Vol. 80/No. 32 August 29, 2016
Rallies in Australia protest jail abuse of Aboriginal youth
AND LINDA HARRIS
The Four Corners program shows a 14-year-old boy hooded and shackled in a chair, evoking the images of torture at the U.S. Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This drew headlines around the world.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, re-elected in the July 2 federal elections, moved to try to deflect anger at the filmed brutality by hastily announcing a special judicial investigation by a royal commission. A week later, under pressure to investigate the Northern Territory government itself and to allow indigenous representation, he announced an Aboriginal government adviser on social justice, Mick Gooda, would be a replacement commissioner.
Dylan Voller was the teenage boy in the film, who had been subjected to years of mistreatment. His sister, Kirra Voller, said the government knew about the abuse of her brother and didn’t do anything, saying the inquiry was “the government’s way of shifting blame.”
This was not an isolated or new incident, nor is it confined to the Northern Territory. Nationally, indigenous youth are 26 times more likely to be imprisoned than others. They make up over half of all children in juvenile detention.
The Northern Territory is third in the world, after the United States and China, in incarcerating people. Under mandatory sentencing laws, many youths are repeatedly locked up over minor offenses. Aboriginal children make up about 90 percent of juveniles in prison. Thirty percent of the 250,000 people who live in the Northern Territory are Aboriginal, whereas only 3 percent of the total Australian population is indigenous.
The program, based on tapes from the prison, reveal authorities’ cruelty on boys as young as 10 years old. In 2014 after six boys held in solitary at Don Dale were tear gassed, an investigation was launched and the prison closed. No one was held responsible and children were just relocated to an adult prison.
John Lawrence, a former lawyer with the North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service, said on the program the abuse is “a deliberate punitive cruel policy” on the part of government and prison authorities.
One protester at the July 26 Alice Springs rally sat strapped in a chair, head covered in a hood, with a placard in front reading, “If I did this to my children, they’d be taken off me!” Government “child protection” agencies, past and present, are notorious for removing youngsters from Aboriginal families.
In the 1980s, a rising protest movement against a string of cop killings of young Black men forced the government to call a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. But as the court process ground on and on, the street protests receded.
Twenty-five years ago, that commission made 339 recommendations, most of which were never implemented. Since then, the number of Aborigines in prison or police custody has doubled.
“A lot of people in the Aboriginal community are saying methods of incarceration haven’t changed much in 228 years,” Tim Gray, an Aboriginal activist in Sydney, told the Militant.
The first British fleet landed in Australia in 1788, founding a convict prison settlement there. British colonial rule and capitalist production expanded across the continent, dispossessing the indigenous people of their traditional lands. The Northern Territory was the final arena of this frontier war, with the last massacre of over 100 Aboriginal tribespeople at Coniston in 1928.
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