Above, 10 April 201, Sydney: Thousands of people of all colours march through the streets of Sydney in a passionate Aboriginal-led protest against the racist state killing of Aboriginal people in custody. Photo credit: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
NEARLY 500 BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY IN 30 YEARS
FIGHT TO DETER AUSTRALIA’S RACIST REGIME
FROM KILLING ABORIGINAL PEOPLE!
5 June 2021: In mid-April, thousands marched against racist killings of Aboriginal people. The determined Aboriginal-led protests marked the fact that since a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody thirty years ago, a further 474 indigenous people have died in custody according to official figures. The real figure is thought to be much higher. To put this in perspective, compared to the current Aboriginal population, one out of every 1,500 Aboriginal people have died in custody since 1991. Imagine what that would mean if the Aboriginal population were much larger, say the same as the whole population of China today. Then if Aboriginal people were being killed or driven to death at the rate at which this is going on right now in Australia, one million indigenous people would have died in state custody in the last 30 years! This underlines the sad truth that almost every Aboriginal family directly knows or is related to at least one – and sometimes several – of their compatriots who have died in state custody in Australia.
The mainstream media were too busy eulogising recently dead Prince Philip – an arrogant racist and male chauvinist – to bother highlighting Australia’s carnage of Aboriginal people. When the media did report, they distorted the truth! They portrayed the deaths as if they were due to natural causes or suicide when the truth is that many victims were either murdered by redneck police or prison guards or died due to the racist neglect of these officers. However, families of victims have powerfully exposed the real truths. Among those who addressed the Sydney protest were Leetona Dungay and Paul Silva, respectively the mother and nephew of Dunghutti man, David Dungay, who was asphyxiated to death by six prison guards. Also addressing the protest was Caroline Andersen, the mother of Wayne Fella Morrison, who died after being brutalised by several prison guards and then transported to hospital while forced to wear a spit hood.
FROM TOP TO BOTTOM AUSTRALIA’S CAPITALIST SYSTEM
IS RACIST AND ANTI-WORKING CLASS
Many Royal Commission recommendations were not implemented. If procedures to reduce Aboriginal incarceration and improve the monitoring of prisoners’ health had been acted on there would have been some improvement. But such changes would far from solve the problem. This is because many of the deaths were caused by cops and guards acting in violation of their own procedures. The state personnel who killed TJ Hickey, David Dungay, Kumanjayi Walker and so many other people were obviously not following stated procedures. Neither were those who caused the deaths of Julieka Dhu, Rebecca Maher and Nathan Reynolds through their refusal to render timely medical assistance. These deaths were simply a result of the racist bigotry of cops and guards and their contempt for people without money. No procedure can stop that! As an Aboriginal protest leader stated: Australia’s system needs to be burnt down to ashes!
Australia’s system, a capitalist system, was created when British colonialists threw Aboriginal people off their land and property owners started exploiting the labour of both Aboriginal people and convicts/ex-convicts. Alongside exploiting workers on stolen black land, Australia’s capitalists rob even more blatantly the peoples of PNG, East Timor, Fiji, Indonesia and beyond. This tyranny is backed by the might of Australia’s American ally. To bolster its U.S. godfather’s power, Australia’s rulers support every U.S. intervention – from its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to its backing of its Israeli ally’s brutal subjugation of Palestine. But it is little surprise that Australia’s rulers are among the most ardent defenders of Israeli terror. While Israel was built on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, capitalist Australia was built through the genocidal dispossession of Aboriginal people. Down, Down Australia – Down, Down Israel – Down, Down USA!
The biggest threat to U.S. and Australian tyranny and exploitation, both at home and abroad, is the spread of socialism – that is of states created by the toiling people’s overthrow of capitalism and which are then dominated by public ownership. Therefore, the U.S.-Australia alliance is in large part about crushing socialistic states. Let’s never forget the horrific war crimes of these regimes in their anti-communist wars in Korea and Vietnam. Now they are preparing for war against a more powerful socialistic foe – the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). If their war drive is not stopped, they could destroy us all!
To protect their theft of Aboriginal land, their
exploitation and the system that ensures all this, Australia’s rich capitalists have created a state apparatus. And all
the components of this apparatus – the police, prisons, military, courts – and
its personnel are immersed in the
prejudices that come with their role as enforcers of a racist, exploitative
“order”. That is why the only thing that
is going to deter state officers from killing Aboriginal people, bullying other
people of colour and harassing the
homeless is if they are made to pay for their crimes. However, the biggest recommendation of the 1991 Royal Commission, or rather non-recommendation,
was that it recommended no charges against any of the cops and guards responsible for the deaths. This was a green light for more state
terror! That is why the rate of black deaths has been 60% higher since the Commission. As Leetona Dungay put it: “No more royal commissions, I want real justice!”
ENCOURAGE CHINA’S CALLING OUT OF THE
AUSTRALIAN REGIME’S “DEEP-ROOTED RACISM”.
BUT CHINA MUST MORE AGGRESSIVELY
DENOUNCE AUSTRALIAN HUMAN RIGHTS ATROCITIES
How are murdering state officers going to be held accountable for their crimes when the police, courts, coroners and Royal Commissions “investigating” deaths are themselves thoroughly prejudiced? The racist Australian regime does have two Achilles heels. Firstly, to further its predatory aims abroad and its crusade against socialistic states, the regime accuses its adversaries of “human rights violations”. This makes it vulnerable to exposure of its own crimes. Concerted international exposure could thus push the Australian ruling You would not have the ability to think about what you must look for viagra sales australia in a device. One of the most icks.org cialis uk effective ways to lower blood sugar levels in the body which is a pull toy to the mind. Add to levitra without prescription that, he has forgotten to pay the premium on his homeowner’s policy and they drop him. Erectile dysfunction is amongst most common and embarrassing health conditions that let a male personality down in front of cialis generic canada his partner and in his own eyes as well. class to somewhat rein in its racist police and prison guard attack dogs. That is why it is important that in January and then again in mid-March – alongside calling out the Australian military’s horrific killing of Afghan civilians and demanding that Australia free the refugees – the PRC led attacks at the UN by several countries on Australia’s racist treatment of Aboriginal people. Anyone opposed to racist terror should be lauding China’s stand while calling on China to be much more assertive in calling out the Australian regime.
In part to distract from these exposures of its racist tyranny, Australia’s rulers and their lying media have attacked China over “human rights.” These attacks are based on lies. For example, most video clips showing supposed “brutal oppression” of China’s Uyghur minority have proven to be taken in other countries (!) and those that are actually real show docile conditions compared to what is faced by Aboriginal people and Palestinians. The small proportion of Uyghurs opposed to the PRC are whipped up by U.S.-backed, capitalist Uyghurs and religious extremists who both seek to use nationalism to throw off China’s secular, socialistic system. In order to prevent the Australian regime from blunting China’s attacks on Australia’s own racist atrocities here at home by falsely attacking China, we must resist the imperialist propaganda campaign against China.
DETER RACIST STATE TERROR THROUGH MASS ACTION
BY MILITANT WORKERS, ABORIGINAL PEOPLE AND ANTI-RACISTS!
There is a second Achilles heel that could more fundamentally threaten the regime’s ability to subjugate Aboriginal people. And that is the reality that while most non-Aboriginal workers enjoy a social position above most Aboriginal people, they still face exploitation and an uncertain future. For working class people, affordable accommodation is hard to find. Even before the pandemic hit, most young people did not have secure jobs – being either unemployed, in unstable casual or gig jobs or on short- term contracts. Meanwhile, the ever escalating military, police and spy agency budgets show that the ruling class threatens us with a nightmarish future of war and repression. Moreover, the cops who assault Aboriginal people are the same ones who attack strike pickets, protests in support of public housing and staunch unionists. That is why it is possible to mobilise working class defence of Aboriginal people. Let us deter racist terror through building resistance, uniting trade unionists, Aboriginal people, other people of colour and all anti-racists!
The problem is that chunks of the masses are influenced by the – often subtle – White supremacist propaganda of the capitalist rulers and their media. That is why we need revolutionary activists within our unions. They must show fellow workers that opposing racist oppression is essential to unifying the multi-racial workers movement into a force able to defeat our exploiters. This work will need to face down obstruction from the pro-ALP leaders of our unions who while proclaiming solidarity with Black Lives Matter (BLM) simultaneously spread Australian nationalism – nationalism that blinds people to racist tyranny in Australia and which binds workers to their rulers on the basis of an actually non-existent, common “national interest.”
A taste of the potential for working class defence of Aboriginal people was seen on June 6 last year when trade unionists were amongst the tens of thousands who marched against racist state killing of black people in Australia and the U.S. Some Aboriginal activists are furious that most of those who participated in those protests no longer join anti-racist actions. A similar phenomenon has occurred in the U.S. The cause for this in the U.S. was the illusion that changing the president and thus increasing the influence of black and “progressive” Democrats would bring improvements. As the presidential election neared and Biden then replaced Trump, protests dwindled. But little has changed! American cops are still murdering black people on the streets! Here illusions in The Greens play a similar role. To be sure, some Greens MPs like David Shoebridge have been among the few politicians to have the decency to participate in BLM rallies. However, because The Greens, like the “progressive” U.S. Democrats, uphold the current capitalist order, they cannot effectively deter racist state violence even when they want to. At protests, Shoebridge offers a strategy of official inquiries and changes through parliament – sometimes even obscuring the racist nature of Australian state institutions by trying to convince people that “there are many good cops.” This strategy simply doesn’t work! On April 15, the NSW parliamentary inquiry, pushed by Shoebridge, into First Nations deaths in custody was released. It offered more of the same as the 1991 Royal Commission. The new report did not even pretend to tackle systematic racism within the police and prisons. Indeed, racism was not even mentioned once in the report’s recommendations! Staunch Aboriginal activists rightly skewered Shoebridge for defending the report. Moreover, although progressive, pro-establishment politicians like Shoebridge do encourage people to participate in actions when they speak at BLM events, the effect of their promotion of reliance on parliament and state institutions is to demobilise struggle. Especially those not directly affected by racist oppression are left with the message that they can leave it up to politicians and inquiries to do the job.
That is why dispelling illusions in positive change through the capitalist state’s institutions and its parliaments is a big part of mobilising the mass resistance needed to deter racist state violence. The racist cop who murdered George Floyd is finally behind bars because there was a massive black-led uprising following his murder and because millions of American workers took strike action in support of BLM. We need militant resistance here to deter racist terror against Aboriginal people on the way to reducing this racist capitalist system to ashes. Inspired by the courage of black deaths in custody families, let’s build toward worker strike action in opposition to state violence against Aboriginal people!