Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will of course be supporting this amendment, as there is no reason for Australia to be going back into the dark period of racial discrimination which beset this country from 1788 until the Racial Discrimination Act was passed under the Whitlam government. This legislation sweeps that aside and says that we can legislate on racial grounds against Indigenous people in a way that makes them second-class citizens to the rest of Australia. This is unacceptable in 2007. It is unacceptable because it is not necessary.

Suddenly, at the end of a long period of turning its back on the Indigenous people of this country, the Howard government has discovered that it should be putting a large amount of money into bringing the Indigenous people the services and the rights that the rest of the country has. That process is needed to end discrimination against Indigenous people—for example, to end the discriminatory situation whereby less is spent on health services for Indigenous people per capita than is spent on non-Indigenous Australians, even though Indigenous people die 17 years younger on average than non-Indigenous Australians. And I am talking about people right across this country, whether they be in the big cities in the south or the communities in the north.

What was required from the government was for them to move to give Indigenous communities the education, housing, skilling and security that other communities in the country have. The minister himself said in here today that, after it was understood that some of those things are being provided—belatedly—people felt better about it. And so they should, because they have been living under the discrimination of inadequate services for so long. But now to employ the Racial Discrimination Act, and to claim that it is a meritorious thing to do so because it will advantage Indigenous people, shows that the government’s philosophy, drive and reason behind doing this are based not on an equal partnership but on a discriminatory attitude of ‘We know what is best for you and we will do for you what we say, not what you say.’

So we have the situation where the Racial Discrimination Act is being set aside against not only existing national law but also international law. The Law Council of Australia said to the committee:

The Law Council considers the inclusion in legislation proposed to be enacted by the Australian Parliament in 2007 of a provision specifically excluding the operation of the RDA to be utterly unacceptable. Such an extraordinary development places Australia in direct and unashamed contravention of its obligations under relevant international instruments, most relevantly the United Nations Charter and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (“CERD”). In addition to its status as a treaty obligation, contained in all major human rights instruments, the prohibition of racial discrimination has attained the status of customary international law, and has been characterised as one of the “least controversial examples of the class” of jus cogens. Jus cogens or peremptory norms of international law are overriding principles of international law, distinguished by their indelibility and non-derogability. They cannot be set aside by treaty or by acquiescence. Other “least controversial” examples of jus cogens include the prohibition of the use of force, the prohibitions of genocide, slavery and apartheid, and the principle of self-determination.

What has now been accepted, without any exception, as international law—and Australia proudly led the move for such international law in the middle of the last century—is being removed in this country of ours to discriminate against the first Australians. It is simply inexcusable that racist legislation should be before the Senate in 2007.

Mr Brough has said that there will be more Indigenous sex offenders arraigned or incarcerated. Let us look at the statistics regarding Indigenous people in the prisons of the Northern Territory. These statistics come from the Northern Territory Quarterly Crime and Justice statistics from 19 March this year. Indigenous prisoners currently represent 82 per cent of the daily average prison population and Indigenous juveniles represent 88 per cent of the daily average prison population. It is discrimination that those figures are the way they are. The minister says that he is going to make those statistics worse. The minister is presuming a lot here. The argument is that removing sexual offenders and putting them in jail will in some way or other improve the basic conditions of Indigenous people—conditions that have led to those figures. What we should be aiming to do is improve those figures. One of the ways of doing that is to ensure that when people come out of jail—sometimes called the university of crime—they are better for it and have gained some pride, some skills and some better ability to take part in the community that they go back to. We are not going to see that manifest here.

We know that there are zero facilities for dealing with sex offenders in Northern Territory jails. We know that the ability to deal with drug addiction in those jails is not much better. I am told that at the moment there are only two people out of 900 prisoners in the jails in the Northern Territory receiving some form of medical treatment—including substitute substances—for their drug addiction. I am also told that there are no psychiatric facilities in the Alice Springs jail or at the hospital and that there is no other way of dealing with people who have a psychiatric crisis. Eighty per cent of prisoners Australia wide have been found to have some sort of psychiatric disorder. If we have such appalling shortcomings, surely the government should move rapidly to work at that end of the spectrum to help fix people up who have been traumatised in a way that has landed them in prisons on the racial basis that the figures show. But that is not what we are getting here today.

What we are getting is the setting aside of the Racial Discrimination Act. That is totally unnecessary and ill-founded and breaches national and international law—certainly this overrides national law. It is a shameful thing for Australia in 2007, because it is so unnecessary. It suits the government’s philosophy. There is a punitive component here which is built into the racially discriminatory approach that we see in this legislation. There is no way that the Greens are going to support legislation in the Senate which says that you can discriminate on the basis of race and lays out how you will do it: ‘Here is how the Australian Crime Commission, with its coercive powers, can be used against Indigenous people—but not non-Indigenous people—not only in the Northern Territory but right across this nation.’ If you are black, you come under the scrutiny of the Australian Crime Commission, with its coercive powers, including its domestic spying powers and its ability to coerce the production of information and materials—powers which are way beyond what ordinary Australian law accepts.

Under this legislation, it does not matter whether you are in Brisbane, Perth or Adelaide: if you are black, you will come under this new police state regime. If you are white, you will not. It is appalling that there could be such highly honed racially discriminatory action against the whole of the Indigenous population of Australia. Can the fact that this legislation can be used against Indigenous people in Redfern be justified? How does that relate to this national emergency in the Northern Territory? When I asked the minister about this, he had no answer; there was no response. There is in this legislation a racist component—reflecting the view of this Howard government in 2007—against all the Indigenous people of Australia. When it comes to the argument that the racist laws are to help the people that they target, we will cop none of that. It is inexcusable and unacceptable, and we will be opposing it.