Launch of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner's: Social Justice and Native Title reports for 2001
Perth and Broome Launches of the Social Justice Report 2001 and Native Title Report 2001
Speech delivered by Patrick
Dodson, Lingiari Foundation
1 July 2002
We're here today for the launch of two reports: a report on social justice and another report on native title. These reports are to be launched by their author, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Social Justice Commissioner, Dr William Jonas.
They provide a yearly scorecard on how Australian governments are meeting their obligations to ensure that Australia's Indigenous peoples can fully exercise their rights and interests.
Both these reports show that, yet again, Australian governments are failing. They are failing on the big questions, and they are failing in the day-to-day administration at the ground level.
We have a national government that is unable to respond in a meaningful way to the reconciliation and social justice agendas. It will not allow native title rights and interests to be fully recognised and exercised. And this is because it cannot accept our inherent rights as the first peoples of this continent.
We know who we are as Indigenous peoples; we know we have fundamental human rights; and that these rights have international recognition. But without the recognition of our inherent rights in Australia, there can be no meaningful reconciliation because there is no real equality and no social justice.
We are curtailed, diminished; our rights extinguished. Terra nullius lives on in the minds and hearts of this mean-spirited and short-sighted government and they will not respond to our concerns, nor to our suggestions for moving forward.
The reconciliation process, agreed to by both sides of the Federal Parliament, held out great promise.
But the Federal Government has not responded to the documents and the recommendations from the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, presented at the end of the Council's 10-year process. The final report, Australia's Challenge, was tabled in the Parliament at the end of 2000 and, like so many other documents and reports, lies on the table and gathers dust.
For this reason, I support Commissioner Jonas's call for a Senate Inquiry into the implementation of, and the Government's response to, the Reconciliation Council's recommendations.
The Government gets plenty of good advice. These two reports Dr Jonas is launching here today are full of such advice. But they listen to no-one and continue to get it wrong.
There is no discussion of an agreement, or treaty, between us. There is no agreed process for dealing with the unfinished business. There is no self-determination - the policy of self-determination has not failed, as some would claim; it hasn't been tried yet.
Instead, there is limited and circumscribed rhetoric about 'practical reconciliation' - another failure of vision and policy, like so many other failures.
There can be no reconciliation without a just native title system - one that recognises our rights and interests in land and waters; provides the mechanisms for the enjoyment of those rights, and for our economic and social development.
This was the promise held out in the High Court's Mabo decision.
Mabo was an opportunity to transform our social, economic and political relationships - a transformation based on the recognition of our inherent rights. Instead, the system we have now takes more of our rights away and minimises our ability to exercise those that remain.
We continue to lose common law ground in the courts. In every negotiation about co-existence, our native title rights are treated as secondary to others.
Governments need to accept our authority structures when negotiating our native title rights and interests. The issue of recognition of the Aboriginal community, the majority of the traditional owners, is more important than recognising individual dissenters. Governments should be prepared to deal with us on our terms and for the common good, and not be distracted by peripheral dissenters.
Governments talk about our disadvantage; this is how the talk about practical reconciliation is justified. But then they fund our organisations at a lower level than other groups in the native title process, and they drown them in a sea of administrative and statutory requirements for which they are not funded.
This government is committed to our disadvantage, and our marginalisation, and acts accordingly - with its inability to listen, respond, work with us and provide resources for our participation.
The implementation of the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody is a complete failure of government policy and action. After 339 recommendations, $400 million allocated to implementing them, and the passage of 11 years, the deaths continue at high rates.
Implementation means more than looking around your particular government department, working out which programs or spending is already in place, and attaching it to a recommendation - whether it meets the objective of that recommendation or not - then putting a tick next to it in your annual report. Then forgetting about it.
It means understanding what the recommendation is actually saying, what it is trying to achieve, and then working with others - within government and in the community - to make that happen. It means understanding the link between action and outcomes. It means understanding that there is a link between action and outcomes - this is one of the missing links in government.
In the meantime, too many of our people continue to die in custody, and are being incarcerated or detained as youth.
In the 10 year-period examined by the Royal Commission, 99 Indigenous people died in prison or police custody. In the 10 years after the Commission, 115 Indigenous people died in custody, and a further 30 Indigenous people died during police operations, many of them young people in high-speed car chases. Eighty-one per cent of these people died in jails.
Many of these deaths are preventable. The WA Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Watch Committee says that, over 50 per cent of Aboriginal people who die in jail, die of ill health. This compares to about one per cent of non-Aboriginal prisoners. The average age of the Aboriginal deaths in custody is 31 years, and they die of treatable illnesses.
Health services to people in prison continue to be poor and inappropriate to the needs of our people - even in the so-called 'Aboriginal jails', in Kalgoorlie, Roebourne, Broome.
Providing good and appropriate prison health would be one, simple way of preventing many Indigenous deaths but in spite of the findings of report after report (Royal Commission, the WA Ombudsman and statements from the AMA) that this should happen, it doesn't.
Aboriginal people die in custody in high numbers because they are in custody in high numbers. This was a key finding of the Royal Commission and has been repeated constantly since. Bringing down the numbers of people dying in custody requires doing something about the incarceration rate of Aboriginal people.
But instead of going down, the Indigenous imprisonment rate has steadily increased, by about eight per cent per year, since the Commission reported in 1991.
In June 1992, there were 90 Kimberley Aboriginal people in prison. By April this year that figure had jumped 64 per cent to 141.
The number of Aboriginal women in Australian prisons has increased by a staggering 262 per cent since the Royal Commission reported.
Aboriginal people continue to be grossly over-represented in the criminal justice system - both as inmates and victims - and Western Australia is the worst.
In the year 2000, Aboriginal people in Western Australia were 10 times more likely to be arrested than non-Aboriginal people.
In June 2001, the adult Aboriginal imprisonment rate was 21 times the rate for non-Aboriginal offenders.
Juvenile detention rates among our young people were 31 times the non-Aboriginal rate. This is the highest rate in the country and is twice the national rate.
Mandatory sentencing persists in Western Australia. Concern and alarm is consistently expressed about the effects of mandatory sentencing, taking more and more of our young people away and putting them in jails - whether for juveniles or for adults. Dr Jonas is one of many who have called for the repeal of these unjust laws.
When our young people do come into contact with the police, they are more likely to be arrested and charged than non-Aboriginal young people are. And they are less likely to be diverted from the juvenile justice system into other programs to try and keep them out of jail - only 54 per cent of our young people get offered other programs, compared to 80 per cent of non-Aboriginal youth.
Dr Jonas found that the WA diversion schemes are sub-standard in general, and that they particularly fail Aboriginal young people. Most diversionary schemes are in urban areas, and the little that is available in regional areas is culturally inappropriate.
Our young people, our future, are failed in many ways. They live in families with a per-capita income of around $120 per week, compared to $350 per week for non-Indigenous Australians.
Only 11 per cent of Aboriginal student in the Kimberley complete year 12. This compares to a national rate for all students of more than 70 per cent.
In the face of continuing deaths in custody and the overwhelming evidence that there is too little justice for Aboriginal people in the justice system, the State Government has abolished the Aboriginal Justice Council. These AJCs were to provide an independent voice on these issues.
In the Social Justice report, the Aboriginal justice councils are listed as one of the advances from the Royal Commission. This is another lost opportunity in Western Australia.
Whilst governments continue to deny our inherent rights, and the structure and culture of governments cannot deal with us and our interests and concerns, we must continually look for ways to work with and outside the system. And, whilst these issues are of national and international human rights significance, they are about our lives and we must deal with them every day.
We must also keep speaking the truth about what is done, and what is not done; and assess rhetoric against action and outcomes. We must hold governments accountable; and keep saying these failures are not right - they are not good for our people, and they are not good for our country.
Dr William Jonas is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. These social justice and native title reports - from him and his office - do this work of assessing outcomes from the policies and programs. They highlight the failures as well as the few successes, and call on governments to be accountable - to meet their human rights obligations.
Dr Jonas is a Worimi man from the Karuah River area of New South Wales.
He has a great breadth and depth of experience - in government, academia and the community.
Dr Jonas became the second Social Justice Commissioner in April 1999. He has been the Director of the National Museum of Australia; Principal of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies; Director of Aboriginal Education, and a senior lecturer in geography, at Newcastle University; a lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea; and a Commissioner on the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests. He has also held positions in the areas of immigration, heritage and environment.
He is a long-standing member of Newcastle's Awabakal Aboriginal Co-operative, and has been both its Director and Board Chair. His work in the community was recognised in 1993 when he was awarded a membership of the Order of Australia (AM).
As well as his PhD from the University of PNG in 1980, Dr Jonas has received an honorary doctorate of the University of Newcastle in 1998, a Professional Excellence Medal of Convocation of the University of Newcastle in 1999, and the Professional Service Commendation of the Institute of Australian Geographers, also in 1999.
Welcome to Broome
Dr Jonas.
