Page 292 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 9 February 2021
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This motion is not about the racist actions of any one individual or group of individuals. Interactions that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights and insults can be labelled as interpersonal racism. Such occurrences are relatively easy to recognise and reject. In contrast, the subject of this motion is institutional or systemic racism, which can be defined as the sometimes unconscious and unintentional embedding of practices, policies or processes within systems or institutions that maintain and reproduce avoidable and unfair inequalities.
Essential to the concept of institutional racism is a focus on the outcomes of activities and processes, rather than on the intentions and attitudes of any individual involved. The best and most decent and most fair people may operate within systems that nonetheless contribute to avoidable inequalities. This is specifically the kind of racism that the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs recently acknowledged almost certainly exists in the territory’s prison. She said:
There is systemic racism right across our community and I think it would be naive to think any part of the ACT Government is the one place where systemic racism does not exist.
The minister is right. This kind of racism is certainly common, but, as I mentioned above, a prison is no ordinary place. It is a place where detainees are placed in an unnatural state of dependence, and therefore vulnerability, and this inevitably amplifies any incidents of institutional racism. A place of incarceration should be one of the very first places to start, especially when one group of people already carrying the multigenerational trauma of displacement and dispossession make up such a large cohort of those affected. It is for this reason that standard 57 of the Healthy Prisons Review insists that “the distinct cultural rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander detainees, also protected in the Human Rights Act 2004, must be met”.
As noted by the report of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s inquiry into Indigenous deaths in custody, these rights include, for example, recognising the special kinship and family obligations of Aboriginal prisoners, and giving favourable consideration to requests for permission to attend funeral services and burials and other occasions of very special family significance.
The appeal that has been specifically put to me, both by Ngunnawal and other First Nations people, is for an independent external inquiry. As a Victorian inquiry found, Indigenous Australians often have a lack of confidence in justice and related institutions. This certainly appears to be the case here in the ACT. For example, the Healthy Prisons Review notes that 43 per cent of detainees at the AMC reported that their needs as an Indigenous person were rarely or never met, and fully 20 per cent of the staff felt that the AMC does not respect or recognise the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Beyond this, other people have shared their personal experiences and the stories of their kin with me. They have made it clear that they have lost confidence in the system, and that something needs to happen to regain their trust. Consequently, all those who have approached me have insisted that an inquiry must be truly
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