Sunshine in Melbourne’s west has seen all manner of refugees in the past half century. The current mix includes a significant proportion of men, women and children from A ...
January 28, 2013
In this month of Janus, it is interesting to note that the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) via the mouthpiece of the Fairfax media is aiming to show how far it has come in addressing racism within its ranks. Whilst the ACT may well look to the past to walk through the doorway into the future, it cannot continue to ignore that harms its own servants of the public have perpetuated ...
June 14, 2012
Law is the quintessential form of the symbolic power of naming that creates the things named, and creates social groups in particular. It confers upon the reality which arises from its classificatory operations the maximum permanence that any social entity has the power to confer upon another, the permanence we attribute to objects … The law is the quintessential form of “active” discourse, able by its own operation to produce ...
May 12, 2012
I’ve debated about the title of this post, torn with an alternative following on from the statement in one’s Aboriginal heritage with a title that would allude to John Howard Griffin using his famous novel as the header, Black Like Me. But whilst I spend time with people of many colours and creeds on a daily basis, having not taken the path of Griffin or more recently John Saffran, I ...
October 15, 2011
The following post has been written by a colleague of mine from Papua New Guinea (PNG). I first met Pius in 1996 when I was working for the Papua New Guinea Banking Corporation (PNGBC) in the mid-1990s as its insolvency and reconstruction manager. At that time Pius was involved with Amnesty International working with West Papuan refugees living in makeshift camps on the PNG side of the Fly River, the ...
September 26, 2011
There is no question about racism being a profound form of ignorance, but when it becomes something that informs employment decisions by one of the world’s biggest accounting firms, Ernst & Young, and a Australian Government Department ACT Treasury, then it becomes something more than simply abhorrent – it becomes a point of view which can be openly expressed in boardrooms and in official government correspondence. It’s at this point ...
September 6, 2011
Callahan and colleagues (2002) suggested that organizations must focus on three trust-building tactics – accountability, reliance, and aspiration – to cultivate helpful internal whistleblowing procedures. These principles provide people and mechanisms to reach the outcome of an ethical organizational culture and help balance the need for profit with unbiased management of all organizational members. Reliance is about employees being able to trust the written and oral polices and standards. A ...
July 6, 2011
In fact, the worst offender of institutionalised discrimination and marginalisation of Aboriginal people is the government.—Neil Gillespie, head of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement Inc, South Australia (‘Poor health, racism go hand in hand – research’, Koori Mail 448 p.32) Over the last few months I have been liaising with an Indonesian journalist, who like me, has an interest in Australian Federal Police racism and corruption. While her particular focus ...
June 3, 2011
“The pattern from the 1980s right through to Haneef is a culture of obsessive secrecy… where the AFP’s major objective has been to look good whilst at the same time avoiding public scrutiny and accountability,” (Former AFP officer interviewed in October, 2008 for ABC Four Corners programme Good Cop, Bad Cop) On the same programme, referencing senior Australian Federal Police officers, the former Commonwealth Ombudsman, Professor John McMillan, stated that ...
March 21, 2011
“…each of the offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice strike at the heart of the administration of justice…” The above statement comes from Justice Bruce James’s judgment in the case of former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld. In 2009, Einfeld was sentenced to three years’ jail, with a non-parole period of two years, after pleading guilty to false statements over a $77 driving fine. He admitted he ...
March 14, 2011
This post forms the second part of my response to the young man who contacted me via blak and black asking: “Are the AFP really as corrupt and racist as you make them out to be on your web site?” The first part of my response can be read at “Our youth, our future of hope?” Jonathan Thurston, Indigenous Australian and one of the world’s best Rugby League players noted ...
March 12, 2011
Yesterday I received a communication from a foreign school student who has an Australian Federal Police detachment in his country. His question, to me after reading my comments on Blak and Black was: “Are the AFP really as corrupt and racist as you make them out to be on your web site?” My immediate response to my enquirer was that on the basis of my own interactions with the Australian ...
January 5, 2011
Over the next few weeks I will be putting up posts written by those who have assisted me in collecting statements or who have introduced me to the victims of the human rights violations I have briefly outlined in the statistics included under the tab Racism in Australia – the facts. Prior to handing over the reins to others, I thought that I would take a detailed look at a ...
December 28, 2010
In a modern democracy the state controls the apparatus of power for the benefit of the people, or so the theory goes. The apparatus of power includes the police, the judiciary and the bureaucracy. Each arm of this machine or apparatus is answerable to parliament, the elected representatives of the people. Likewise, each arm is independent, or at least was meant to be independent of direct political influence. The concept ...
October 28, 2010
As I have expressed in my ‘About’ page, a major consideration for me in becoming a cyber-pamphleteer was to protest about the racist and subsequent violent treatment I have been subjected to by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) over the last seven years. It is not only me; over two hundred other Indigenous Australians have provided me with statements alleging racial vilification and physical assaults by the AFP. When I ...
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