By Lisa Macdonald
PM John Howard professes outrage at charges that his government is racist. Minister for Aboriginal affairs, John Herron argues that "that's all in the past". Today, says MP Pauline Hanson, Aborigines get "privileged treatment".
Once in a while, however, something happens that blows a large hole in this whitewashing to publicly reveal, if only for a moment, the reality that the Australian establishment works so hard to conceal. The November 25 release of the Indigenous Deaths in Custody 1989-1996 report by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission does just that.
The report shows that seven years, $400 million and much PR after the four-year Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody completed its investigations, indigenous people are dying in custody at an even greater rate.
During the period investigated by the royal commission (January 1980 - May 1989), there were 98 indigenous deaths in custody, an average of 10.4 a year. In the seven years since May 1989, another 79 indigenous people have died in custody, an average of 11.4 a year. The increase in institutional deaths was greatest in NSW (from 15.2 to 31.6) and Victoria (3 to 6.3).
The rate of death for indigenous women in custody is even higher than that for indigenous men and this has increased since 1989. Between 1980-1989, 10 indigenous women died in custody. Between 1989-1996, another nine died.
These figures are outrageous yet they do not even include an increasing cause of death among indigenous people who come into "contact" with the police. There have been an another 17 deaths from police pursuit since 1989, bringing the actual number of black deaths in the "justice" system to 13.7 a year. The report documents that deaths from police pursuit have increased significantly for both indigenous and non-indigenous people since 1990.
The only good news in the report is that there has been a significant decline in the number and proportion of indigenous deaths in police lockups since 1989 (from 63% to 23%). However, this is countered by a greater increase in the number of deaths in prisons (from 34% to 76%). The report argues that this is probably due to the speedier transfer of detainees from police cells to prison once they
have been arrested and the increase in imprisonment levels for indigenous (and non-indigenous) people since 1989. Whatever, the cause, it reveals that the police, courts and prisons are continuing to ignore the key recommendation of the royal commission — the need to keep indigenous people out of custody in the
first place.
Between 1988 and 1995 the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander (TSI) people in prison has increased by 61%, almost twice the increase of 38% in the non-indigenous prison population. Compared to non-indigenous people, Aboriginal and TSI people are 17.3 times more likely to be arrested (in WA the over-representation rate is four times this), 14.7 times more likely to be imprisoned and 16.5 times more likely to die in custody.
That the "justice" system reserves "special treatment" for Aboriginal and TSI people is absolutely clear in this report: Indigenous people are more likely than non-indigenous people to be imprisoned for assault, break and enter, motor vehicle offences, property offences and justice procedures offences than non-
indigenous people. Where assault occasioning no harm is the most serious offence, they are twice as likely as non-indigenous people to be arrested.
The systematic discrimination against indigenous people in policing practices and the courts that these figures reveal also means that Aboriginal people are caught up in the system at a much younger age. The result, that indigenous people who die in custody are, on average, only 29.2 years old, (compared to 35 years for non-indigenous people), is one of the greatest tragedies for Aboriginal communities.
Ray Jackson, spokesperson for the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Watch Committee in NSW points out that the current "law and order" campaign to push through "stupid laws like the NSW government's proposed Street Safety Act [which gives police the power to break up groups of more than two people if the police "suspect" that the group "might intimidate, harm or obstruct others"] and a bill to allow police to hold people for 12 hours without a charge are only going to exacerbate an already horrific situation".
Recommendations ignored
In an effort to address the immediate needs of indigenous people caught up in the legal system, if not the more fundamental changes necessary to eradicate systemic discrimination against Aboriginal and TSI people, the royal commission made a total of 399 recommendations for reforms in the police, court and prison systems. In 1992, $400 million was allocated to governments to implement these recommendations. Almost five years later and despite numerous PR exercises, follow-up reports and the best efforts of deaths in custody watch committees and support projects, virtually none of the recommendations have been implemented.
Jackson says, "There's been a hell of a lot of government reports saying how wonderful they are and how the recommendations have been put into place and are working on behalf of the people in the custodial system — all full of rhetoric. This report blows all of that right out of the water. There is no rhetoric in it, only the scorching truth that governments and people working in the custodial systems really couldn't care less."
The report reveals that not only are the royal commission recommendations not being implemented, they are being systematically breached: In each black death in custody since 1989, an average of 8.5 recommendations were breached. In Queensland the rate was highest at
13.6 breaches. The number of breaches has not decreased over time.
Jackson told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, "It's very difficult to get through to people that the recommendations are not being implemented. That makes us very angry because a lot of our young people would be living if the recommendations were implemented properly."
Sam Watson is chairperson of the Murri Watch Cell Visitors Project which visits Aboriginal prisoners in watch houses across Brisbane. He believes that "there's an idea that has gained great currency in Canberra that the only way to solve Aboriginal deaths in custody is by inventing huge bureaucracies, huge commissions, huge inquiries and throwing millions of dollars at it when really we just need an absolute commitment from all parties involved that those recommendations, even though they're not perfect, must be implemented as quickly as possible."
Watson told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳: "What essentially happens in deaths in custody is that the victim is totally isolated and feels totally bereft of any support. They are taking the ultimate step as a statement of their own sense of worthlessness. A simple thing like a buddy system, which was one of the recommendations, has been implemented in some situations in Queensland and it's had a high success rate. It's not infallible, but it is a constructive step towards identifying that the prisoner must be supported and assisted during those crucial moments. And it's absolutely cost-negative."
The failure to implement the recommendations cannot be simply attributed to "ignorance", Watson said. "We found in the course of the Daniel Yock inquiry in November-December 1993 that the officers who were involved in the arrest and detention of Daniel Yock were aware of the royal commission, but had not read one word of the recommendations and had not even read one page of their own custody manual which clearly spells out police officers' criminal duty of care to any person that comes into their custody."
Questions have also been raised about the use of the funds allocated to implement the recommendations. According to Jackson, the House of Representatives inquiry in late 1994 which produced the Justice under Scrutiny report urging governments not to let the recommendations "gather dust on the shelf" also claimed that a significant amount of the $400 million could not be accounted for. "In chasing that up", Jackson said, "I was informed verbally that up to $100 million could have gone walkabout. Now remember, that $400 million didn't come to Aboriginal groups and organisations; it was for governments — for the police, the prisons, the justice system, all that sort of thing and it was misused. For example, a lot of it went on a meeting of the police ministers at Uluru. They went on a two-week chat and came back with motherhood statements that they'd lifted out of the recommendations anyway. The whole thing was a farce."
Another example of the misuse of the funds, says Jackson, was "When there was a death at a police lock-up in Macquarie Fields. They knocked the whole place down afterwards and ... built a beautiful police station with carpets, piped music, fish tanks, and ferns. It's gorgeous, but there's two cells in it. How can you justify that expenditure?"
Political will
The fundamental problem underlying the failure to implement the recommendations, however, is not financial mismanagement or "ignorance". Rather, it is that the major parties and all arms of the legal system have no interest in eradicating black deaths in custody, or the systemic racism that forces Aboriginal and TSI people into the system in the first place.
Watson argues that the whole approach to black deaths in custody has so far been, to a large extent, a bureaucratic and political whitewash. The royal commission itself, he said, was flawed in so far as few ordinary Aboriginal people had anything to do with designing or running it. Instead, he says, "it delivered substantial dollars into the pockets of a whole generation of private white lawyers who didn't have any relationship with the Murri community before the royal commission and have done very little work for the Murri community after it."
"If they were genuinely concerned about deaths in custody they would go down to the coalface and talk to the field officers of the legal services, the cell visitors and the prisoners themselves, as well as to ordinary Aboriginal people on the streets who have this entrenched phobia about being locked up in cells.
"It's very simple — real change can only happen with real people. Aboriginal and TSI people should be involved in the training of the police and correctional services officers and then Aboriginal and TSI people have to have an ongoing monitoring capacity so that when our people are taken into custody, there's ways and means for keeping indigenous people involved."
Watson argues that the fundamental problem is a lack of political will. "To force police and correctional services employees to honour their commitments to prisoners is going to take a government that is prepared to go the hard yards and break the backs of the militant right-wing factions that dominate police unions in Queensland, NSW and WA", he said. "And it's going to take something like the family of the next victim actually delivering the body to parliament house and
saying 'you bury them because you killed them' for politicians to take the issue seriously."
Both Watson and Jackson are scathing about Minister Herron's much publicised national summit planned for May 1997. "The talk-fest scheduled for next year is not going to work", says Watson. "It's just another opportunity to bring together a huge number of people in a five-star hotel to have a great time with a lot of travel allowance. There will be a whole lot of talking, a whole lot of papers and a whole lot of promises but I don't think anything is going to change. Governments at state and federal level do not have the political will or political guts to really change the way things are done."
Jackson points out that bureaucratic games are part of the whitewash. "In NSW next year there will be a meeting called by the Aboriginal Justice Advisory Groups on January 11 to look at submissions to a February conference to go to the May summit. In these bureaucratic games set up by governments you have to jump through all these hoops and if you miss a hoop then you've got to start all over again. And while we're jumping through the hoops, our people are dying.
"There really doesn't seem to be any understanding on the part of any government, whether it be Labor, Liberal or whatever, that they urgently need to stop talking amongst themselves and sit down with Aboriginal people and let us tell them how to do it."
A clue to the real agenda behind Herron's summit, says Jackson, is that "apparently we're up to the last of the money. I think the summit will be used to announce that when it's all gone that's it. They'll say, 'sorry about that but we've done what we can, goodnight'."