Respect is a two - way street
29-Aug-2009

Pacific peoples would take more note of Australia’s moral leadership in the region if they could see and sense more consistency in that great neighbour’s dealing with its own indigenous people. A new report by the UN Special Rapporteur on indigenous human rights, Professor James Anaya, has castigated Australia’s treatment of its Aboriginal people.

Recent ‘intervention’ policies aimed at curing apparently endemic problems of alcohol abuse, child abuse, spousal abuse, porn addiction and rampant violence, have in Anaya’s view, gone too far in the other direction.

The intervention policy has simply added to, rather than subtracted from, the deep-seated racism that still afflicts Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations. Indeed, the intervention violates Australia’s obligations to its international treaties and agreement. To be sure, Aboriginals have had to sustain more than 200 years of systemic and structural racism. None of the policies imposed by Australian governments has undone the damage of the ‘full blast of Europe’ (as one historian put it).

Added to the awkward and often counter-productive effects of structural policies, have been the full impact of cultural racism and the web of prejudice and discrimination which have left Aboriginals trapped in a spiral of poverty and dissolution.

Anaya himself notes that ‘entrenched’ racism remains a feature of their plight. Moreover, the Australian government’s suspension of its Racial Discrimination Act sends another contradictory message to the Pacific. The suspension was undertaken to allow the ‘intervention’ to proceed without legal entanglement. This effectively denies the full application of human rights in respect of Aboriginals.

This measure of simply suspending law for the sake of allowing an enforced policy to take effect is, in principle, the kind of thing Fiji is accused of and damned for doing to itself by Australia. Where is the consistency?

Finally, Australia’s response to the special investigator has been one of undiluted upfront rejection of his broadside. Both government and opposition have virtually told Anaya to ‘go jump’. How does this overtly hypersensitive and reactionary response help Pacific peoples respect the verdicts of international observers who similarly comment on their own various social and political problems?

Australia wants the indigenous Pacific to heed human rights and yet when it is itself critiqued by human rights experts, its posture is dismissive and consistently so.

The Pacific may have some problems (and Fiji among them), but perhaps Australia should, in the words of Jesus, take the log out of its own eye before it picks on the splinters in the eyes of its smaller neighbours.