elsewhere in the world, and agriculture too. Grains of local seeds rather than European grains were found stored, and stores of other foods were found by those who first arrived after 1788. All of this early food production and storage by Indigenous Australians was recorded by early explorers but NOT included in the history we were taught at school.

Instead we were given the "smooth the dying pillow" model of Indigenous Australia.

I used to wonder why the few Indigenous people I met never told me stuff but I realise now that the sheer volume of lies and the distortion I had been fed at school was so overwhelming; they would not have known where to begin, or how anyone could have believed them without the portable library the internet now makes possible.

How does a sketch of one tiny, quaint handwoven fish net in a schoolbook compare to a whole, re-designed river system that breeds fish?

As well as the extensive work involved in setting up aquaculture systems, firestick farming was used to sculpt the landscape – in the example below there was scrub providing cover to attract kangaroos, and once there they could be smoked out and herded into an open space where they were easily hunted down.

We came along and failed to recognise what was deliberately done over many years with careful planning and design, and we destroyed it. Funny no one told us this when we were at school. Funny most people still don't know.

Western culture is built around the Biblically entrenched assumption that mankind must actively manipulate and control the environment - almost demands, in fact, that we do it as destructively as possible. In contrast, we have been taught to think of Indigenous Australians as the passive victims of their environment. If we credit them with being in tune with the environment it almost seems a negative. Yet traditional land and resource management was both active and environmentally sensitive - it had to be to succeed, and it is something future generations will envy.

None of us like to be invisible, but I wonder how it feels to belong to such a demeaned race? To constantly be reminded you are not valued in the only country you have? How odd that we think of boomerangs as something only tourists buy, but we think dream catchers and items used by First Peoples from other countries are somehow more meaningful.

How odd that, to people like Mr Bark Huts on Australia Day and Proud of It, the First Peoples of almost any other continent are seen as Noble, but First Australians are viewed almost universally as losers, who were too useless to invent housing (untrue), did not trade (untrue), had no laws (untrue), could not navigate (untrue), didn't have alcohol or drugs (untrue), had no medicine (untrue), didn't resist invasion (untrue), had no religion (untrue), could not count (untrue) stood for nothing (untrue)... and when they ask only that the truth be told we tell them in return to "get over it".

The very idea that there was nothing of value before 1788

is the biggest insult of all

but that is exactly what our obsession with 26^th January implies

Other countries celebrate the day they became Independent, or achieved National Unity. Only in Australia would people seriously expect Indigenous Australians to celebrate being invaded - I mean, how stupid are we?

It fails the first rule of marketing - "what's in it for me?" - on Every Single Level.

3) Indigenous law might have seemed cruel, but it was never arbitrary. It was certain, predictable and swift – fair enough, there were no circuit courts with travelling magistrates. Indigenous Australia was not a single nation, it was - is - made up of many, many nations.

In any case, English law itself in 1788 was quite barbaric (don't start me!).

After years in which the replacement system of English law treated lower class whites with contempt, no surprise if we were desensitised to what it continued to do to Indigenous Australians - but what is our excuse now?

When will the Nazi Germany excuse - "we had no idea" - expire for Australia?

We cannot tell Indigenous Australians that they should get over the past, when the past is still happening.

This is footage of a young woman who was DYING in a local police station lock up. She was DYING and someone let her head fall back and slam against the concrete floor of the cell. She was DYING and they dragged her like she was a sack of shit, out into a corridor and picked her up and put her in the back of a wagon to take her to hospital. RELUCTANTLY.

Ms Dhu was dead before she got to hospital. Ms Dhu’s original crimes were swearing in public, and wagging her finger at a police officer, and she got the death penalty.

The Police Officers that treated her in this inhumane fashion were not charged with anything. That’s the way the law works in WA. These Police Officers have since been promoted. It’s a long and complicated story but I have read the coroner’s report and I promise you there is no “but” that makes it okay or understandable. It’s just a disgrace. (For more detail click here)

So much for celebrating Australia Day and the arrival of law. Under traditional law those Police Officers would have been speared or something two years ago, swiftly and quite reasonably. This happened two years ago but I say "now" because Ms Dhu’s family waited two years to learn no one will be charged, and since then, more people have died in custody. Indigenous people.

It happened to us

One of the most bizarre "get over it" arguments I keep hearing is "it happened to us". The "my ancestors were convicts" school of arguments include

·         Some of those whose families arrived here not long after the invasion are of convict stock, victims of a system that treated surplus labour like sub-human detritus.

·         Some are of Scottish descent, victims of the Highland clearances

·         Some are of Irish stock, victims of the unnecessary famines of the mid 19th Century and the evictions.

???Huh???

My ancestors were murdered/ tortured/ robbed/ etc and it didn't hurt them...???

This makes it okay to murder/ torture/ rob others?

This is a reason others should let us murder/ torture/ rob them without saying anything?

Are we to seriously believe that it's somehow more honourable to lose quietly than to go down fighting?

Is this some kind of "who suffered the most and is stupid enough to be chuffed about it" competition?

Yes, the methods of dispossession during the industrial revolution, plus the cultural genocide during the clearances and the evictions were brutal. My father's English ancestors did this to my mother's Irish ancestors eight generations ago. I get over it by blaming the policy makers, while remembering the benefits and costs of that theft flow on and multiply for many generations, remembering the people who suffered, and working hard to stop these things from ever happening again - to anyone.

Apart from costumes, the only differences are some people have forgotten how low humans can sink, and in the case of Indigenous Australia - IT IS STILL HAPPENING.

Guilt Shmilt

I am not proud of what happened for the first 200 years of occupation, but I do not feel guilty. No one is asking us to feel guilty about the past, we are just being asked to see what is happening now. Believe me, I know how lucky I was to be born in a country with plenty of food, water, and shelter, and not in the middle of some horrible war. And I also know how lucky I was to be born into the dominant race. I'm only beginning to feel guilty that I can't do anything much to stop what is still happening to Indigenous Australians NOW. Well, not on my own.

It is understandable that with a lack of information and communication, with a lack of education, with ignorance and deliberate lies, stuff happened in the past that people often had no idea about. Some whites did know and were complicit, others knew and fought it. (See, digging for the truth means you will find white heroes, too). But the more we knew, the more we fought the bad stuff.

And in 1967, for better or worse, 91% of white Australians - including my parents and grandparents - voted for the federal government to do something to make things better.

In the year 2000, many hundreds of thousands of Australians in large cities all around the country marched across bridges demanding our government apologise to the stolen generations. On balance, we are not evil people at heart.

But now, in the age of the internet, the time has come to move to the next stage. The next layer of truth is available and there is no excuse for ignorance, and ignorance is no longer an excuse. The law that once put chains around the necks of Indigenous Australians has been re-written, but shocking stuff is still happening. The chains have gone but the results are as bad. And the rot is spreading back from Indigenous Australia, with the potential to affect everyone who is standing around doing nothing.

If those of us who are non-Indigenous are so morally bankrupt we can't give a shit about Indigenous Australians, like Mr Bark Huts on Australia Day and Proud of It, must we be too lazy or stupid to care about the mess we are setting up for ourselves?

The country my parents fought for

My parents and my grandparents, were decent people

they would have been outraged by what happened to Ms Dhu

To suggest they fought for a country that thinks this is okay

would be to dishonour them

and the Indigenous Diggers who fought alongside them

The way Ms Dhu was treated was appalling, but the law in WA does not allow for anyone to be charged over what happened. That’s the same law that would apply if it happened to a white person. For some reason, this is just not happening to white people. Yes, whites die in custody, but not like this. For me this raises two important issues.

1) Until we abolish states, we will never have equal treatment before the law for all Australians, regardless of state of residence. (There are lots of reasons to get rid of states, this is just one of them).

Any state can currently pass its own law bringing back capital punishment, making "float people" criminals again, or abortion a crime and so on.
Or dismissing the importance of deaths in custody, like WA does.

2) Assuming a new constitution is too hard, we should call for a Federal Court of Natural Justice while states can still pass laws that allow them to get away with shit like this. When a Coroner is able to prove there has been blatantly inhumane and unprofessional conduct but state laws allow people to weasel out of responsibility, there must be some system to take up the slack.

No wonder Indigenous Australians are pissed off. Justice is never seen to be done.

Starting Over... Again

Democracy is about freedom of speech and opinion. It is about taking a place that is good and finding ways to make it better, not assuming it has always been great and always will be; that it never needs work, and letting it fall apart out of smug pride. Great democracy is not about saying if you don’t like the things that are not so great, you should rack off. Is this why we don't engage with Indigenous Australians? Cos we don't know where to tell them to rack off to?

And I think Australia won’t be the great democracy it could be, more open to truth and to embracing its Indigenous people and heritage, until it stops with the rack off attitude. And we will never have the best we can have until we do embrace our Indigenous brothers and sisters and the rich heritage we could share, including their constantly demonstrated willingness to do the right thing (like help that great berk Burke) despite the way we treat them.

When did we become so scared of hearing a difference of opinion or a new idea?
(The ones doing the silencing are the very people complaining about being silenced.)
Silence is not supposed to be our heritage. Our heritage could be so much more.

Aren’t we all sick of the same basic stuff?

Of politicians talking about us like we are something on the soles of their shoes? Having no one decent to vote for at election time? Travel rorts? The lack of accountability? Far from democratic laws making it illegal to tell the truth? The silence from opposition "leaders" on issues that matter? No one doing anything about increasing job losses, or the casualisation of labour?

Australia Day is a joke because

this country was not built on a dream

- it was hastily cobbled together out of a nightmare

Not only can I not understand how anyone seriously expects Indigenous Australians to celebrate Australia Day, I don't really understand why the rest of us are supposed to be celebrating. If we were celebrating an achievement it would make sense. Celebrating the day the British - after trying the Americas, various places in Africa and elsewhere - finally found somewhere at the opposite end of the world to dump their human rubbish? As silly as expecting Indigenous Australians to celebrate being invaded.

And I wonder if we don't want to acknowledge the lies we were told about Indigenous Australia because we can't bear to face the truth about our own beginnings; that white Australia too has been built on a lie; a myth that Australia stands for some great human ideal when in fact we have been drip fed just enough crumbs of democracy to hope we are not being conned but we know deep down it's not the real deal at all.

Our State Constitutions and our Federal Constitution were not written with any great ideals in mind. They are essentially administrative documents written for the benefit of those who had the most power in the 19th Century, before ordinary men get the vote, and long before women got the vote, and way before anyone Indigenous was guaranteed a vote. All the protections we rely on are "traditions" being overturned without us being consulted, and even the Federation itself no longer works the way it was originally intended. There is no "contract" between government and people, just good faith gone bad.

This rant opened with an ad that celebrates multiculturalism and diversity, but the truth is in Australia people are valued on a sliding scale:

Our governments believe those in government are more important than those being governed; corporations worth more than the workers, and workers more than those looking for work. We are told to value those in work more than those too old or sick to work. Politicians vilify workers who want tax benefits, yet coddle corporations that pay no tax at all. Whites are definitely worth more than blacks. Asylum seekers are almost sub-human on this warped scale, and it is not just plain wrong it is downright dangerous.

We are de-sensitised, and becoming more so, to the plight of those who are only the tiniest bit different from each of us, as if we are not all the same species. We don't have to want open borders to be concerned about how asylum seekers are treated. We don't have to want to pay massive amounts of welfare to the unemployed to demand governments do a better job of creating jobs.

The way governments are prepared to treat others

shows exactly how they are prepared to treat any of us

When did we stop dealing with people's actions and fall into the trap of judging people based on which group they belong to?

While we celebrate being Australian, while we congratulate ourselves for not being American or having Trump as President of our country, all of the justice and democratic and legal systems that once made us feel safe, that once protected us from being a country just like America, are being steadily eroded. All of the conditions including poor state constitutions that made Trump possible - and the nightmare that is yet to unfold in the U.S. - already exist here.

We can treat the new barbecue ad as a standard of behaviour to aspire to, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking it shows how our laws really see us now - or even how we really treat each other - when governments so often tell us to choose which of us is more important and we are more likely to say "okay" instead of asking "why?"

I hope you care about Ms Dhu as a human being; about the fact that she died an agonising death in jail for some really petty crimes, I hope you're outraged the police officers who treated her so inhumanely were promoted, that it was all legal in a country everybody likes to believe is great, and that nobody "important" seemed to give a shit. Because I need to believe you are the sort of people who would care, if only you knew...

It’s not that the snags are burning on the barbie, mate, the house is burning. This is not the country anybody I ever cared about fought to defend. I probably won't feel like celebrating just because a politician or a TV ad tells me to. I'll feel more like celebrating when - well - when all Australians realise Australia is not its government or symbols of government, but its people; ALL its people. That Australia is really no more or less than what we do for ourselves, and for each other. Not just when we are threatened from outside, but also when we are threatened from within. We are all in this together.

.

.

Coroner’s Report is Perfect – It’s the System That is Rotten

The WA Coroner recently released a Report that doesn't guarantee Justice at all for Ms Dhu, who died in Police Custody on 4th August 2014, but it's a perfect case study of how systemic racism works.

 

The recently published report of the WA Coroner, Ros Fogliani, of her investigation into the death in custody of Ms Dhu, does not provide any kind of closure for Ms Dhu’s family. Ms Dhu died in tragic and despicable circumstances, but the report does not make any clear calls for anyone to lose their jobs.

Far from losing their jobs, many of the people involved in Ms Dhu’s shameful treatment have since been promoted. There has been one resignation [circumstances unknown].

As an outsider I can only guess that New Australian law remains, at times like this, a particularly bitter pill for Indigenous Australians. My impressions are that traditional people are more respectful listeners than non-Indigenous people generally, have a keen sense of justice, are puzzled when obvious wrongs go unpunished, and mourn traditional forms of justice that were swift and certain.

This does not mean the Coroner has failed in terms of New Australian law. The Coroner has, in fact, done an excellent job in speaking not only on behalf of Ms Dhu, but on behalf of Indigenous Australia. She has sought the truth, acknowledging and seeking to address, within the limits of her position, white privilege and systemic racism.

 

There is a TRIAGE system for assessing people in hospital emergency departments; it includes forms with tick boxes for temperature and pulse rates. It’s a system that in 2014 gave people wiggle room to treat Ms Dhu carefully, or to judge her as not worth a lot of effort.

There is another system for deciding how WA Police respond to domestic violence calls.
In 2014 it included checking to see whether there are warrants outstanding for the address the call was made from before attending at the address, because warrants matter more to the powers that be than the welfare of the people calling.

And there is a system, in each Australian State or Territory, for determining the cause of death when somebody dies in Police Custody. In Western Australia, this is governed primarily by The Coroners Act 1996.

Life in Australia today is governed by one big macro-system made up of millions of interlocking, smaller micro-systems; by a multitude of forms and procedures reflecting systems as big and formal as legislation or as small and informal as the mood of someone having a bad day.
At every level from registering a company to buying a carton of milk, our lives are subject to "ways of doing things"; our lives are subject to "systemic forces".

On the surface, most systems are the same for all Australians: In a hospital, the same forms are used for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous patients. In theory, the same procedure applies when there is a domestic violence call to the WA Police regardless of who calls, and the same Coroners Act governs the way a death in custody is investigated, regardless of who has died. But statistically speaking, measured on a basis of racial identity, the same systems still provide different outcomes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

If the systems are the same for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, why are the outcomes so different?
How can systemic racism exist? The coroner, in her report into her investigation into the death of Ms Dhu, provides some excellent clues.

 

In the real world, a macro system is never simply the sum of its micro parts. The whole is always other than the sum of its parts because there are always factors missing from the equation.

Systemic racism flourishes because most formal systems assume racism does not exist.

Nobody consciously decides “we had better make temperature readings compulsory in case one of our nurses or doctors thinks Indigenous people, or people with drug problems, are worth less than other humans.”

A major error contributing to the death of Ms Dhu was that none of the three people who treated her on August 3rd 2014 used a thermometer to take her temperature. That was the crucial day doctors had a chance to discover she had a bone infection, and treat her with antibiotics. Knowing her temperature would have been a major clue. After her death, one of the treating nurses went straight out and bought her own personal heat thermometer for taking temperatures, and now always has one available. I don’t think she was a racist; her failure on that day was prompted by typically poor hospital management of resources, then compounded by the poor character of lots of other people. The rot set in long before Ms Dhu was seen by Nurse Hall, and kept on growing.

Lots and lots of things happened to Ms Dhu in her final 48 hours. Are Indigenous Australians cursed with a gene that causes them bad luck, or did Ms Dhu's exceptionally poor treatment have some other cause? Everyone suffers sometimes from human error or bad luck or bad moods, but white people do not also suffer repeatedly from the consequences of racism as well.

So much of what did happen to Ms Dhu was unforgivably inhumane, and had nothing to do with human error. Her death was allowed by a system that does not assume racism or inhumanity exists – or at the very least dismisses it as unimportant.

Her death was allowed by a system that believes other things are more important than inhumane treatment; a system that fined and then locked Ms Dhu up for, amongst other things:
"...swearing in a public place... waving her right finger in a police officer's face and not moving away from him when warned to do so..." [784] but did not see inhumane behaviour by police officers as offensive enough to justify someone being charged.
 

The Coroner’s Report into Ms Dhu's death makes for sickening, at times harrowing, reading. The Coroner has highlighted the personal failures of many of the people who dealt with Ms Dhu in the final two days of her life, and used a systems-approach to identify system defects.

The system in WA requires that, in the first instance, when someone dies in Police Custody, the matter will be handled through a Police Internal Affairs investigation.

Unless a police officer is caught on CCTV clearly using a racist expression, it is difficult to “prove” that they were motivated to act, or not act, by racism. What the coroner has done instead in some cases is use every English word at her disposal but the R word to describe the appalling attitudes of some of the people responsible for Ms Dhu’s care at the time she died.

We have to decide for ourselves whether Constable Matier’s use of the word “junkie” was his idea of a safe euphemism for something racist. We have to decide for ourselves whether devaluing someone as a "junkie" is a lesser crime than devaluing them based on race. The Coroner cuts through the lies about Ms Dhu even being in withdrawal at all, and provides us plenty of context for making those decisions.

The efforts of Hospitals and Health workers in Australia are governed by certification and registration systems that are, like Police operations, self-governing to a degree, and designed to be self-correcting. The focus is not on retrospective punishment for failure, but on prevention of future mistakes. Unless someone actually breaks a statutory law, prosecution is unlikely.

I am particularly impressed that the Coroner, who had no legal choice but to conclude there was no deficiency in Dr Lang’s “medical treatment” of Ms Dhu on 2 August 2014, dedicated 42 paragraphs of her report to Lang’s treatment and testimony, because we get to meet Dr Lang as a person and doctor, despite the required “conclusion”.

If I had not read what I did about Dr Lang in a Coroner’s report I would find it hard to believe that a Doctor with so many years’ experience could treat another human with so much indifference, and remain indifferent to her death or the circumstances of her death throughout the inquest process. Dr Lang thought Ms Dhu had "behaviour issues".
Did this make Ms Dhu feel powerless? Did it influence the medical staff and police officers who had contact with Ms Dhu for the remaining hours of her life?

 

Ms Dhu had been arrested for non-payment of fines. She was not in jail, she was in a police cell - a local "lock-up". She was unwell and asked repeatedly to be taken to hospital. The report tells the story of her complaints of being unwell, of her being taken to hospital twice, the medical treatment she received, and what happened at the lock-up before Police finally, reluctantly, agreed to take her to hospital a third time. The Coroner believes she probably went into cardiac arrest while being wheeled into the emergency department the third time.

In the video footage below, she is still alive but dying when, while being handcuffed, her head falls onto the concrete floor of the cell. No ambulance is called, instead she is dragged from the cell into a corridor and then lifted into the back of a police vehicle.

Our legal system is built on two broad ideas that have, for the past 200 years, become progressively confused;

1. that governments will pass laws and regulations telling us what we must not do, and
2. a common law idea that tells us what we must do, which is show that we all owe a duty of care to each other.

It is precisely because the law cannot - indeed should not have to - spell out everything we must not do, that the idea of a duty of care is important.

We should NOT need a law saying don't let the head of an obviously ill person
fall back and hit the concrete floor of a cell.

One human being showing a reasonable level of care for another would not let that happen.

There is one system for specifying in legislation and regulations what is unacceptable behaviour, [prosecutable offences] and another back-up system for demanding people behave in a decent and caring fashion.

The Coroner did not find that anybody who had contact with Ms Dhu during those final 48 hours in custody broke any laws or statutes in a way that could be prosecuted.

She did find that lots of people made mistakes and personal errors of judgment, and that some showed a distinct lack of good character; that they failed to care.

What I get from the Coroner's Report is a clear message the police who let Ms Dhu's head hit the floor of the cell, and who dragged her around like she meant nothing human to them, did not break a prosecutable law, but they failed in their duty of care.

It is because Duty of Care operates as a back-up system that, although there have been no prosecutions to date, all might not yet be lost.

The Coroner does not use the expression “white privilege” in her report, but she was very careful to set out from the beginning just how big the duty of care was in the special circumstances of someone like Ms Dhu:

Ms Dhu did not have a choice of medical practitioner, or medical facility. She was not free to go to the HHC [Hospital] when she thought it appropriate. She was not free to seek a second opinion on her medical condition, if she had wanted one after being diagnosed with “behaviour issues”. In presenting at HHC, she was escorted by police. This heightened the power imbalance and her dependency. The clinicians were tasked with ascertaining whether she was fit to be held in custody. She was not free to present as a patient, seeking medical assistance, formulating her own questions for the doctors.

In respect of all of these matters, Ms Dhu was reliant on police from the Lock-Up and clinicians from HHC. Her reliance upon them heightened their duty of care towards her.

[261-2 emphasis mine]

The Coroner has not failed Ms Dhu; she is but the messenger of an extremely rotten system.

Many of the people who treated Ms Dhu so contemptibly in her final hours failed to meet their duty of care. In the absence of pre-existing laws saying things like "do not allow an obviously ill person to smash her head on a concrete cell floor", the back-up system still allows the family of Ms Dhu to investigate the possibility of suing those involved for a breach of Duty of Care, and I sincerely hope they can and do. The Coroner has tried hard to spell out those failures.

Our current system of justice does not provide reasonable timing, or certainty of justice. And I do not for a moment suggest our current system has proven itself over the last 238 years to Indigenous Australia to be anything other than a smokescreen.
Our current Federal and State legal systems are part of bigger systems that provide protection for governments that often don't even pretend to care about the vulnerable. If they cared, current representatives would be making grand announcements about changes to Police Regulations as a result of this Inquest. Their priorities remain clear: "Do not wave your finger at a Police Officer."
But the State Coroner herself on this occasion has not hidden behind the system, she has used it to full advantage to do the best she can on Ms Dhu's behalf, and to change the system where possible.

In particular, she has successfully challenged

• the assumption that the purpose of taking someone to hospital was only to justify keeping them locked up [i.e. fit for custody indefinitely];
• the notion that transport to a hospital is sufficient as opposed to attendance by paramedics [so ambulances will now be called];

She has endorsed a recommendation by Ms Dhu's family that a Custody Notification Service based on the NSW model be put in place.
[Late Edit - the Federal Govt has offered to fund this for 3 years but the WA Government has refused the offer].
At every stage of Ms Dhu's story, we have to ask, statistically, what are the odds this would have happened to her if she was a non-Indigenous woman? 
What are the odds she would have been fined for wagging her right finger at a Police Officer?
What are the odds she would not have been able to pay the fine, and would have been locked up instead?
What are the odds she would be in an unhappy relationship? Have a drug problem?
What are the odds that when she went to the hospital the first time, a Police Officer could so readily plant the idea that she was a junkie, that she was in withdrawal [not true] that she was faking illness [not true] and that this lie would be so readily accepted by so many [not all] of the medical people and so many [not all] of the police officers who dealt with her in the next 24 hours; and this would influence the way people treated her?
etc; etc; etc;


I'm not suggesting Indigenous Australians have a monopoly on unhappiness, or making mistakes in life, or being unemployed, but statistically, Indigenous Australians have a lot to deal with.
After 60 plus years of living in the wilds of white suburbia I've seen my share of white dysfunction, but I don't see white people arrested or fined for public swearing or other low level offences, I don't see the same suicide rates affecting families, and I don't see white people being so quickly devalued for drug problems unless they are actually behaving badly.

I simply cannot wrap my head around what is in that CCTV footage. At all. 

 

As a little old white lady I can be aware of racism, and sometimes see it when it is blatant, but I can never know the half of it. Lots of things make me doubt myself, but racism never does, lots of things make me hesitate sometimes, but racism never does; sometimes I get anxious about the future, but never because of racism.

Perhaps it’s too easy for me to think the majority of non-Indigenous Australians, however deluded about their privilege, are not actively racist.  I believe the best and most immediate hope for Indigenous Australia lies with systemic change.

We can help those deluded about privilege understand we are not accusing them all personally of active racism, by helping them understand the whole system is other than the sum of its parts and how systemic racism really does work.

The most urgent and useful thing we can do is change the system every chance we get, to protect people as much as possible from delusion and from active and passive racism. In system-terms, the quickest path to some success is "fix the system not the person".

The whole system is rotten, but if the Coroner had recommended all of the changes necessary to eliminate racism, for example, proposed a new Federal Constitution, the Report would have been scrapped, and perhaps the Coroner sacked. Within the constraints of the system as it currently stands, the Coroner has looked for ways to effect systemic change. This included questioning the social bias that put Ms Dhu in a lock up for non-payment of fines in the first place. The Coroner is not the problem - the system is rotten to the core.

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Weeks later I realise what I was trying to say, in more simple terms, is this:

Racist outcomes are not the result of lots of deliberate or conscious choices. We only need one or two bad choices plus a lot of indifference for the whole system to fail.

• One nurse who was ANTI-racist (but did not have her own thermometer)
• One police constable who saw Ms Dhu as a person who was sick, but had to fight really bloody hard the whole time for a chance to treat Ms Dhu with respect, was prepared to fight her boss, but could not win on her own
• One doctor who really cared but made a human error on the wrong day and is devastated by the mistake he made
• Up to 40 people who were neither racist nor anti-racist but were rather ho-hum about what they do from one day to the next
• Half a dozen people who were total scum

These are the elements that create systemic racism. We need more people to move from the ho-hum category into the really caring/prepared to fight category for something to change.

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