On October 17, voters in the Australian Capital Territory will finalize their decisions regarding who should govern them for the next four years. In that decision, they will no doubt remember the push for same-sex marriage, finally ratified in December 2017. The ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr, a homosexual man and same-sex advocate, pursued an equality agenda using taxpayer funds to paint buses and traffic roundabouts rainbow. We won’t discuss the fact that the rainbow-roundabouts were painted with the colours backward, but we will point out that a campaign on a single issue of equality does not make a social justice warrior, as some would have us believe of Barr.
In the same year that the Barr Government went loud and proud on same-sex rights they watched as the Australian Federal Police acted on the ACT Government’s own racial vilification of an Indigenous man for having the temerity to seek equality before the law through the ACT Civil Administrative Tribunal four years earlier in 2013. Mullins had been seeking a copy of a Public Interest Disclosure lodged in 2003 with then Chief Minister Jon Stanhope. No record was found on file. Yet precisely two years later in 2005 the ACT Ombudsman stated that the ACT Government did have a record on file.
The contradictory and incompatible assertions of Sue Hall for the ACT Government and the ACT Ombudsman became the subject of intense legal battle. An affidavit supposedly submitted by Mullins to the Tribunal was referred by the ACT Government to the Australian Federal Police for investigation on the assertion that its contents were fraudulent. The affidavit was examined by a jury in March 2017 with the jury finding Mullins not guilty on all 16 counts, dismissing the charges. The jury did not accept the Prosecution’s assertions that the Ombudsman had made a mistake in its letter to Mullins of 26 June 2005 in which he referred to Mullins PID made in 2003. A copy of the Mullins PID was contained on his work computer, as evidenced by the AFP’s own investigations at the time of his dismissal in 2004.
The fact that Mullins 2003 PID mysteriously disappeared in the face of constant racial vilification, bullying and harassment in the workplace and subsequent spiraling mental health issues is testament to the culture of the ACT Public Service of the period. Mullins subsequent career demise with his dismissal in February 2004 on the basis of a PID submitted by Angel Marina dated 19 December 2003 (which has now been shown to contain a number of untruths), enabled the ACT Government to bury Mullins’ PID in the expectation that it would never see the light of day again. The ultimate irony is that it is the ACT Government’s own actions that have drawn it back from obscurity.
With Mullins exoneration in the ACT Supreme Court on 24 March 2017 came the responsibility of the incumbent ACT Government to investigate the ongoing attempts to suppress the Mullins PID from 2003 and to address the lies that led to the racism-fuelled personal and professional attacks that drove him to despair. Mullins was driven from his ACT Public Service position as a senior manger by a racist subordinate four levels below him. It was convenient for his superiors to allow this to happen because it enabled them to ignore the concerns raised in Mullins PID.
And the questions raised as a result of Mullins legal win on 24 March 2017 cannot be ignored.
Who fitted Mullins up?
Who accessed the ACT Civil Administrative Tribunal files and interfered with the files that should have been securely held?
Why were the documents changed?
Where is the original of the Mullins PID from 2003 and why has it been suppressed?
Chief Minister Andrew Barr gives not a damn about equality for all. He has allowed his own government to perpetuate the same lack of transparency and racism that has poisoned every other Labor-led ACT Government for two decades. A Chief Minister who truly believed in diversity and equal rights wouldn’t be a single-issue show-pony. He would lead by example on the hard issue of racism, addressing historical injustices and wrongful prosecutions.
The long and the short of it is that Barr’s efforts at Indigenous equality are tokenism. He has neither the ticker nor the capability to address the hard issues. The ACT’s First Nations and non-Indigenous voters alike can expect nothing better of his leadership moving forward. Nothing better will come without change. The only thing that they can expect is more lazy and unaccountable government.
