26 January 2019 – Liberal PM Scott Morrison and the rest of the establishment want us to celebrate “Australia Day.” The big end of town whom they serve certainly have a lot to celebrate about Australia the way it is. They have become filthy rich as a result of the post-1788 social order. Others will join in the commemorations, not because Australia’s current system is treating them well but because they have bought into all the nationalist hype. However, for this country’s 100,000 or so homeless people, for unemployed workers struggling to find work and barely eking out an existence on the paltry Newstart Allowance, for casual workers bullied by greedy bosses and not knowing if they have work from day to day, for the African community being racially stigmatised and for Muslim and Asian migrants who are targeted by racist rednecks there is little to celebrate about Australia’s current social order. Those who certainly have the most to resent about “Australia Day” are this country’s First Peoples. Other than for a few, like Warren Mundine who has risen to a high status by enlisting in the establishment that so cruelly subjugates his own community, for Aboriginal people Australian society means being subjected to police harassment and terrible discrimination.
Nothing highlights the horrific injustice that most Aboriginal people face today more than the truth that racist state personnel continue to kill Aboriginal people. Today, more than three years after 26 year-old David Dungay was crushed and suffocated to death by prison guards, the family is still waiting for justice. Meanwhile, the family and friends of 17 year-old Aboriginal youth TJ Hickey have been seeking justice for nearly fifteen years. TJ was murdered by racist cops when they chased him through the streets of Redfern and then rammed his bicycle with their vehicle sending him flying onto a fence that he was, horrifically, impaled on. The 2004 coroner’s inquest into the death whitewashed the police killing. So many other Aboriginal people are in same position as the families of TJ Hickey and David Dungay.
What makes the December 2015 killing of David Dungay especially stark is that it was actually captured on video. Six prison guards moved in against Dungay after other guards objected to him eating biscuits. The video shows the heavy-set guards throwing Dungay face down and brutally putting their combined weight on his back. The young man begs, “please, I can’t breathe” dozens of times. But the barbaric guards, who seem to be enjoying what they are doing, ignore him and continue to crush him. Prison staff then inject Dungay with a sedative and moments later he dies. The video footage clearly proves that the prison guards murdered David Dungay. Therefore, many people hope that finally the family of an Aboriginal victim of state terror will see justice done. Yet in many other cases of Aboriginal people dying in custody – like in the cases of Eddie Murray, John Pat, David Gundy, Daniel Yock, TJ Hickey, Mulrunji Doomadgee, Kwementyaye Briscoe and Ms Dhu – it was also clear that the racist actions of cops or prison guards were responsible for the tragic death of an Aboriginal person. Yet, not a single police officer or prison guard has ever been criminally convicted over the death of an Aboriginal person in custody. This is the harsh reality that the Dungay family and all other Aboriginal families of murder in custody victims face in their quest for justice.
The fact is that the “justice” system in Australia does not treat people equally. It is a part of a state machine that was founded for the very purpose of overseeing the murderous dispossession of Aboriginal people from the land on which they lived and enforcing the exploitation of all workers’ labour by wealthy business owners. That is why the coronial inquests into the cases where racist cops or prison guards have killed Aboriginal people have been such blatant cover-ups. Now the Dungay family faces another obstacle: the ugly reality that the political mood here is one where politicians like Fraser Anning, Peter Dutton and Pauline Hanson are increasingly able to bring extreme racist agendas into the mainstream. In every large capitalist country in the world from Australia to Germany to Trump’s America to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, extreme racist forces are gaining strength. And this inevitably pushes the courts into being even more hostile to oppressed racial groups.
Already there are worrying signs of the way that the inquest into Dungay’s death is going. Much of the discourse at the inquest and the related media coverage suggests that the ruling class establishment will try and sell the angle that while the prison guards were poorly trained and acted incompetently, they did not act criminally. Such an outcome would be a terrible injustice! Even eight year-old children fighting in the school playground know that when their adversary starts saying something like, “I can’t breathe,” they should release their hold on that person and check that they are OK. One does not need to have any training to know that!
That is why we cannot allow the coroner’s inquest to “run its course.” Because it’s normal course will, as always, end with a whitewash! The Dungay family and their supporters are planning protests when the coroner’s inquest reconvenes on March 4. We add our voice to the many others calling on people to join these demonstrations. The guards who killed David Dungay must be jailed for their crime!
Some people who support justice for deaths in custody victims call for the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into black deaths in custody to be implemented. This is because some of those recommendations would allow for a lower rate of Aboriginal imprisonment. However, the most significant aspect of that inquiry was that it whitewashed the cases where the state enforcement personnel murdered Aboriginal prisoners. The 1991 Royal Commission refused to charge a single cop or prison guard over the killing of an Aboriginal person. As a result, racist state personnel took it as a green light to undertake yet more violence against Aboriginal detainees. In the 27 years since that inquiry was held, 407 indigenous people have died in state custody – a more than 50% higher rate than before the inquiry. That is why that 1991 Royal Commission must not be held up as a positive example by anti-racist activists. What is more, if people are going to be mobilised on the streets to stop the so-called justice system from committing yet more injustices against Aboriginal people they need to understand that they can never trust a royal commission or any other organ of the racist, rich people’s capitalist state. Otherwise, instead of being mobilised, many will decide to just stay at home and wait, in vain, for the next coroner’s inquest to deliver a “fair outcome” like the 1991 Royal Commission supposedly but in actuality never did.
We must not let the ruling class of Australia sit back, relaxed in the knowledge that opponents of racist state violence have faith in the justice system by, for example, speaking favourably of the 1991 Royal Commission. We need to make Australia’s ruling class scared of us if we have any chance of preventing them from orchestrating their usual whitewash at David Dungay’s inquest. We need to make them afraid that their usual acts of injustice will provoke massive, militant resistance. The resistance that the state authorities most fear is workers’ industrial action – since such action hurts the profits of the capitalist bigwigs that the capitalist state really serves. It certainly is in the interests of the workers movement to mobilise its power behind the struggle for justice for Aboriginal victims of state terror. After all, the same racist state that persecutes Aboriginal people also sends in their cops to attack picket lines of striking workers and prosecutes trade union officials for organising “illegal” strikes and workplace visits. Just two days ago, riot police attacked a wharfies’ protest at Port Botany and detained for a while the leader of the Sydney branch of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and one other unionist.
There have been a few important cases where the workers movement has actively supported Aboriginal people’s struggle for justice. On 7 November 2008, the Sydney branch of the MUA stopped work in solidarity with a 200-strong Sydney demonstration in support of Lex Wotton – the Palm Island Aboriginal resistance leader who led the November 2004 uprising that responded to the police murder in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee. The Sydney rally was held to coincide with the sentencing hearing that Wotton had to face for his part in the heroic struggle. Although the solidarity actions, including the MUA stopwork, were not enough to win freedom for Wotton, it did result in him getting a much lighter sentence than the authorities expected. To make such powerful union solidarity with Aboriginal people the norm rather than the exception, we need to drive out of the workers movement the currently dominant politics of Laborite Aussie nationalism. We need our unions to be guided by a program that understands that the current state is the enemy of the working class and all of the oppressed and that the working class can only be a powerful, united force if it actively mobilises against racist injustice.
Only when we have a country where Aboriginal people are not killed by racist authorities, where Aboriginal and poor, working class children are not cruelly removed from their families, where refugees are not imprisoned in hell-hole camps and where workers cannot be thrown out of their jobs by fabulously rich bosses chasing still higher profits, only then would there be an Australia worth celebrating. Perhaps on a day commemorating the brave guerrilla struggle of an Aboriginal anti-colonial resistance hero like Pemulwuy. However, it will require turning the social structure of this country literally upside down to achieve such a society. Such a revolutionary socialist transformation is not only in the interests of most Aboriginal people but also, more broadly, that of the multi-ethnic, working class majority of this country. The relative privilege of a section of mainly white workers and the ability of the ruling class to corrupt the masses with racist and nationalist ideologies makes many people currently blind to this truth. Those of us who do understand the need for a radical, revolutionary transformation of this country must work hard now to bring that understanding to the rest of the working class masses. Our numbers will at once increase when the people who have been deceived come to their senses and begin to draw the lessons of all that has been done to them along with their sisters and brothers. We workers of Australia – of whom the Aboriginal people form one of the proudest and most important sections – have the strength, the will and the character to right the wrongs of the past and the injustices of the present. The crimes of Australia’s ruthless, exploiting and murdering ruling class – be they perpetrated against this country’s oldest inhabitants or some of its newest arrivals – must be reckoned with. Stolen land must be returned. We look with hope and respect to our sovereign Aboriginal sisters and brothers to help lead us – along with all of the oppressed – toward a brighter, fairer socialist society. Together we can start rebuilding a culture of humanity, which will not be burned in the fires of bloody war and murder or sink in the flood of brutal, senseless racism.