Despite the 339 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, handed down during 1991, Aboriginal people are dying in prison at an increasing rate. In 1996 already there have been a further two deaths of Aboriginal people in custody. On New Year's Day at Townsville Correctional Centre, 23-year-old Brian Paul Robertson smuggled a rope into his cell, using it to hang himself. On January 7 Kelvin Marr died, it is believed of a heart attack. SUJATHA FERNANDES spoke to RAY JACKSON from the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Watch Committee.
Question: What are the figures for black deaths in custody in Australian prisons? What are the rates of arrest and incarceration of Aboriginal people?
The national figure at the moment is 84 since May 1989. There were 99 deaths from 1980 to 1989. In NSW there have been 15 from 1980 until 1989 and 21 from 1989 to the present. The figures are increasing dramatically. There were 15 deaths in custody in 1995, and there have already been two deaths in 1996. Despite the 339 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody which are supposed to alleviate these deaths, nothing has changed. The arrest rates are increasing. The cops keep saying that the recommendation stating that arrest is a last resort is being implemented, yet the figures continue to go through the roof. The figures are very hard to get because police refuse to keep statistics on how many Koori people they pick up. They say that it would be an invasion of privacy and discriminatory. Well, they are discriminatory enough, and they invade the privacy of our people without worrying what a few statistics are going to do. It is just an excuse for them to hide the truth from the people. In April every year, they collect statistics on Aboriginal people and then that figure is extrapolated to give a 12-month figure which is obviously false. The chance of going to prison is 18 times higher if you are an Aboriginal person. When you consider that we are 1.5% of the population in NSW, but we are 18 times more likely to go to prison, there is obviously something wrong with the system. Incarceration rates are also increasing. Bob Debus, the minister for prisons, has said that the total number of Koori inmates is 888 from a total prison population of 7749. The number of Koori inmates has increased from 7.9% in 1989 to 11.5% now.
Question: How are Aboriginal people treated by the courts, the police and the prison system?
Any person who has had any dealings with police in this country at any level knows that they are and always have been corrupt because it is built on a corrupt system. If the system is corrupt, each individual copper will become corrupt. The officers in the prisons are corrupt. They turn a blind eye to the bashings, the assaults, the rapes. You turn a blind eye when the drugs are brought in, you turn a blind eye when some young girl is getting raped. We want a royal commission into the prison system. The problem is in the jails, where you have custodial and Corrections Health officers on a day-to-day basis acting like little Hitlers. They don't have any fear that they will be convicted because no-one has ever been charged. Until a charge is laid against one of those officers for a breach of duty of care, you can have 5000 recommendations and nothing will change.
Question: What has been achieved by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody?
There was a lot of money spent. There were 124 deaths presented, but the royal commission only accepted 99 of them. Of those 99, not one cop or medical person was found guilty of any major problem. A few got counselling. John Pat was kicked to death by five or six off-duty cops who went to court and were acquitted. Those cops are still working within the Western Australian system. In fact they have all worked their way up in the force. There are cops here who are guilty of the deaths of our people. Whether they want to call it death by neglect or death by misadventure or accidental death, it is still the murder of our people. The police and the prison officers and Corrections Health have a duty of care to our people, and there are many case that should be reopened. The cases which have happened since 1989 go before the coroner. The custodial officers actually lied on the stand, and there was no recommendation against those custodial officers. In another case the coroner handed down that there was actually a case for the family to look at legal action against the Department of Corrective Services and also Corrections Health Services. Well, that's fine, except you would have to be a millionaire to take those two establishments on. We want the coroners to say that here is a very clear breach of duty of care. You have failed, and I am going to recommend you for prosecution. But that never happens. While they continue to throw the onus back on the family, we are not going to get anywhere.
Question: In February 1995 the Sydney Morning Herald reported on a study carried out by the Sydney University Law School claiming, "The NSW juvenile justice system does not discriminate against Aboriginal young people, treating all youth with similar criminal histories equally". What is the real history of the NSW juvenile justice system?
I am amazed at that report, because it is absolute rubbish. Our young people make up less than 1% of young people under the age of 18. The juvenile justice population is made up of 35% of our people. The reason is that the cops keep picking our kids up. In the royal commission there are recommendations on what to do with juveniles, but the cops ignore them. You only have to look at the examples. One Aboriginal kid was locked up in the Dubbo cells for five nights and five days in contravention not only of the royal commission recommendations but of the juvenile justice acts and their own police regulations. The cops said that they couldn't move him because they didn't have the transport, which is lies. A 17-year-old Koori girl at Gosford had been visiting her 17-year-old boyfriend in the juvenile justice centre up there. She was sitting at the train station to return home when two transit cops came up to her. They asked her for a ticket and she showed them her ticket. She was wearing a lot of jewellery and according to the cops, for a Koori to be wearing a lot of jewellery, it is obviously stolen. Then five cops came down from Gosford police station. So there were seven cops harassing this one 17-year-old girl. Because she couldn't produce receipts for the jewellery she was wearing, they took her down to the police station. Before they took her to the station the transit cop was abusing her with his baton while the others stood there watching. Then the five other cops took her down to Gosford police station and they sexually assaulted her. There is bruising on her body. One of them took the lace out of her sneakers and wrapped it around her throat, tight enough to leave bruising. We are carrying this case on now because we have the statements from the girl, the medical records and photographs. That is just two examples of the way in which young Aboriginal people are treated by the justice system.
Question: Paul Keating promised land rights and Carmen Lawrence promised an improvement in Aboriginal health. What has been achieved under the current Labor Party government and what is the record of the Liberals?
To date the federal Labor government has given us nothing. There has been one case under the Land Rights Act. The only one who is going to get rich from Mabo is the lawyers. The problem is that when you are looking at land rights, this is a very big country. You have a lot of tribes, and what suits the people in the Northern Territory doesn't suit the people in Tasmania or NSW. To come up with one land rights law is impossible. I think that the Land Rights Act is better than none. But if they had waited and come up with individual laws for each tribe, there would be no land left because Court and Goss and Marshall Perron were wrapping up land as fast as they could, so the other legislation had to be pushed through. There are lot of disgruntled Aboriginal people with the Mabo legislation. At least there is something in place. Now we have to push for the best result out of that. The health side of it is worse. [Graham] Richardson was weeping and wailing and was about to do something, but he left within about 10 days. Carmen Lawrence may say that she wants to do something, but it is not the politicians who are running this country. They are just the front people, the figureheads. Who is really running this country is the establishment behind the bureaucrats. The politicians are mouthpieces for the establishment. The money needs to reach the people, the communities, not be given to some air-conditioned office in Brisbane or Darwin that is going to tell the people how to run their health services. After the 1967 referendum, the federal government had the power to take over all issues pertaining to Aboriginal people. They don't and they won't. Robert Tickner has abdicated any responsibility for deaths in custody within the states and territories' jails system. He argues that two-thirds of the royal commission recommendations fall within the states and territories' area. This may be true, but they also apply to the federal government. After much discussion with him, he stated that he really had no power to do anything and we could do one of two things. One, we could go to Duncan Kerr, the federal minister for justice, seeking his help in setting up a national meeting of corrective services ministers which would include ourselves, a representative from [ATSIC social justice commissioner] Mick Dodson's office and representatives from the Aboriginal Legal Services. Or we could go to the United Nations. Personally, I think that it is a big insult to have our minister for Aboriginal affairs telling us that we need to go to the United Nations, or Amnesty International in London, or the World Court, or somewhere else, anywhere else but Australia, where the problem is.
Question: The mainstream media try to present the high rate of incarceration of Aboriginal people as due to their inherent violence or criminal tendencies, completely ignoring the underlying causes.
In all countries where there are indigenous people, the media play the same game — the lying game, the fabrication game, the statistics game. The latest one is that our young people want to go to jail. It is seen as some sort of rite of passage. These myths are picked up by the media and peddled out by the hate mongers such as Laws and Jones. What is needed is a massive education program. Next year the Watch Committee wants to get out into schools, into high schools and primary schools. Last week I was out at Masada College, a Jewish school in the North Shore. I spent time there talking about deaths in custody, and those kids were goggled-eyed because they had actually believed what the media say about hanging ourselves being a form of protest. History is written by the winners, and the winners write what they want. The winners in this country have been fighting the idea that there was genocide in this country, in living memory. We have records of a man who in 1969 was killed by the police. He was arrested and deemed by the police to be mental so they tied him up with barbed wire. In mid-winter in Griffith they stripped him and hosed him down. That man died. He died of "natural causes". Our people are still dying of "natural causes". There needs to be education in this country and it's papers like 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly which get the information out. It is a matter of people of good intention getting out there and educating every day. We are up against a major scheme. The job of the media in this country is to brainwash people into thinking that we are just a lot of "whingeing boongs". The papers say, "All they want is to stop this land from becoming prosperous; all they want is to take your backyard and you, you poor white person, will have nowhere to live". Sometimes our people have to go to extremes to attract the interest of the media and people like Michael Mansell come out with statements like, "We want our own state, kick everybody out of, say, the Northern Territory". Well, you can imagine the Aboriginal people of Tasmania not wanting to live in the Northern Territory. But these statements are made just to try to generate discussion about why Aboriginal people want this. But what you get is a lot of hysteria. The Court government did it very well, that we would kick all the whites out and take everyone's back yard. They say that if the mining in Western Australia didn't happen we would have gone bankrupt and it is going to be our fault. These lies are continually peddled by so-called "respectable" newspapers.
Question: What campaigns are being run by the Black Deaths in Custody Committee?
We have just been given funds by ATSIC to hire another six workers, so we can service all of the country jails. We get 5-10 calls every week from people who have been assaulted by the police badly enough to seek medical attention. We have a guy who was bashed badly enough to need a neck and back brace, we have a 14-year-old boy who was bashed by five cops. At least five calls a week come from the north coast, and we have to do something about it. It is no use going to [NSW police minister] Paul Whelan because he won't do anything about it. He sits up in his 47th floor office, getting a fat salary, but he told us he won't do anything. There is a police ombudsman, but if you take it there, it is buried for anything up to two years, when they suddenly appear with surprise witnesses who are basically liars. Apparently Commissioner Wood [of the NSW Police Royal Commission] was sounded out about this and his reply was that Aboriginal people have had their day in court. But I am sure we haven't had our day in court: 99 deaths and not a single conviction. As far as the committee is concerned, we are going to make this the year of custodial change. Recently we had a meeting with Bob Debus; we feel that the department should be taking more action. We gave them a four-pronged submission which we believe would reduce Aboriginal deaths in custody in that state. First of all, we want the Deaths in Custody Committee to train the custodial officers in what the royal commission recommendations mean and how best to utilise them. Part of that training involves using inmates as facilitators. The second prong is public liability. When a coroner finds that there have been blatant breaches of duty of care by custodial staff, then he should have the power to recommend to the Director of Public Prosecutions that these people must answer in a court of law. The third prong is to set up a ministerial investigation team which would be one person from the Watch Committee, one from the Aboriginal Resource Unit and another from Corrections Health. They must be Aboriginal, and they must have the full power to go in and to conduct a full investigation when a death in custody occurs. The fourth, more long term, prong is to open up Aboriginal healing centres. That is, rather than sending our people into the mainstream prisons, our people would come to us and we would deal with them in our own centres. I think that Bob Debus and his department expect this to go dead in the water, but we won't allow this to happen. We will be calling on people for public support of this submission. We will be doing rallies and meetings around this particular submission.