A prayer to the Gods

Watershedd is usually the more moderate of the contributors to Blak and Black. On this occasion Watershedd has shed the veil of temperance and speaks with the raw emotion of one who has witnessed the dehumanizing and destructive effects of the kind of racially motivated hatred Australian officialdom and Ernst and Young have directed towards Bakchos and his family over the last decade. I’ll let Watershedd speak to her own anger and disgust over what happened last Monday evening.

Over to Watershedd:

“Hear me, god of the silver bow, that standest over Chryse and holy Killa, and rulest Tenedos with might, O Smintheus! If ever I built a temple gracious in thine eyes, or if ever I burnt to thee fat flesh of thighs of bulls or goats, fulfil thou this my desire; let the Danaans pay by thine arrows for my tears.”

The Iliad, Homer.

When I was aged eight years old, I became lost during a school excursion to the Royal Melbourne Show. We were given free reign to wander the exhibits for a while and I could not find my way back to the meeting point. It was raining, cold and I was scared about being left behind. Eventually, a seemingly impossibly tall police officer in a long black raincoat found me and guided me back to the Showgrounds police station. He ensured I did not lose him in the crowd by having me hold tight to the tail of his raincoat. I always viewed that police man, that impossibly tall policeman, with favour. Now, I wonder if he would have done the same if I was a little Aboriginal child, perhaps a child like Kieffen Raggett.

I was so very fortunate to be raised in a very multi-cultural community and to learn that people, regardless of heritage, all seek the same thing – a peaceful and happy life with their family and a steady secure income. They expect that the police will protect them and offer them the same protections and care I was offered as an eight year-old. The reality is, if you identify as or look anything other than white, you will not be treated as favourably as someone of European heritage.

On Monday night Bakchos was called back to his car to collect some items he’d forgotten to take inside. It was well after dark and he had a short walk to get to where he had parked in an isolated, though suburban side street. On his way, Bakchos was attacked by four men, he had a pillowcase placed over his head, a noose around his neck and petrol poured over him, whilst all sorts of abuse were hurled in his direction, including terms such as ‘nigger’, ‘coon’ and ‘cunt’. Bakchos’ assailants were such big, tough, strong, reputable men that they had to hide their identities in the heavily built up streets of Sydney. So now we have gone from an admission of attempted murder through the damage to Bakchos’ car last weekend, to an in-the-face attack intended to intimidate, if not kill him in a heavily built up area.

I was annoyed on the weekend; now I am downright angry. The opening quote should give you some idea of just how angry. What the hell has happened to you Australia? More importantly, what the hell has happened to your police, your public servants, and your institutions? When did it become acceptable to not only attack a woman in broad daylight simply because she was associated with a man of dark skin, but to terrorize that man and his family simply because they demanded what the rule of law supposedly exists for – justice and equality? When did it become acceptable for the privacy of a man’s personnel file to be breached, accessed and manipulated by someone else for purely personal reasons motivated entirely by racism?

Bakchos has been the support and voice of many marginalized souls: refugees, single parents, victims of abuse and fellow Indigenous Australians. He for himself has asked for nothing other than an honest explanation of what happened to the former Commissioner for ACT Revenue’s personnel file at Ernst & Young and an investigation into the assault at the Waldorf Café and the events that led to it. He still asks for nothing more than for the rule of law to be applied equally to all, regardless of their status, creed, colour or gender. And so do I, but quite frankly Australia, I have almost lost faith in your honesty, in your so-called democracy.

A recent study by Piff et al, investigated the propensity for people to break the law based upon their socio-economic status. The findings of the study indicated that people from better socio-economic backgrounds had a higher propensity for unethical behaviour. They flouted the rules and expected to get away with their actions more often than those of less affluent backgrounds. It is hypothesized that the lack of restraints and relative freedom from supervision by others, combined with greater access to resources to offset potential consequences of unethical behaviour seems to embolden more wealthy individuals. What’s more it’s suggested that the wealthier a person is, the more they seem to believe that they are entitled to get away with unethical behaviour and that they actually become desensitized to the plight of their fellow man. Put enough of these wealthy people together and your have the advantage that marks a set of societal controls that condones, or at the very least is silently complicit in the unethical behaviour of others within the group.

Now take a look at the former Commissioner for ACT Revenue (‘Pat’), an Indigenous Australian, member of Stolen Generations and high achiever, and consider his socio-economic background. He was, in fact, one of Canberra’s most senior Aboriginal Public Servants prior to being fitted-up and sacked by the ACT Department of Treasury, aided and abetted by Ernst and Young, for having the temerity to ask that white justice apply equally to white, black and yellow alike. Pat has asked for nothing more than to be treated with equality by his employers, colleagues and the legal system. But in the end he became a victim of the corruption and racism set in play by the Inquisitor, an employee of the ACT Department of Treasury, who has racially abused both Pat and other members of Pat’s family. The Australian Federal Police have failed to record the crimes, let alone investigate them when they’ve been reported, Ernst & Young have refused to be honest about what happened to Pat’s personnel file in the hands of Tanya Taylor and the Inquisitor and the ACT Department of Treasury has allowed the Inquisitor to get away with the whole shebang. If that isn’t racism, I don’t know what is. These issues are at the heart of what happened to Bakchos last Monday night.

The actions that Bakchos was subjected to last Monday night are nothing short of a threatened lynching. These men, these KKK lily-livered gutless wonders are part of this racist agenda being carried out by Ernst & Young, the AFP and ACT Treasury. A lot of people are watching, a lot of people are listening and lot of people are reading, waiting to see whether Bakchos will get his justice or become a rallying point for others racially abused in this country. Grow a spine, Australia and deal with the racist, narrow-minded and corrupt officials in your midst before you wake up one morning and realize that your democracy is nothing more than a distant memory.

Post Script:

In reviewing the comments on the blog, Blak and Black has again found a missive from the Australian KKK, again operating as a pingback. However, in this case the commenter has got the user ID and the HTML link back to front. Hence the user ID tries to load as the website (i.e. the URL that tries to load is http://tompayneandtheniggerhunters/), rather than linking to the actual Ernst & Young website. The URL for the website has become the user ID and just happens to be none other than the statement from Ernst & Young regarding the original abusive Tom Payne comment. We can only take this as Ernst & Young giving Blak and Black the finger and giving weight to argument within the body of the post regarding the research by Piff et al that individuals from wealthier backgrounds see themselves as above the law. In the case of Ernst & Young, and we can only assume from the evidence at our disposal that they pingbacks come from Ernst & Young, that they are saying to Bakchos that we can destroy your property at will, we can make death threats against you, we can racially vilify you and send four gutless thugs around to put a pillowcase on your head, a noose around your neck, pour petrol over you and remain completely immune to Australian and United States law.