In my criticism of the Royal Commission, it may be initially concluded by some that I am an apologist for the government or some other entity inimical to genuine Aboriginal welfare.
This is not the case. In point of fact, I accuse both the NT and Federal Governments of presiding over actual genocide and denial of basic human rights in the NT. Whether this genocide is deliberate or is the inevitable outcome of ignorance, racial arrogance, and continued colonialism, has yet to be determined.
What really is a major threat to NT Aboriginal cultural and physical survival is the plethora of media-generated and largely imagined crimes against Aborigines, whilst ignoring the infinitely more lethal negligence that is actually and demonstrably killing people in their tens of thousands.
It is my intention to expose the pseudo-crimes and illuminate the true causes of Aboriginal premature death. Why? Because the truth will eventually emerge anyway and subsequent public disillusionment will seriously erode critical electoral support for the genuine NT Aboriginal cause.
ABORIGINAL DEATHS IN CUSTODY
What the Royal Commission Report really said
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, initiated in October 1987, presented Australia to the world as a barbaric and racist nation which was comparable with universally-reviled Apartheid South Africa. The entire world 'discovered' how Australia practiced racism and used brutality and murder in the ruthless containment of its helpless indigenous minority.
In the foreign media and Aboriginal Lobby productions this was presented as repression and genocide. A procession of supporting actors were propelled from political stage left, including such deified notables as Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, and representing international organisations among whom were leaders of the major Christian Churches, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations.
A recent sample survey of ordinary Australians demonstrated a widespread, if not universal, presumption that the Royal Commission did indeed uncover racism, brutality and murder.
The Murdoch Media implicitly accepts this, as do the courts and a host of government agencies.
These presumed findings of the Commission have been extruded into curricula for school children, students, and government workers. State Police cadets are exposed to the shameful “facts” during training.
An expensive national bureaucracy has been set up to prevent possible repeats of the “racist incidents” through the simple expedient of enabling Aboriginal offenders to avoid prison sentences, even though non-Aborigines are routinely incarcerated for the same offences.
What has yet to be revealed to the world, is that the reputations of Australian police and prison guards, and of Australia as a nation, have been impugned based on incidents that never took place and conditions which have not existed since the early 1960s. In the Northern Territory, these brutal conditions ceased to exist since the establishment of missions and government communities in 1936, initiated by the Commonwealth's protector of Aborigines.
SYNOPSIS
Events preceding the Inquiry
A barrage of misrepresentations, innuendo, unsubstantiated accusations, conspiracy theories, and outright non-facts were presented as evidence to the Federal Government by a broad range of tax-payer funded Aboriginal organisations and lobby groups. On that basis, the Royal Commission of Inquiry was launched.
Although the Royal Commission’s subsequent National Report opening statements are effectively an admission that the Inquiry was founded on baseless allegations, it is difficult to find anyone who has actually read this report.
Concomitant with the Report’s muted release has been a brilliantly-orchestrated campaign of innuendo and media impressionism, the imputation being that Aborigines have long been repressed under a regime of police and prison guard brutality, racism and murder; and that this had indeed been proven.
A budget in excess of $4 million per year has been provided since the Report’s release, to finance the perpetuation of this impression.
This deliberate campaign to misinform the people of Australia, and the world, has yet to be publicly challenged.
Ignoring the evidence presented to the Commission, this having already been admitted as baseless by an embarrassed Commission, this chapter instead examines the accessible details of the circumstances that led to the setting up of this farcical Inquiry in the first place. It is a story of journalistic and academic naïveté, of ruthless ambition and judicial arrogance on a truly breathtaking scale.
What has not been said to the world is that, on a per capita basis, more Europeans died in custody in police cells and prisons than did Aborigines. And, that exhaustive research and investigation by the Royal Commission found that there was no evidence of violent deaths caused by police or prison guards.
An emerging development was that some prisoners were committing suicide. These were the ‘copycat suicides’ that were so freely documented in the media. In this regard, and at the end of the day, all that the Commission could come up with was to blame these suicides on the authorities and, by association, the nation. Drug abuse, alcoholic remorse, depression, suspect medications for the treatment of depression, and an absolute absence of aspirational horizons and meaningful life goals, did not rate a mention.
The reader might well ask why publicly funded Aboriginal organisations, government agencies and representatives, Amnesty International, the United Nations, both national and international media; and unsurprisingly, the authors of The Stolen Generation Report, continue to behave as though the Royal Commission found that police and prison guards were racist and beat Aborigines to death.
That such brutal and inhuman behavior most certainly occurred earlier in Australia's history is absolutely undeniable, but this is not what the Royal Commission was set up to expose.
To ensure there is no confusion here, the following passages presented (in green Arial Italic Bold), are selected quotes from the National Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody:
"The Report acknowledges in its introduction that the Commission owed its origins to a background of sustained Aboriginal Lobby claims to the effect that most if not all of the Aboriginal deaths in custody over the specified period, were the result of murder" (1.1.3).
"The Royal Commission of Inquiry considered all witness accounts, and examined all the circumstances of death of the 99 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who died in custody over this period, and this incorporated the optimum use of pathology and state of the art forensic sciences. The subjects of investigation consisted of 88 males and 11 females, with an average age of 22 years" (1.1.1).
In its direct findings, The Report goes on to say…
"The conclusions reached in this report will not accord with the expectations of those who anticipated that the findings of foul play would be inevitable and frequent. That is not the conclusion which the Commissioners reached. As reported in the individual case reports which have been released, Commissioners did not find that deaths were the product of deliberate violence or brutality by the Police or Prison Officers" (1.2.2).
"The work of the Commission has established that Aboriginal people in custody do not die at a greater rate than non-Aboriginal people in custody" (1.3.1).
… "But it can certainly be said that in many cases death was contributed to by system failures or absence of due care" (1.2.3).
This latter comment failed to qualify that the same “system failures” and “absence of due care” applied to all prisoners, regardless of race, and that for non-Aborigines these continue to be the prevailing circumstances. Such a conclusion does not reveal a positive and egalitarian attitude towards justice.
Outrageously, included in “system failures” is the imprisonment of people who have failed to pay fines, a legal overkill which critics have complained about for decades, and which effects all Australians equally who, for one reason or another, have failed to become aware of or have forgotten to pay fines. Warrants are duly issued and defaulters are arrested and incarcerated with no consideration for race, sex or creed.
According to judicial reports, as a result of the Royal Commission Aborigines no longer go to jail for not paying fines. This is as it should be. What is wrong is that non-Aborigines continue to be jailed for this ‘crime’. This is unadulterated and institutionalised racism.
In desperate need for a course to set, which might harvest some tenuous justification for the Royal Commission of Inquiry, the definition of “system failure” was extended to include virtually any imprisonment of young Aborigines at all. This has resulted in urbanised European-acculturated part Aborigines being placed on farcically-supervised community service, or under otherwise unaccountable ‘supervision’, while young non-Aborigines go to jail for the same offences. Given that the only difference between the two parties is generally the faintest pigmentation of skin, and can identify no cultural differences at all; this is classic colour prejudice. This is racism, pure and simple.
In terms of accusations of police racism, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody went out on a very lean limb. The agencies that are now implementing the Commission’s recommendations are stranded on an even slimmer bough, one which is rotten to the core with politically correct racism and irretrievably corrupted ethics.
That the Royal Commission of Inquiry was a farce from the outset is candidly obvious to anyone who has actually read the National Report. My own surveys, of Aborigines in NT, Queensland, and NSW, revealed that all were completely unaware of the actual findings of the Commission.
The politicians, bureaucrats and the culpable media, carried away by the momentum of sensationalist pre-Commission publicity, have since gambled on the politically street-wise fact that nobody actually reads reports. Even Cabinet Ministers merely glance at the first and last paragraphs and hope that their over-worked and sycophantic ministerial assistants will have read them in their entirety, which is not always the case.
It must be admitted that this has not been a high risk gamble; the strategy has worked countless times before.
Every participating official who has read the Report is hoping that he or she will be long gone when and if it all “hits the fan”, or at the very least, that they will have someone else to blame. There must be many outraged but unread counter-reports hidden in files throughout the nation, handily tagged and bookmarked for instant slamming on pre-judicial benches, as some fingers begin to point and others begin to burn.
There must be a lot of bureaucrats out there who nervously peruse every issue of the Government Gazette, and who routinely prepare applications for jobs elsewhere…just in case. Perhaps for many, after almost three decades of nervousness the sound of the falling sword will probably come as something of a relief.
In the interests of responsible government in the future, we should be asking ourselves, how did this happen? How is it possible to launch something as weighty as a Royal Commission of Inquiry into a complete non-event, at a cost of many, many millions of dollars, especially when the reality was known to many hundreds of qualified Australians of impeccable integrity, from the outset?
More significantly; and now turning towards the source of primary motivation, how is it possible to do so much damage to Australia’s national integrity and international reputation without a voice being raised in protest or defense?
THE DETAILED STORY, AS SEEN FROM A NORTHERN TERRITORY PERSPECTIVE
When the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was first announced in 1987, many people with extensive experience working within the various crime containment services, or who for one reason or another monitored aspects of the various correctional systems, were rather nonplussed.
Because there were at that time, more non-Aboriginal deaths in custody per than there were Aboriginal, they found it difficult to understand why the inquiry was being set up with the Aboriginal bias in the first place... as the then NT Senator Bob Collins wondered aloud to a journalist at Darwin Airport, at the time of the announcement.
Those who had genuine concerns about the markedly increasing Aboriginal participation in antisocial or criminal behaviour had long campaigned behind the scenes, and within their respective departments, for a formal and well funded multi-disciplinary study, to be conducted on a regional basis, and reflecting demographic and cultural realities.
The more fortuitously positioned and well-informed members of the community quickly concluded that the Royal Commission was hijacking public concern and taking it someplace where it would wither and die without addressing the real issues, which were widely acknowledged as being politically too hot to handle.
These were:
Typically, this comprehension had attached itself to people who were also of an age whereby they were tied to mortgages and family responsibilities.
In a climate of rigorously enforced political correctness, risking their jobs and careers by criticising the Royal Commission of Inquiry was something they were not prepared to do, especially being aware of the ruthless vindictiveness of many Supreme Court Judges, one of whom was now leading the Commission... James Muirhead.
Recognising that their objections would be futile gestures anyway, and that the welfare of their own respective families was a more immediate responsibility, they were indeed wise to remain silent.
One of the casualties of political correctness is that dissenting voices are silenced and, as a consequence, ill-advised ventures and projects burgeon without critical constraint and are not subjected to normal social or financial controls. The Royal Commission was yet another such expensive but unproductive exercise.
The Inquiry revealed nothing that was not already known to the well-informed. No murders or brutality were exposed so, as a final desperate measure, the suicides of prisoners suffering from alcoholic toxicity and remorse, and the lawlessness of many rebellious young Aborigines, were blamed on the nation.
Serious observers were left to ponder the question, why did the Royal Commission take place? If the evidence which prompted the Inquiry was known to be false, well prior to the event, which in retrospect must have been obvious to the initial instigators, why pursue it?
The intuition of these observers would have warned them that this was a path down which they should not venture. They would have asked themselves, if the illustrious careers of all-powerful national political and judicial leaders are at stake how far would they go to protect themselves? Fear is an effective inhibitor and the life of a whistle-blower is not an enviable one.
Nevertheless, these questions must be answered, if for no other reason than the redemocratisation of Australia must be preceded by a national awareness of the true extent of political corruption, parliamentary deception, media interference in government, and the absolute abandonment of judicial integrity in deference to an unaccountable and undemocratic World Governance agenda.
Before attempting to answer these questions it would be prudent to address:
Admittedly, in respect of the latter three observations, some faith in the veracity of this author will be required, at least until independent investigators can verify the facts. A formal entirely independent investigation is essential; and one considerably more reliable than a Royal Commission. In the meantime, it must be accepted that any Australian has the right, and in light of the evidence, the responsibility in the general public interest, to present these issues to the Australian electorate in their known entirety. Any attempt to repress this report, must be viewed as an assault on political freedom, on public access to information, and on democracy itself.
Aboriginal ill-health; lifestyles and the implications for criminality
The most predictable but nevertheless valid observation that can be made is that Aborigines are dramatically over-represented in police lockups and in prisons. This is not because they are being picked on, as activists, the Inquiry Commissioners, the authors of The Stolen generation, and would-be reformers assert, but because they commit many offences.
These are rarely people whose culture is intact, but whose culture has long ago disintegrated leaving a valueless void. As children, they are now raised to have no respect for other people, to believe that they are victims of a racist society, that violence and theft is an acceptable way of life, that the life of a criminal is romantic, and that the world owes them a living. This syndrome is far from being confined to Aborigines.
Their knowledge of history, their understanding of how the world works, their levels of literacy and numeracy, and their range of occupational skills, are effectively non-existent.
This disastrous circumstance has evolved:
These are the readily observable realities that teachers, social workers, human rights officials and activists, journalists, foreign critics, the police hierarchy, magistrates and judges, refuse to confront. The real ‘system failures’ that the Commission alludes to, are in the education system, the now corporatised Christian church organisations, welfare agencies and in the courts; compounded and reinforced by the media.
Statistics are unconscionably distorted to support various illicit facets of the radical extremist Aboriginal cause: If Aborigines are in prison in proportionately greater numbers than are other Australians, as the Commission’s Report accurately points out, their deaths in these places must also be conspicuous by their greater incidence. This is a mathematical fact, enhanced as it is by reduced Aboriginal longevity and youth suicides.
And, the reasons why Aborigines die at a younger age is precisely the same as it is for non-Aborigines who also die at an earlier age…an unhealthy lifestyle…, for many, by choice, not by imposition. An uncontestable fact, one that has never been publicised, is that Aborigines were a slim people before the initial impact of welfare, 20 something years ago. They, and Torres Strait Islanders, are now probably the most obese segment of the population and suffer from a whole new genre of illnesses.
The primary causes of poor health are: poor diet, sucrose toxicity, abysmally poor hygiene and home over-crowding, failure to complete prescribed courses of medicine and antibiotics, abuse of alcohol, and lack of regular exercise. We might also note that the two most unhealthy populations of OECD nations, are Australian Aborigines and the people of the US. They are also the most vaccinated populations in the world, which is somewhat of an anomaly in light of the sickness industry's claims of protection provided by vaccinations.
Food for thought? It should also be pointed out that the collapse of NT Aboriginal education which occurred in the late 1970s has created widespread illiteracy. This, in turn, has prevented Aboriginal access to new information about diet toxicity. Hair-brained academics and scientists have published a plethora of health education documents and posters which cannot, surprise surprise, be read by people who cannot read. To overcome this handicap, posters have been produced in Aboriginal languages which, of course, also cannot be read by people who cannot read. One wonders when the world will finally realise that most academics and scientists are very far from being intelligent. Some are quite remarkably stupid.
It would be a fair comment that the early death rate for Aborigines is generated by government incompetence or, as some quite hard-nosed observers are increasingly now saying, deliberate genocide. Certainly, focus on purely tokenistic ameliorations of Aboriginal issues such as Reconciliation, Close the Gap, and Recognise, are funded by mining interests who clearly desire a conveniently depopulated NT. Riotinto and BHP feature prominently here.
Returning to a more pragmatic and generic overview of the Royal Commission context, any person who adopted a similar unhealthy lifestyle could expect to die earlier. If such a person chooses to brawl, steal, bash and rape, there is a considerable chance they will also die in prison.
It was the dishonest presentation of these circumstances, minus the all-important per capita factor, that provided fuel for initial accusations of victimisation; that, plus the deliberately selective use of the term ‘in custody’ instead of ‘in prison’.
The western cultural implication of “he died in prison” is invariably one of recidivism. Indeed, one might quite reasonably expect an old lag to die in prison. However, the use of “he died in custody’ has immediately sinister overtones. “He died in Police custody”, given historic abuse in South Africa and in other ethnically repressive countries, is an unspoken accusation of police brutality and murder.
In the minds of the public, the very expression of Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody prompted an immediate presumption of police and prison officer guilt. In the already media-primed minds of most, the mere fact that it was a Royal Commission conveyed the impression that guilt was already established and the inquiry was merely the formal and wholly independent instrument of investigation to find out ‘whodunit’, and how often.
Ultimately, that the Inquiry failed to find the required evidence, for the simple reason that none was to be found, was a bitter disappointment to the instigators but, as events transpired, this mattered little. The media version was always what really counted. After all, as the spinners know so well, the public perception is always the ultimate political reality.
It has recently become topical, ever since concerned Aborigines began to demand the legally protected freedom from alcohol chosen by Northern Territory communities more than three decades ago; to consider the true role of alcohol in Aboriginal crime, and in typically insular focus, at least initially inasmuch as this contributes to domestic and Aboriginal community violence. As yet, little serious research has been devoted to the role of alcohol in Aboriginal crime per se, or from a national perspective, the relationship between welfare, alcohol and crime for all Australians! There is undoubtedly a relationship and it is a growing one. Alcohol is Australia's great but hidden killer.
It has long been known, at least on government files, that Aboriginal offences invariably involve alcohol, and it has to be accepted, however reluctantly, that these factors are the consequence of an entirely voluntary chain of actions and behaviour.
Offenders are forced, neither to drink nor to commit these offences. They do so out of choice and their lifestyle is entirely one of choice.
It is true that for traditional people it is difficult to avoid demands that they drink with reciprocating and ‘obedience’ relationships but these demands are usually presented (by pseudo-anthropological opinion) as impossible to resist, which is most certainly not true.
Many very traditional Aborigines continue to be teetotalers and continue to justify the love and respect of their relations and other people in their community.
Those naïve aspirants to social science sophistry who adopt the position that the lawbreakers are merely victims of the clash between tribal cultures and western law are ignoring and demeaning the majority of traditional Aborigines who choose not to behave this way.
On the contrary; in point of easily provable fact, the more traditional / tribal that Aborigines are, the less likely they will be to breach western law or, even more obviously, their own tribal rules of behaviour.
Those Aborigines that live closer to traditional ways in their homelands (outstations) are rarely represented in prisons at all (the exception being young people who deliberately offend, as with Anandilyagwa-speakers who for forty or so years have seen a prison term as being a rite of passage to manhood, and who have often made up some 80% of Aboriginal prisoners in their region).
Significantly, Aborigines who seek education and jobs are also rarely in conflict with western or tribal law.
The time is well overdue for the world to recognise that, those Aborigines who pursue a hedonistic and self-indulgent existence, abusing alcohol and other drugs, are that same group that is most represented in prisons. Not surprisingly, if we apply these same criteria to European Australians, we discover that a similar pattern of behaviour produces similar consequences in western culture. What this reveals is that we need to be talking about the behaviour of people, not Aborigines alone.
As one highly respected Aboriginal elder, the late Bill Ngulpurray Waramirri, noted wistfully some decades ago to unionist Brian Manning, “If we all concentrated on what we have in common, rather than how we are different, we would all be happier”.
As noted above, Aborigines tend to have shorter lives than other Australians. Once again, it is never mentioned in the international, or even the Australian media for that matter, that this is in spite of Aborigines enjoying better access to health services and receiving higher levels of welfare assistance, and developmental and home financial assistance than is paid to other Australians.
It is galling to ordinary Australians that they are then blamed by implication for poor Aboriginal health and shorter life spans.
The question that is never asked is, is the mooted quality of health care per se justified? I would say NO! But then I am wholly unqualified to judge. But as a jaundiced health product consumer My own observation is that most western medicine could better be described as the Sickness Industry, one that is dominated by pharmaceutical corporations and willingly gullible doctors.
We are here drifting into two distinct but over-lapping categories: people who choose unhealthy lifestyles and those who are simply unaware that their diet and lifestyle is tantamount to slow-motion-suicide. Given the now-sedentary and self-abusive lifestyles of many in the NT, a short life span is hardly surprising:
(What the Australian public is not being told is how many careers and government departments depend for their existence upon a continuing breakdown in Aboriginal health. In another article perhaps...).
To those people who feel compelled to deny Aborigines any responsibility for their own behaviour, they should at least become aware that in almost every traditional Aboriginal community there is the option of healthy homeland (clan outstation) lifestyles, and there are powerful exhortations by family members to live in these places.
Unfortunately, Government has abandoned Homelands and increasingly attempts to draft people into the ghettos that are mainstream communities, or into cities.
This is unfortunate because in the North there is much enterprise and employment potential on Homelands.
Depending upon actual location, northern Aboriginal communities have industry potential in buffalo, market gardening, fishing, wildlife and conservation management, mining, timber production; air, sea and road transport, home and road construction and maintenance, stores and retail, and local government, not to mention tourism and artifact and art production and marketing.
Meanwhile, The rise in Aboriginal crime has paralleled urban drift. If Aborigines move to larger towns in Australia, they should automatically be required to take on social responsibilities that go with urban living, like anyone else. This includes western-style parenting, considering the absence of extended family in cities.
However, for the majority, the unwanted weight of family responsibility is the reason why most left the home communities in the first place. They want, instead, as most will readily admit, the freedom to get drunk whenever they like. The price of this ‘freedom’ is progressively damaged health, reduced personal security, wasted financial resources, and the likelihood of finding themselves at odds with the law, Australian law and so-called traditional law, if this latter still applies.
Reported conflict with tribal law is exaggerated by a sensationalising media, and by a few opportunistic magistrates who like to ride the very profitable community courts circuit. Seeing that this is not covered elsewhere in this book, perhaps there should be some brief mention here about the silliness of ‘thigh spearing’, supervision by tribal elders, and other so-called tribal punishments, which are oversighted by childishly naïve magistrates, and which are damaging distortions of what were once traditional conflict resolution protocols.
Government and the media should be more responsible and check the bona fides of people making claims about tribal this and tribal that, especially if the people quoted have only a few years association with their subject or are otherwise circumstantially unqualified to comment.
Thigh-spearing (the highly misunderstood Makarrata) was part of a conflict resolution ceremony which provided hot tempers with time to cool; enabled offended parties to save face; and which imposed a termination point on all aspects of the dispute, once blood had been spilled. A more detailed description is provided elsewhere in this series. However, there can be no comparison with torture, as shrill human rights activists insist.
The thigh-spearing approved by magistrates is a barbaric and pointless parody of the original act. Similarly, the tiresome repetition of the term ‘elder’ conveys no Aboriginal reality other than ‘older’. Being older does not guarantee special knowledge or qualifications in either Aboriginal or European societies, with the notion of bloody old fool having currency in all human communities, only more good-naturedly and fondly applied in Aboriginal settings.
With specific communication skills and appropriate relationships it is sometimes possible to identify that special maternal uncle who can certainly make a miscreant conform to acceptable behaviour, if he wants to and if the miscreant is not of a mind to tell the uncle to bugger off, once the silly magistrate is out of sight. Unfortunately, Aboriginal family authority is suffering from the same crisis of recognition as are all other families on this planet; thanks to UN treaties attacking parenting.
On other occasions, purported supervisory elders are simply no such thing; more often than not, the obedience factor operates in reverse, which is how the “elder” was coerced into accepting the role for the whitefella magistrate in the first place, much to the amusement or bemusement of the community once the court has lumbered on to its unworldly chambers in the city.
The bottom line is that none of this has any connection to causative factors in Aboriginal crime or to behaviour modification later on.
In summation, if we consider that:
The truly surprising thing is that this so rarely occurs and it was clearly to the credit of police and prison officers that, at the time of the Royal Commission, fewer Aborigines died in custody than did Europeans.
One might ask, why then did the Commission not give police and prison officers credit where this was so obviously due?
In all justice, given the circumstances of baseless accusations, surely some kind of apology or reparation was called for, if for no other reason than to restore their standing in the community. Churlishness perhaps… or some less prosaic motive?
It should reasonably be presumed that the relevant investigative authorities must have been aware of all of these factors. Answers to many of the questions raised were already available in hundreds of government files and reports and known to thousands of reliable personnel. So, why a royal commission?
Perhaps readers should first ask themselves, have the measures instituted by these authorities to ameliorate Aboriginal problems worked in the past?
The simple and observable answer is no.
On the contrary, since 1980:
Quite obviously the authorities have access to relevant statistics and information, but they do not understand the problems, much less have any insight into the answers.
Many Australians may have difficulty accepting this but; Government has blacklisted those individual ex-employees who do understand, and who are capable of identifying strategies which would reverse the Aboriginal downward spiral. These people were forced out of government service during the 1980s and replaced with the compliant and the malleable; the sycophants and the politically correct.
Police and prison officers
As we have previously noted, it is a matter of public record that Aboriginal deaths do occur in police cells and in prisons, although not in the significant numbers claimed by Aboriginal activists and their irresponsible groupies.
There have been two kinds of deaths in custody that became the initial targets of concern. These will be covered here because they continue to create problems for police, who will continue to be exposed to unjustified harassment over their handling of Aboriginal prisoners.
Firstly, it was alleged that police beat Aborigines so severely while arresting them that they later died of their injuries. Other claims were that police beat prisoners in their holding cells. There can be absolutely no doubt that both abuses occurred sporadically, as they do with non-Aborigines.
What, in all commonsense, must be recognised is that Police and prison officers who are brutal tend to be brutal to everybody. These are violent people and they reflexively provide violent solutions to confrontations, especially when frustrated by unrealistic and racially selective regulations. These individuals identify themselves for all to see during crowd control situations and the recent peace protests, and the anti-Lebanese gang riots, recorded on TV showed baton-wielding police officers using very little restraint on anyone.
In recognition of this there has been ongoing monitoring of police behaviour since the 1960s when police violence first became a widespread public concern. Similar measures were taken in respect of prison personnel.
The harsh hand of reality intervenes here preventing 100% solutions. Police are employed to deal with extremely violent criminals and, it must be said, many of these criminals are Aboriginal, or to be more accurate and fair to traditional people, are invariably part Aboriginal and of western culture and language.
Only the most social fringe dwelling of academics and armchair critics would seriously suggest sending in social workers and counselors to apprehend drunken and violent criminals. On a police officer’s pay it is the successfully aggressive officers who are going to perform competently in this kind of work and this is an unavoidable fact of life. Police discipline is designed to keep excesses in check. The situation in prisons is the same but, normally, without the provocative element of alcohol in the metabolisms of prisoners.
On street violence something needs to be said and to be understood by critics of the police. A successful street fighter enjoys what he is doing, and to be good at this he needs regular real-life practice. The person who does not enjoy this exercise is the one who is injured or who dies. The regular restraining of violent criminals requires street fighting ability and reflexes, and officers who do not have the necessary instincts are the casualties.
Official references to restraint technique development are pure sophistry and public relations, as is the quaint belief that if one studies martial arts one will learn to defend oneself. Those who are successful are successful because of their fluid and reflexive response and their willed capacity to strike a pre-emptive crippling blow.
Police officers who work in high risk areas, and who wish to survive, employ defence and subduing techniques that involve the least risk of injury to themselves and, if they have any commonsense at all, once attacked, they will ensure that the criminal cannot repeat the attack; that is, he is incapacitated.
The decision to attack police was always the free decision on the part of the violent criminal and few criminals are not aware of the retaliation they invite. If someone is to be hurt it is better if it is the criminal rather than the police officer, who is after all doing what we employ him to do, and who more than likely has a family that does not want him injured or killed. The wider community generally endorses this outlook.
All of this applies equally to constraining and disarming of psychotic offenders. If undiagnosed sociopathic psychiatrists and psychologists did not release these people onto the streets in the first place, the police would not need to deal with them. But once they threaten the community, their mental ill health status is irrelevant.
It is accepted that certain professional personal defence experts (especially trainers) will dispute what has been said here, but these always neglect to mention that their degree of skill is dependent upon some five hours of combat training and exercise per day; and that they have a remunerative axe to grind. The taxpayer does not wish to pay every police officer for this time (20-25 hrs per week) and, addressing the alternative, it would be incredibly unreasonable to demand that this time be invested at the expense of his or her family and life.
These media-worshipped critics of the police, who for some strange reason always seem to be men who talk like women, would be well advised to do two things: confront the real world; and, understand that they are setting themselves above an increasingly irate majority of Australians.
Nevertheless, ruthlessly exploiting this, Aboriginal criminals cry police brutality and victimisation at every opportunity. What are needed are senior officers who will take disciplinary roles seriously and who will also stand by their officers when they become the unfair targets of ruthless and unscrupulous lobbies and the media. This is where it all breaks down. As so many front line officers will attest, “We are not backed up by our senior officers and hierarchy”.
As a result, police officers close ranks, with the good and with the bad. Unquestioning loyalty to fellow officers becomes the one sure means of survival. Ignore this ethic and be labeled an outcast 'dog'.
The current practice of appointing a politically correct hierarchy (including implementation of affirmative action policies) is not only the cause of the problem, it ensures that there can be no resolution.
An additional factor in the violence equation, which prompted the Inquiry, is the Aboriginal propensity for being arrested during drunken brawls. Very often it would be difficult, if not impossible, to conclude if injuries were received before, during or after arrest.
And, considering the usual nature of injuries sustained by Aboriginal protagonists during fights, and comparing them to the kind that might be inflicted by police, the chances will favour a conclusion of death through injuries received during the initiating brawl.
Predictably, relatives of the deceased did, and will continue to, blame the police, regardless of circumstances and evidence to the contrary. It has become fairly typical Aboriginal behaviour to embrace a popularly identified cause of death, and then to physically enact revenge. This is all a flow-on from the traditional payback mechanisms that all societies impose in one form or another, either in institutional form or enacted at a more personal and immediate level.
Incredulous readers, those who are still held captive to the nineteenth century belief in the noble savage, should become aware of the following: This is a sufficiently common enough phenomenon for NT Police to advise drivers that, if one of a group of drunken Aborigines stumbles onto the road in front of their car and is consequently run over, they should keep driving. Most certainly, phone for an ambulance and police, but “keep driving; do not stop and attempt to render assistance”.
In 2002, failure to heed this advice led to a European grandmother in Mount Isa, Queensland, being badly beaten by a mob, and hospitalised for a lengthy period. Although she was in no way to blame for the death of an Aboriginal man who leapt in front of her car during a fight, she was fortunate not to have been killed. A series of similar incidents occurred in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and Katherine, and minor equivalents are routine events in almost all rural towns.
It is accepted that this is all part of a not unnatural initial grieving process when a loved one dies, but it is one that has been stripped of the moderating protocols, rituals and conventions that adhere to such situations in the sober and constrained tribal situation, which is volatile enough under the best of circumstances
Taking a wider view, this is also typical enough of grieving in non-Aboriginal families whenever it is possible to apportion blame over the death of a relative. This is, in other words, an essentially human response, taken to extremes.
In spite of pre-arrest injuries sustained by Aborigines, there were more European deaths in custody than there were Aboriginal. Where the statistics did vary dramatically was with a new set of circumstances, suicide.
During the 1980s a series of copy-cat Aboriginal suicides occurred, usually involving depressed youth. Somehow this came to be regarded as the Police’s and the prison authority’s fault. This rather preposterous assertion ignored the offender’s responsibility in the initial substance abuse, the committing of the offence or offences that resulted in the Aboriginal person’s arrest in the first place, and then his later responsibility over the taking of his own life.
This blame syndrome puts the police in a no-win situation. If they let a prisoner have blankets / sheets and clothing, he might tear these into strips and hang himself. If they remove these they will be accused of racist victimisation and the denial of basic human rights.
The demand by activists that there be 24 hour visual observation of prisoners would incur costs that, ironically, these people rarely contribute to in taxes. As an ethnic group, they are also unwilling to undertake this role on a voluntary basis. Their credibility is suspect to say the least.
In initiating the Inquiry, the long and the short of it was that, if the suicides were taken out of the equation, Aboriginal deaths in custody was an issue requiring routine investigation into the actions of and procedures adopted by the actual officers concerned.
In each genuinely suspected instance, and there were two or three, this would have been supported by appropriate evidence and there would have been a murder investigation. This is the normal procedure. As the Commission later mumbled into its collective gown, this was not warranted by the circumstances.
There is a universal concern here and it is that investigations into police behaviour are always conducted by police.
The majority of Australians consider that such investigations should be carried out by a completely independent body, with wide-ranging powers, and in circumstances of total transparency. Very significantly, it is government that resists this. Obviously, resolution can only be found in compliance with democratic process, by responsible government; not by initiating a Royal Commission of Inquiry which only succeeded in blurring and obfuscating the issues.
Career injustice
Finally, regarding the matter of police and prison officers being unjustly accused of racism, brutality and murder, it would be reasonable to conclude that these accusations would have affected their standing in the community, the social standing of their families, the attitudes of their children to their parents, and the personal confidence and dignity of each individual officer.
At the very least, there should have been a public apology to these people, one that was heard in every home in Australia, and through overseas media outlets. These were people who had been libeled, not accidentally through pursuit of the public interest, but deliberately and maliciously, and for personal gain.
Surely, in compliance with the most elementary concept of common justice, this apology should have been made; and, where appropriate, compensation provided. That these standard responses of a civilised society did not take place clearly demonstrates that real justice has never been on the agenda. One of the intentions of this article is to ensure that the names of these officers and their respective services are cleared.
Systemic failure of the judiciary
So why then, the Royal Commission?
Transparently, there was malice borne of ignorance, and absence of normal human values on the part of some witnesses and participants of the Inquiry; and career opportunism and shameless mercenary motivation for others who stood to benefit, yet at the highest levels, the Commission was permitted to proceed.
There appears to be only two motivating factors:
(1) The first is that there was political and lobbyist interference in the initial politico-judicial process, clearly attributable to intimidation caused by enforced political correctness. Those who could have spoken out, particularly well-informed public servants, dared not.
In response to representations made by the radical urban Aboriginal lobby to several international ‘rights’ organisations (dominated by dubious "rights funder" Geroge Soros), and the resultant ill-conceived and misinformed allegations being uncritically accepted and then magnified by partisan elements of the United Nations bureaucracy, Australia’s political leadership wanted to be seen as doing something.
For its part, the United Nations understood very well that a royal commission would be interpreted by the world as Australia’s tacit admission of guilt. To justify the introduction of ‘governance’ the UN has long attempted to show Australia in a bad light.
It reflects little credit on the entities involved that the ‘rights’ organisations accepted the unsubstantiated and often falsified evidence of oppression and racism provided by Aboriginal lobbyists.
There can be little doubt that these people were aware that they misrepresented the situation; or put more bluntly, they lied, and in so doing seriously damaged Australia’s international reputation and the reputations and integrity of officers and services.
There should be no misinterpreting what happened here. The UN bureaucracy was the prime driver of the campaign for a Royal Commission, and Australian politicians and judiciary were consciously aware of this.
(2) Personal prestige, judicial power and consequential conflict with democratic process
Although judges and magistrates are fond of defending their notorious insularity from the wider community; as a combined manifestation of that farce... preserving the Independence of the Judiciary... coupled with selective media reporting; evidently some judges have additional motives and many are evidently not at all averse to political back-scratching. Was the appointment to head the Royal Commission one such instance?
In an atmosphere of genuine integrity, if there was a reason to hold an inquiry into deaths in custody, it should have been the outcome of a preliminary study into the circumstances and cause of death of any prisoner in custody: in police cells or in prisons.
The decision to study only Aboriginal deaths in custody, which were already known to be statistically less significant than non-Aboriginal deaths, and reportedly, a feature noted by ALP Senator Bob Collins from the outset, leaves one with only one conclusion to draw: that it was politically motivated and a cynical exercise in southern state urban Aboriginal Lobby-generated racial divisiveness. This followed a now-familiar pattern.
A worrying aspect of this is that the integrity of the inquiry system is now in tatters. Given the farcical nature of this and a series of other unsatisfactory public enquiries, the Australian community can now have limited confidence in prison, police or any other inquiry systems. This sentiment will prevail until the extent of such political intervention has been identified and excised, and mechanisms installed which will prevent future corruption of legal processes.
All of this should have been quickly apparent to a veteran judicial mind.
The obviously spurious nature of the inquiry should have resulted in a refusal by all persons of integrity to even entertain the notion of accepting a nomination as Commissioner.
At least that is what the average Australian would have every right to expect.
The unfortunate reality is there has never been a shortage of people on the Bench who would leap at the opportunity to command the personal power and prestige, and not to mention historical immortality, of a Royal Commission.
The courts of Australia have always provided a stage for those of a class who were ‘born to rule’, a means by which they could satisfy their need for wealth, power and privilege. This has culminated in a judiciary which fails to perform the functions expected of it by the Australian community (a sentiment revealed by countless surveys).
This has been amply demonstrated with the recent epidemic of plundering of trust funds by solicitors, and some years earlier with Sir Garfield Barwick’s little venture into reinterpreting tax evasion legislation, both phenomena barely rating a murmur of dissent from the Law Society.
It appears to matter little to the legal profession if their members are lacking in personal and professional integrity, that they are without a sense of social perspective or responsibility, or in the case of judicial members, even a sense of justice.
If the Law Society has ever felt concern over these issues, no record of this has been evident other than a single knee jerk ‘not guilty’ plea when, in December 2002, the Queensland’s Attorney General launched a scathing broadside, critical of the Society’s wish-washy excuses for professional auto-regulation.
Public disapproval is almost universal. Not only does the legal system engage in activities that it shouldn’t in a democracy (judicial activism), it completely fails in its essential roles.
According to a sample survey that accompanied the preparation of this book, more than 96 % of Australia’s population believes that judges and magistrates are far too lenient with sentencing of violent criminals; a figure repeated in a national TV survey (Channel 7). Follow-up interviews revealed that the judicial preoccupation with rehabilitation of criminals represents incapacity to address reality, and an application of values and priorities that are seriously antagonistic to those of the wider community.
It has been well-recorded in prioritised detail exactly what the community believes:
In the case of violent rapists, child molesters, serial killers, violent robbers, psychotic offenders, and participants of serious assaults by gangs, the evidence does not support compromising public safety with rehabilitation. In most instances, the community wants permanent incarceration or the death penalty for serious violent offenders. (Ironically, politicians most fear the death penalty).
That the legal profession does not see this situation as flouting the essence of democratic process, or even that democratic process is an issue at all, speaks for itself.
The claims that all other expert opinion is at odds with public sentiment is a deliberate misrepresentation. Many highly experienced police, prison, court and other government officers were in full agreement with the public. They are now silent or sacked or retired.
Thus it may be clearly perceived that the dedication of the judiciary to the subversion of democratic process provided a climate in which a frivolous or mischievous inquiry could be successfully launched.
All things taken into consideration, the basic legal system itself should be workable. If it isn’t, perhaps the task of fine-tuning it should be the role of future generations. In the meantime, there is a more obvious place to look for imperfections. It is no coincidence that the people who run our legal systems today have few admirers in any community in the world: Of course, we are talking about lawyers.
Why do we look beyond the obvious?
Justice and Law are seen purely as conduits through which wealth can be poured into the pockets of lawyers, whether these are barristers, solicitors, magistrates or judges. It is probably an otherwise sound legal system by concept, but one which is mercilessly exploited by people who are bereft of personal or social conscience and there must be few Australians today who believe otherwise. Those who do will not be reassured by the afore-mentioned Channel Seven survey that found that only 12 % of respondents trust the courts. This exactly confirms the results of all other independent surveys and polls.
The rounds of ‘lawyer’ jokes which may be heard in every country of the world indicate the level to which this so-called profession is held in contempt. It should not be difficult to guess why a judicial system doesn’t work for the people, when it is operated by lawyers whose behaviour is seen as non-criminal only by virtue of legal drafts of defining legislation, effectively oversighted and approved by the law society.
The small percentage of lawyers who do maintain integrity are ineffective against the majority. Their reformist efforts are rendered counter-productive, being used as they are for their public relations value by the unethical majority, in much the same way that doctors use nurses and residents (interns) to provide their ‘profession’ with an aura of heroic altruism.
Although it is beyond the parameters of our examination of Aboriginal deaths in custody, to even begin to identify all the malfunctioning components of the legal system, it is clear to critics that a complete review of its functions is overdue.
In the meantime, for the purposes of this address, we must look at the leadership of the judicial system itself. This is appropriate because the very existence of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was enabled by the system’s NT judicial leadership.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was but one of a series of court scenarios whereby the rights of the vast majority of Australians were alienated and overridden. The current activities by the high court, making judgements that set aside parliament and the people, so-called ‘judicial activism’, are but tips of very dangerous icebergs which threaten the lingering buoyancy of our almost scuttled democracy.
But this is a complex national situation that cannot be addressed here, linked is at it to the ambitious hegemony of the International Criminal Court. For now, it will be sufficiently enlightening to take an immediate look, not at the globalist legal hierarchy, but at the calibre of Commission leadership itself. As every surviving swordsman learned, watch not the sword, but the eye of its wielder.
This exercise may orientate the initiators of a future inquiry because if we are continually critical of actual decisions, and this appears to be the case in the minds of the majority of Australians, it is as likely that the people who operate the legal system are as much a problem as the system itself. From whatever aspect we currently view it, it would appear that these leaders are wholly the problem.
Accordingly, there can be no better window into the absence of integrity in the Commission of Enquiry system or in the Courts themselves, than a series of cameo case histories of the illustrious judge who launched the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
This also provides an insight into the courts that is not ordinarily available to the man on the street. Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions.
Case One
Some years prior to the Royal Commission, a seventeen-year-old American youth on holiday in Darwin, NT, met members of a bike gang at a local pub and accepted their invitation to a bush party. He did not suspect that he was scheduled as the entertainment.
At Darwin’s East Point Reserve, among other abuses, he was beaten with chains and raped. While gang members made drunken and drug-ridden preparations to toss him over a cliff into the rock-strewn sea, he escaped into nearby bush.
When the case went to trial, the feelings of Territorians were that the gang members had engaged in premeditated torture and rape and fully intended to kill the boy, and that court sentences should reflect the seriousness of the crime and the perceptions and values of what was then an intensely cohesive community.
The consensus appeared to be that, failing reintroduction of the death penalty, this should be life imprisonment, or at least something like twenty to thirty years.
In actual sentencing, Justice James Muirhead handed down non-parole periods variously of three and a half, and four and a half years.
The Northern Territory community was outraged. This was their first experience of judicial new-age activism and arrogance.
Case two
A few years later, in 1976, a Commonwealth community welfare worker, myself as it happens, had occasion to interview a young lady who was demanding financial assistance because, she said, she was pregnant (but not visibly).
In the course of the interview it was assessed that she was not eligible for financial assistance and that her early stage of pregnancy was not an issue. As she did not accept this decision, I referred her to the Director of Welfare to facilitate an immediate appeal.
In those days, interim non-statutory financial assistance was provided strictly on the basis of demonstrated need only. As the young lady was actually on holiday visiting her family in Darwin, the Director of Welfare confirmed the refusal of assistance, the interpretation being that the taxpayer was being asked to subsidise her holiday. She was unable to demonstrate any particular need, staying as she was with her relatively wealthy mother and father.
Upon rejection, the young lady threatened that she would report the matter to her father who, she claimed, was a Supreme Court Judge. It was explained that criteria were regulated by the Commonwealth Government Treasury and that flexibility beyond a certain point simply did not exist. Sorry.
A day or so later I was summoned to the Judge’s Chambers and told in no uncertain terms that, in the Judge’s opinion, his daughter was eligible for assistance, and that it should be paid forthwith.
Incredulous, but also quite intimidated, I politely but firmly refused.
The following day I was informed by the Director of Welfare that he too had been summoned to the Judge’s Chambers. The Director, John 'Black Jack' MacDonald, remarked that he anticipated pressure but that the decision would not be changed. For the Director and I, with whom I was generally in conflict over client advocacy issues, this was a moment of rare accord.
Two hours later an obviously humiliated Director of Welfare advised me to make the requested payments to the Judge’s daughter. Quite evidently, the judge had knowledge (evidence to land rights/ uranium mining Fox inquiries?) which gave him leverage over the Director of Welfare. In the normal course of events, such a situation should be impossible.
Case three
At around the same time, a number of Aboriginal children, the youngest of whom was seven years of age, were sent to a remote island off the northern coast of Australia, Bremer Island, as ‘treatment’ for petrol sniffing.
There were no facilities other than a tarpaulin.
Some of these children were from Yuendumu; a Warlbiri community 2000 Ks away and far out in the desert, north-west of Alice Springs. Others were from communities in the Northern Territory’s Top End.
The reason that these children were sent to this isla, Jeff Sargent, that it would cure them of petrol sniffing.
Before proceeding, a few things need to be said about petrol sniffing at that time.
· The first is that it was not illegal
· The second was that the Aborigines themselves did not see it as a serious problem
· The third was that settlement and mission Europeans did see it as a serious problem because kids stole petrol from European’s cars, and neglected to reinstall the fuel lines resulting in a considerable loss of fuel. Once stoned, they also tended to vandalise school property, something that afforded immense, although diplomatically covert, amusement for Aboriginal adults. Amusement was especially the prerogative of every boy’s primary uncle and every girl’s primary auntie and granny, these being the people whose roles (and material security in old age) had been unintentionally usurped by the white teachers and the education system.
So, it may be seen that, to some extent, petrol sniffing was seen as a sort of urban resistance to white control, by (in those days) reticent and extremely polite traditional Aborigines.
It was also only Europeans who perceived petrol sniffing to be seriously injurious to health. This was largely because of the tetra-ethyl lead accumulation aspect of petrol inhalation in long-term habitual sniffers. In real terms there were relatively few of these hard-core cases, perhaps twenty to thirty Territory-wide.
What should be footnotes to the entire Aboriginal petrol-sniffing, and perennially media-regenerated sagas, are that:
One of Aboriginal Australia’s most competent and intelligent Legislative Assembly Members, the late Wesley Lanhupuy, was himself as a child a former petrol sniffer, and
Legitimate cessations of petrol sniffing had been achieved; which throws the Bremer Island saga into illuminatory relief. As this episode demonstrates that real solutions are available, and also just how negative is the influence of the judiciary, it is worth providing the narrative in detail.
The Aboriginal community of Bamyili, now Burunga, once a virtual nightly riot of petrol sniffing and associated juvenile and adult crime, was converted into a crime-free model community through the supportive intervention of an annual high-discipline Aboriginal ceremony.
There was also the directive to apply the teaching of respective clan languages and culture; and for grandparents to participate in school education. The somewhat unconventional measures introduced were specifically sanctioned by the Children’s Courts (respectively magistrates McGregor & Thomas). The local police officer, Dave Walter, although initially and understandably skeptical and antagonistic towards the proposal, was impressed by the results and wholeheartedly supported the internally directed intra-family programme.
Significantly, this reinforcement of family power and people power has gone unrecorded and unrecognised other than on obscure NT Police, Court and Child Welfare files. Unnecessarily, petrol sniffing continues to be a problem in many communities, and millions are spent on fuel modification (opal), sports projects and counselling which do not address the causative issues.
European power control appears to be the central factor (colonialism, to give it its old-fashioned name). Well-intentioned or otherwise, medical (particularly doctors who suffer from what I regard as Albert Schweitzer syndrome), academic, public service and judicial interference, are all problematic. The Bremer Island saga provides a unique insight into this perennial game of blind leading the blind:
Petrol-sniffing boys were sent to otherwise uninhabited Bremer Island, under an unofficial arrangement between a District Welfare Officer, and the Aboriginal family ‘purported owners’ of a lesser part of Bremer Island, represented by the Rrirritjingu language group president of the local mainland Community Council at Yirrkala, Roy Marika.
For the desert boys it was a terrifying experience, the coastal boys had told them that the giant mud crabs would come ashore at night and tear them to pieces alive, and then eat them.
All boys missed their families intensely, dysfunctional as many of these were, at least by Aboriginal standards.
In a paper tabled in the Australian Crime Prevention Council, Darwin, it was pointed out by the Department’s formal representative and welfare officer (who, as it happened, was me) that the Devils Island concept of treatment was unsustainable by any measure, Aboriginal, or European; and was illegal and potentially litigational.
Boys of different languages and backgrounds were flung together and the welfare officer in charge (an ex-Catholic brother), had no relevant linguistic skills and little local cultural knowledge. There was no constructive programme and it was impossible to identify any merit in the scheme at all.
Furthermore, the entire exercise amounted to abduction and was not the result of any genuine consultation with the parents, with whom real resolution resided.
In fact, inquiries revealed that the whole idea was part of a strategy devised by Roy Marika as a contesting ‘landowner’ of Bremer Island, and was directed at ‘stealing the march’ on the absent Dhamarrandji clan ‘owners’, in the issue of disputed territoriality.
Eventually it was firmly confirmed that this was an exercise in Aboriginal geographical hegemony and was part of the ruthless competition for resources between the thirteen-odd language groups which were represented on the Yirrkala Mission, conflict that was generated by iniquitous royalties arrangements set up by the courts for the then Swiss-owned Nabalco Gove bauxite mining company Comalco (and then ALCAN of Canada, and later Rio Tinto).
In more specialised quarters there was additional concern because ongoing cumulative and conjunctional studies demonstrated that Aboriginal family stresses caused by European-generated ‘power imbalances’ between clans were the primary cause of the identified family dysfunctionalism which led to petrol sniffing in the first place. The Bremer Island scheme actually enhanced and accelerated family alienation, rather than ameliorate it.
In less pedantic language, (and this would come as no surprise to any normal parent) the Devils Island project defeated its own purpose by exacerbating interference in family relationships.
As many mature traditional Aboriginal interviewees pointed out so succinctly, petrol sniffers were children who felt that “their families did not care about them”. Packing them off to a terrifying barren island in the care of complete strangers would hardly convince them otherwise.
The Bremer Island affair blew out of local control when the international press got hold of my submission to the Crime Prevention Council and the whole world knew about Australia’s Devil’s Island for Aboriginal children. This was both unfortunate and unfair on Australia because it set the pace for later international libels. This would have repercussions for decades to come.
Nevertheless, Justice Jim Muirhead, in his capacity as President of the NT Crime Prevention Council, declared that in his judgement, “Bremer Island was a worthwhile experiment”.
That a Judge should consider that he had relevant knowledge or expertise to judge such a matter is cause for serious concern. That he believed experimenting with children’s cultural, psychological and emotional security to be “worthwhile” should have had alarm bells ringing in more balanced and responsible circles. Nuremberg trials had a lot to say about such attitudes.
That his judgement continues to remain unchallenged says much about the power of judicial authority, legitimate or otherwise. We have already seen how that power was abused.
Case four
In another instance, the same judge was presiding over a Supreme Court trial whereupon a naval rating successfully avoided just and serious penalties after he had deliberately ploughed a car through a large group of Aborigines grouped outside the Berrimah Hotel, outside of Darwin. His motive was the mistaken belief that they were the group who had unceremoniously ejected him from the pub for sexually harassing the wife of one of their number.
It was known that he had then returned to the Navy Base and attempted to borrow a rifle from a colleague. When this was refused, he stole a car. That he had multiple-murder on his mind was never in doubt. That he was a trained fighting man, is icily relevant.
At least two people were permanently maimed in the incident, and others sustained a variety of less serious injuries. (The author interviewed two of the victims).
In what was plainly attempted and premeditated murder, the navy man avoided any penalty, other than losing his navy job, by virtue of the Police Prosecutor being a Navy Reservist, who constructed and presented such a weak prosecution case that, in the minds of all observers the rating got off virtually without penalty.
Aboriginal legal aid officers were angry but lacked the knowledge to react and later felt powerless to pursue the matter further.
There was no reported inquiry about police competence or conflict of interest. In fairness, it was reported in the NT News that Justice Muirhead did comment that he believed that this represented a “grave miscarriage of justice”, but certainly, as far as the public was aware, nothing further was done and no boats were rocked. As a matter of justice there should have been a retrial. Much could have been achieved had the issue been referred to the electorates and their representatives, entirely appropriate in a democracy.
Instead, silence reigned... as usual.
In all of the above instances this was the same judge who presided over the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The issues of integrity and commitment, and capacity for sound judgement both personal and professional, are left for the reader to decide.
Eccentricity, arrogance, ignorance, delusional elitism, and outright corruption are not only endemic to the judicial system, thanks to political appointments.
During the past four decades, the High Court has consistently made judgements which are way beyond the competence of the judges to make (deliberate and literal misinterpretations of tax law, Aboriginal land and so-called sea rights, and the status of illegal migrants), and they have been equally consistent in their variance from the beliefs and values of the wider community.
Principles upon which decisions have been made are in conflict with centuries-old principles incorporated in common law; and with basic concepts of justice and truth.
For example, precipitated by the manipulations of the Law Reform Commission and the Land Councils, urban Aborigines have criticised Europeans for claiming to own land, and then claim to own land themselves (ie via the entirely alien notion of 'traditional owners').
Genuine traditional people point out that the land owns the people, not vice versa. Nevertheless, easily corrupted individuals claim ownership themselves and proceed to ban others from entering 'their land'. They claim that their ties are purely spiritual, and then claim royalties. Opportunists claim open sea rights, yet had no oceanic boats (other than those obtained or later copied from Torres Strait Islanders or Macassans from Indonesia. Far North Queensland Islanders used outriggers and they alone may have a basis for such argument, but using traditional hunting methods only).
The word of academics has been taken as gospel and as expert evidence, yet it has been later admitted that much of the ‘evidence’ was concocted and fabricated, but of course with ‘the purest of motives’ (ie Kenbi).
Other, less influential Aborigines, have been led to believe that they have secured their traditional lands when it appears they have access to a mere token 100 metres of wilderness intertidal beach front, with hunting grounds and water still owned by cattle stations (or manipulative land councils).
Ergo, Judges have willingly become the terminators of traditional Aboriginal consensus systems of decision-making, turning this role over to easily corruptible individuals who can be relied upon to profitably defer to mining companies and even, in the case of Muckety Station, the storage of toxic waste.
Judges decided that their personal wisdom entitled them to override the opinions and insights of an informed wider Australian community. Non-academic evidence and opinion has been dismissed as ‘anecdotal’; the social science word for unacceptable.
In a Democracy, the ultimate authority is the people. As Thomas Paine put it: "All authority resides in The People".
Thus, any authority exercised by the judiciary is enforced on behalf of the people. If the judgement of a member of the judiciary is at odds with the people, then he has exceeded and abused this authority.
High Court and Supreme Court decision-making over the past twenty years has been little more than a litany of abuses of authority, with the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody being only the most transparent example.
In the words of Thomas Paine, in The Rights of Man, (1790):
The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; nor can any individual, or any body of men, be entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it.
The law is an expression of the will of the community. All citizens have a right to concur, either personally or by their representatives, in its formation. It should be the same to all, whether it protects or punishes; and all being equal in its sight, are all equally eligible to all honours, places, and employments, according to their different abilities, without any other distinction than that created by their virtues and talents.
These definitions also reflect the beliefs of the vast majority of Australians, and are in clear agreement with the thrust of this book; and the judiciary is in equally clear opposition.
Manifestly, our judges believe that they are above the Law, and they believe either they are above legitimate authority or they are the source of this authority. Although they pay declining lip service to common law, in their interpretations they manipulate, distort or abandon as they see fit.
If any Australian ever doubted this, it was abundantly evident when the court attempted to override a government decision regarding the refusal of entry by illegal immigrants, into Australia in 2001. This was a deliberate attempt to breach Australian sovereignty in favour of an unelected and unaccountable United Nations, the template for global governance.
This betrayal disregarded an absolute majority of Australian citizens who were clearly opposed to the forced entry of illegal immigrants, and the people supported the timely (albeit politically opportunistic) government response to this issue. (However, the pro-sovereignty response would probably not have happened at all if it had not been for a then concurrent and closely fought Federal election).
The people of Australia are faced with a new need: to play a more active role in the management of our most vulnerable of governmental institutions, the legal system.
Finally, a sobering comment on the damage caused to Australia’s international reputation by the pursuit of such non-legitimate issues as Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
We Australians are now falsely known to most of the world as a people who repress and arbitrarily imprison our indigenous members; it is believed we deny them access to jobs, education, health and welfare services. What is more, it is said, our brutal police routinely torture and kill our indigenous people and we, the majority, stand by and approve (beliefs gleaned from interviews with 5000 young European travelers between 1988 and 1995).
Government has made no move to successfully counter this outrageous impression.
Those who continue to serve hostile foreign interests, which includes the action of lobbying United Nations and other undemocratic and unaccountable international agencies to place sanctions against Australia, must comprehend that they are willing collaborators in the destruction of our nation and they should understand that they may be regarded by history as traitors to Australia and enemies of all patriotic Australians.
As if an entirely spurious Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody were not a sufficient insult to long-suffering Australians, the total cost of this calculated betrayal has been an unbelievable twenty million dollars (other estimates being as high as $80 M).
In other chapters within this website can be found the genuine causes of Aboriginal genocide.
Qualifiers...
I should state from the outset that a significant part of my extended family is Aboriginal, to which I am deeply loyal. Moreover, most of my life has been immersed in Aboriginal culture in the Northern Territory's Top End.
My interest in judicial interventions is partly driven by concern for the heritage that may soon be lost to my Aboriginal grandchildren, and over the ravages inflicted on Territorians by foreign powers and by governments that clearly act at the behest of foreign interests, with ample complicity on the part of the Judiciary, the law Reform Commission, and the Law Society. All Territorians had the truth of this brought home forceably with the betrayal of the democratic majority by the NT Government over fraccing and the associated inquiry.
In broader terms, there can be no hope for a prosperous and independent Australia until political power returns to the people of Australia. This includes judicial power.
Fate or destiny placed me in the right place and right time to observe and, often, participate in the below-mentioned events.
Because of my work as a Commonwealth and NT Government welfare officer, I had access to files of the former Dept of Native Affairs, Dept of Aboriginal Affairs, Welfare Branch of the NT Administration (Commonwealth), and Community Welfare Division of DCD, NT Government... until 1983. On certain projects, I also had access to the files of other departments, which consideraably broadened my overview. Because I was long regarded as an advocate for Aboriginal rights, both cultural and civil, I was a first port of call when Aborigines claimed persecution or victimisation by the police, and during the 1970s I often acted as interpreter for Aboriginal Legal Aid officers in the field.... an unlikely role considering my precarious grasp of Yolngu languages at that time, but nevertheless reflecting the complete absence of competent interpreters during that era.
Finally, because critics will declare this paper to be presented in far to much detail, I reply in advance that the Northern Territory is a legal geographical locality in which two separate worlds co-exist: western and traditional Aboriginal... one to the detriment of the other. This conflict is entirely due to the failure of outside (or even most residents) observers to study the region in sufficient detail to appreciate that what works elsewhere need not necessarily work in the NT.
This especially applies to the Aboriginal/European interface,
Around that time, I became aware of an expanding industry of greed and dishonesty built on US-imported and ill-fitting rights concepts, to the point by which it was no longer possible to take anybody's word at face value. Exacerbating this, employing tabloid journalism and leading with unchallenged allegations, the media presented all events in ways that suited the foreign corporate agenda.
Ruthless bureaucrats and judges saw this journalistic chaos as an opportunity for self-advancement, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was initially viewed as a plumb appointment in this regard. As the evidence relentlessly exposed the lies of complainants; the complicity of opportunistic and ignorant bureaucrats; and the outrageous publicity given to fabricated statistics; the reigning Supreme Court judge, Justice Jim Muirhead, eventually bailed out of the Royal Commission, claiming ill-health.
Years later, in 1991, the Inquiry commissioners eventually reported that the charges were not supported by the facts... a conclusion never reported in the media. Yet the good names of police and prison officers were smeared for all time, and senior officers have, to a man, failed to stick up for their command. There are now serious issues of command disloyalty, injustice, and the spawning of a destructive new culture of 'rejection of consequences for ones own actions' on the part of urban Aboriginal youth. Not one indigenous person who I have interviewed is aware of the truth of the Commission's findings. Few of mainstream Australians are any better informed. Yet all Australian policies regarding Aboriginal justice are predicated on a lie. This ain't healthy.
This paper provides the context and detail for the Deaths in Custody saga, and can be used to explain why measures recommended by the Commissioners, and adopted by governments, have resulted in a more than 20% increase in incidence of Aboriginal youth crime (as calculated and reported by a NSW Aboriginal group). Until the truth behind the Royal Commission is told, resolution of Aboriginal crime cannot be resolved, because the real issues are not being addressed.
A final observation about evidence offered to the Commission by complainant families:
In Aboriginal culture family loyalty is everything, which makes it difficult to be objective about issues that effect family. Yet relying on subjective belief, rather than evidence, is the biggest obstacle to resolution to the many problems besetting most traditional Aborigines. In diametric contrast, objectivity is the overriding regulator of this discussion paper.
The reader can judge if this has been achieved or not. Regardless, readers should obtain for themselves the relevant documents and then ask themselves why the single element not to emerge following the Royal Commission's revision by the media, has been Truth.
-Tony Ryan
This is not the case. In point of fact, I accuse both the NT and Federal Governments of presiding over actual genocide and denial of basic human rights in the NT. Whether this genocide is deliberate or is the inevitable outcome of ignorance, racial arrogance, and continued colonialism, has yet to be determined.
What really is a major threat to NT Aboriginal cultural and physical survival is the plethora of media-generated and largely imagined crimes against Aborigines, whilst ignoring the infinitely more lethal negligence that is actually and demonstrably killing people in their tens of thousands.
It is my intention to expose the pseudo-crimes and illuminate the true causes of Aboriginal premature death. Why? Because the truth will eventually emerge anyway and subsequent public disillusionment will seriously erode critical electoral support for the genuine NT Aboriginal cause.
ABORIGINAL DEATHS IN CUSTODY
What the Royal Commission Report really said
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, initiated in October 1987, presented Australia to the world as a barbaric and racist nation which was comparable with universally-reviled Apartheid South Africa. The entire world 'discovered' how Australia practiced racism and used brutality and murder in the ruthless containment of its helpless indigenous minority.
In the foreign media and Aboriginal Lobby productions this was presented as repression and genocide. A procession of supporting actors were propelled from political stage left, including such deified notables as Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, and representing international organisations among whom were leaders of the major Christian Churches, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations.
A recent sample survey of ordinary Australians demonstrated a widespread, if not universal, presumption that the Royal Commission did indeed uncover racism, brutality and murder.
The Murdoch Media implicitly accepts this, as do the courts and a host of government agencies.
These presumed findings of the Commission have been extruded into curricula for school children, students, and government workers. State Police cadets are exposed to the shameful “facts” during training.
An expensive national bureaucracy has been set up to prevent possible repeats of the “racist incidents” through the simple expedient of enabling Aboriginal offenders to avoid prison sentences, even though non-Aborigines are routinely incarcerated for the same offences.
What has yet to be revealed to the world, is that the reputations of Australian police and prison guards, and of Australia as a nation, have been impugned based on incidents that never took place and conditions which have not existed since the early 1960s. In the Northern Territory, these brutal conditions ceased to exist since the establishment of missions and government communities in 1936, initiated by the Commonwealth's protector of Aborigines.
SYNOPSIS
Events preceding the Inquiry
A barrage of misrepresentations, innuendo, unsubstantiated accusations, conspiracy theories, and outright non-facts were presented as evidence to the Federal Government by a broad range of tax-payer funded Aboriginal organisations and lobby groups. On that basis, the Royal Commission of Inquiry was launched.
Although the Royal Commission’s subsequent National Report opening statements are effectively an admission that the Inquiry was founded on baseless allegations, it is difficult to find anyone who has actually read this report.
Concomitant with the Report’s muted release has been a brilliantly-orchestrated campaign of innuendo and media impressionism, the imputation being that Aborigines have long been repressed under a regime of police and prison guard brutality, racism and murder; and that this had indeed been proven.
A budget in excess of $4 million per year has been provided since the Report’s release, to finance the perpetuation of this impression.
This deliberate campaign to misinform the people of Australia, and the world, has yet to be publicly challenged.
Ignoring the evidence presented to the Commission, this having already been admitted as baseless by an embarrassed Commission, this chapter instead examines the accessible details of the circumstances that led to the setting up of this farcical Inquiry in the first place. It is a story of journalistic and academic naïveté, of ruthless ambition and judicial arrogance on a truly breathtaking scale.
What has not been said to the world is that, on a per capita basis, more Europeans died in custody in police cells and prisons than did Aborigines. And, that exhaustive research and investigation by the Royal Commission found that there was no evidence of violent deaths caused by police or prison guards.
An emerging development was that some prisoners were committing suicide. These were the ‘copycat suicides’ that were so freely documented in the media. In this regard, and at the end of the day, all that the Commission could come up with was to blame these suicides on the authorities and, by association, the nation. Drug abuse, alcoholic remorse, depression, suspect medications for the treatment of depression, and an absolute absence of aspirational horizons and meaningful life goals, did not rate a mention.
The reader might well ask why publicly funded Aboriginal organisations, government agencies and representatives, Amnesty International, the United Nations, both national and international media; and unsurprisingly, the authors of The Stolen Generation Report, continue to behave as though the Royal Commission found that police and prison guards were racist and beat Aborigines to death.
That such brutal and inhuman behavior most certainly occurred earlier in Australia's history is absolutely undeniable, but this is not what the Royal Commission was set up to expose.
To ensure there is no confusion here, the following passages presented (in green Arial Italic Bold), are selected quotes from the National Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody:
"The Report acknowledges in its introduction that the Commission owed its origins to a background of sustained Aboriginal Lobby claims to the effect that most if not all of the Aboriginal deaths in custody over the specified period, were the result of murder" (1.1.3).
"The Royal Commission of Inquiry considered all witness accounts, and examined all the circumstances of death of the 99 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who died in custody over this period, and this incorporated the optimum use of pathology and state of the art forensic sciences. The subjects of investigation consisted of 88 males and 11 females, with an average age of 22 years" (1.1.1).
In its direct findings, The Report goes on to say…
"The conclusions reached in this report will not accord with the expectations of those who anticipated that the findings of foul play would be inevitable and frequent. That is not the conclusion which the Commissioners reached. As reported in the individual case reports which have been released, Commissioners did not find that deaths were the product of deliberate violence or brutality by the Police or Prison Officers" (1.2.2).
"The work of the Commission has established that Aboriginal people in custody do not die at a greater rate than non-Aboriginal people in custody" (1.3.1).
… "But it can certainly be said that in many cases death was contributed to by system failures or absence of due care" (1.2.3).
This latter comment failed to qualify that the same “system failures” and “absence of due care” applied to all prisoners, regardless of race, and that for non-Aborigines these continue to be the prevailing circumstances. Such a conclusion does not reveal a positive and egalitarian attitude towards justice.
Outrageously, included in “system failures” is the imprisonment of people who have failed to pay fines, a legal overkill which critics have complained about for decades, and which effects all Australians equally who, for one reason or another, have failed to become aware of or have forgotten to pay fines. Warrants are duly issued and defaulters are arrested and incarcerated with no consideration for race, sex or creed.
According to judicial reports, as a result of the Royal Commission Aborigines no longer go to jail for not paying fines. This is as it should be. What is wrong is that non-Aborigines continue to be jailed for this ‘crime’. This is unadulterated and institutionalised racism.
In desperate need for a course to set, which might harvest some tenuous justification for the Royal Commission of Inquiry, the definition of “system failure” was extended to include virtually any imprisonment of young Aborigines at all. This has resulted in urbanised European-acculturated part Aborigines being placed on farcically-supervised community service, or under otherwise unaccountable ‘supervision’, while young non-Aborigines go to jail for the same offences. Given that the only difference between the two parties is generally the faintest pigmentation of skin, and can identify no cultural differences at all; this is classic colour prejudice. This is racism, pure and simple.
In terms of accusations of police racism, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody went out on a very lean limb. The agencies that are now implementing the Commission’s recommendations are stranded on an even slimmer bough, one which is rotten to the core with politically correct racism and irretrievably corrupted ethics.
That the Royal Commission of Inquiry was a farce from the outset is candidly obvious to anyone who has actually read the National Report. My own surveys, of Aborigines in NT, Queensland, and NSW, revealed that all were completely unaware of the actual findings of the Commission.
The politicians, bureaucrats and the culpable media, carried away by the momentum of sensationalist pre-Commission publicity, have since gambled on the politically street-wise fact that nobody actually reads reports. Even Cabinet Ministers merely glance at the first and last paragraphs and hope that their over-worked and sycophantic ministerial assistants will have read them in their entirety, which is not always the case.
It must be admitted that this has not been a high risk gamble; the strategy has worked countless times before.
Every participating official who has read the Report is hoping that he or she will be long gone when and if it all “hits the fan”, or at the very least, that they will have someone else to blame. There must be many outraged but unread counter-reports hidden in files throughout the nation, handily tagged and bookmarked for instant slamming on pre-judicial benches, as some fingers begin to point and others begin to burn.
There must be a lot of bureaucrats out there who nervously peruse every issue of the Government Gazette, and who routinely prepare applications for jobs elsewhere…just in case. Perhaps for many, after almost three decades of nervousness the sound of the falling sword will probably come as something of a relief.
In the interests of responsible government in the future, we should be asking ourselves, how did this happen? How is it possible to launch something as weighty as a Royal Commission of Inquiry into a complete non-event, at a cost of many, many millions of dollars, especially when the reality was known to many hundreds of qualified Australians of impeccable integrity, from the outset?
More significantly; and now turning towards the source of primary motivation, how is it possible to do so much damage to Australia’s national integrity and international reputation without a voice being raised in protest or defense?
THE DETAILED STORY, AS SEEN FROM A NORTHERN TERRITORY PERSPECTIVE
When the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was first announced in 1987, many people with extensive experience working within the various crime containment services, or who for one reason or another monitored aspects of the various correctional systems, were rather nonplussed.
Because there were at that time, more non-Aboriginal deaths in custody per than there were Aboriginal, they found it difficult to understand why the inquiry was being set up with the Aboriginal bias in the first place... as the then NT Senator Bob Collins wondered aloud to a journalist at Darwin Airport, at the time of the announcement.
Those who had genuine concerns about the markedly increasing Aboriginal participation in antisocial or criminal behaviour had long campaigned behind the scenes, and within their respective departments, for a formal and well funded multi-disciplinary study, to be conducted on a regional basis, and reflecting demographic and cultural realities.
The more fortuitously positioned and well-informed members of the community quickly concluded that the Royal Commission was hijacking public concern and taking it someplace where it would wither and die without addressing the real issues, which were widely acknowledged as being politically too hot to handle.
These were:
- · Fallout from the socially and racially divisive policies produced through the application of political correctness, reinforced by
- · The social impact of growing Aboriginal welfare dependency (which continued to be officially denied); and exacerbated by CDEP (now CDP)mwhich effectively strangled any embryonic formations of local employment, enterprise or sustainable regional economic base; and
- · The bitter resentments inevitably engendered in disadvantaged recipients of racially selective welfare services, and related hostility which was erupting within the wider tax-contributing community.
Typically, this comprehension had attached itself to people who were also of an age whereby they were tied to mortgages and family responsibilities.
In a climate of rigorously enforced political correctness, risking their jobs and careers by criticising the Royal Commission of Inquiry was something they were not prepared to do, especially being aware of the ruthless vindictiveness of many Supreme Court Judges, one of whom was now leading the Commission... James Muirhead.
Recognising that their objections would be futile gestures anyway, and that the welfare of their own respective families was a more immediate responsibility, they were indeed wise to remain silent.
One of the casualties of political correctness is that dissenting voices are silenced and, as a consequence, ill-advised ventures and projects burgeon without critical constraint and are not subjected to normal social or financial controls. The Royal Commission was yet another such expensive but unproductive exercise.
The Inquiry revealed nothing that was not already known to the well-informed. No murders or brutality were exposed so, as a final desperate measure, the suicides of prisoners suffering from alcoholic toxicity and remorse, and the lawlessness of many rebellious young Aborigines, were blamed on the nation.
Serious observers were left to ponder the question, why did the Royal Commission take place? If the evidence which prompted the Inquiry was known to be false, well prior to the event, which in retrospect must have been obvious to the initial instigators, why pursue it?
The intuition of these observers would have warned them that this was a path down which they should not venture. They would have asked themselves, if the illustrious careers of all-powerful national political and judicial leaders are at stake how far would they go to protect themselves? Fear is an effective inhibitor and the life of a whistle-blower is not an enviable one.
Nevertheless, these questions must be answered, if for no other reason than the redemocratisation of Australia must be preceded by a national awareness of the true extent of political corruption, parliamentary deception, media interference in government, and the absolute abandonment of judicial integrity in deference to an unaccountable and undemocratic World Governance agenda.
Before attempting to answer these questions it would be prudent to address:
- · Several aspects of Aboriginal behaviour and circumstances that are not widely recognised or understood, at least in urban or academic Australia, and most certainly not by judgmental international agencies
- · The basic role of police and prison authorities …but more significantly,
- · The deliberate inhibition of information-flow to the Australian public about the reality of Aboriginal social disintegration.
- · Evidence of overall lack of judicial integrity and competence.
- · The seriously inappropriate pattern of social and judicial behaviour already identifiable in the original Commissioner for the Royal Commission, Justice James Muirhead.
- In general terms it can be said that there is no grand conspiracy to address; no dark and calculated plot to expose; rather there is:
-
- · A hotchpotch of individual and group ignorance, blind errors and poor judgement, driven by ambition, and ideological or racist conviction.
- · In some quarters there were lies told with unmitigated malice. These included virtually all of the evidence provided by Aboriginal activists.
- · Sometime before the original Commissioner jumped ship, there was a panicky scrambling for political survival with an orchestrated launching of the commission craft in the hope that it would sink very slowly, very quietly and very far away. Unfortunately for those manacled to this ill-fated venture, they all became grist for the Murdoch Mill.
- · In the power apex of bureaucracies, there have been the usual cynical manipulations of political ebbs and flows, in the interests of public service empire expansions and personal power bases, with no regard for the price paid by individuals, institutions or by the nation.
- · But, at the end of the day, there is an arrogant judiciary which sees Royal Commissions as jewels on career crowns; and there are judges and retired judges who exploit these opportunities with no regard for the consequences. There could have been no Royal Commission if the nominated judge had possessed the integrity and courage to turn the position down. To suggest that a person in his position did not already know, or at the very least suspect the truth is an insult to the reader’s intelligence. However, it is impossible for any serious observer to avoid speculation that, part way through the Inquiry, this judge realised that the Royal Commission was unsustainable. Rather than announce this publicly he slipped quietly away, claiming ill-health. In other words, he passed the buck.
Admittedly, in respect of the latter three observations, some faith in the veracity of this author will be required, at least until independent investigators can verify the facts. A formal entirely independent investigation is essential; and one considerably more reliable than a Royal Commission. In the meantime, it must be accepted that any Australian has the right, and in light of the evidence, the responsibility in the general public interest, to present these issues to the Australian electorate in their known entirety. Any attempt to repress this report, must be viewed as an assault on political freedom, on public access to information, and on democracy itself.
Aboriginal ill-health; lifestyles and the implications for criminality
The most predictable but nevertheless valid observation that can be made is that Aborigines are dramatically over-represented in police lockups and in prisons. This is not because they are being picked on, as activists, the Inquiry Commissioners, the authors of The Stolen generation, and would-be reformers assert, but because they commit many offences.
These are rarely people whose culture is intact, but whose culture has long ago disintegrated leaving a valueless void. As children, they are now raised to have no respect for other people, to believe that they are victims of a racist society, that violence and theft is an acceptable way of life, that the life of a criminal is romantic, and that the world owes them a living. This syndrome is far from being confined to Aborigines.
Their knowledge of history, their understanding of how the world works, their levels of literacy and numeracy, and their range of occupational skills, are effectively non-existent.
This disastrous circumstance has evolved:
- · Through the impact of welfare dependency on their families.
- · Through the refusal of their parents to send their children to school, and the refusal of authorities to remedy this.
- · Through the actions of teachers who falsify school attendance roles in order to preserve their jobs thus rendering non-attendance visible to naïve and ignorant educational researchers.
- · To magistrates and judges who tinker with ‘social justice’ without prerequisite real world comprehension and guided only by their own manifestly dubious values.
- · To the journalists, film and documentary makers, and media commentators, who subscribe to the belief that anything said by ‘Aborigines’ must be true, and that anything said by non-Aborigines which conflicts with these views must be “racist lies”.
These are the readily observable realities that teachers, social workers, human rights officials and activists, journalists, foreign critics, the police hierarchy, magistrates and judges, refuse to confront. The real ‘system failures’ that the Commission alludes to, are in the education system, the now corporatised Christian church organisations, welfare agencies and in the courts; compounded and reinforced by the media.
Statistics are unconscionably distorted to support various illicit facets of the radical extremist Aboriginal cause: If Aborigines are in prison in proportionately greater numbers than are other Australians, as the Commission’s Report accurately points out, their deaths in these places must also be conspicuous by their greater incidence. This is a mathematical fact, enhanced as it is by reduced Aboriginal longevity and youth suicides.
And, the reasons why Aborigines die at a younger age is precisely the same as it is for non-Aborigines who also die at an earlier age…an unhealthy lifestyle…, for many, by choice, not by imposition. An uncontestable fact, one that has never been publicised, is that Aborigines were a slim people before the initial impact of welfare, 20 something years ago. They, and Torres Strait Islanders, are now probably the most obese segment of the population and suffer from a whole new genre of illnesses.
The primary causes of poor health are: poor diet, sucrose toxicity, abysmally poor hygiene and home over-crowding, failure to complete prescribed courses of medicine and antibiotics, abuse of alcohol, and lack of regular exercise. We might also note that the two most unhealthy populations of OECD nations, are Australian Aborigines and the people of the US. They are also the most vaccinated populations in the world, which is somewhat of an anomaly in light of the sickness industry's claims of protection provided by vaccinations.
Food for thought? It should also be pointed out that the collapse of NT Aboriginal education which occurred in the late 1970s has created widespread illiteracy. This, in turn, has prevented Aboriginal access to new information about diet toxicity. Hair-brained academics and scientists have published a plethora of health education documents and posters which cannot, surprise surprise, be read by people who cannot read. To overcome this handicap, posters have been produced in Aboriginal languages which, of course, also cannot be read by people who cannot read. One wonders when the world will finally realise that most academics and scientists are very far from being intelligent. Some are quite remarkably stupid.
It would be a fair comment that the early death rate for Aborigines is generated by government incompetence or, as some quite hard-nosed observers are increasingly now saying, deliberate genocide. Certainly, focus on purely tokenistic ameliorations of Aboriginal issues such as Reconciliation, Close the Gap, and Recognise, are funded by mining interests who clearly desire a conveniently depopulated NT. Riotinto and BHP feature prominently here.
Returning to a more pragmatic and generic overview of the Royal Commission context, any person who adopted a similar unhealthy lifestyle could expect to die earlier. If such a person chooses to brawl, steal, bash and rape, there is a considerable chance they will also die in prison.
It was the dishonest presentation of these circumstances, minus the all-important per capita factor, that provided fuel for initial accusations of victimisation; that, plus the deliberately selective use of the term ‘in custody’ instead of ‘in prison’.
The western cultural implication of “he died in prison” is invariably one of recidivism. Indeed, one might quite reasonably expect an old lag to die in prison. However, the use of “he died in custody’ has immediately sinister overtones. “He died in Police custody”, given historic abuse in South Africa and in other ethnically repressive countries, is an unspoken accusation of police brutality and murder.
In the minds of the public, the very expression of Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody prompted an immediate presumption of police and prison officer guilt. In the already media-primed minds of most, the mere fact that it was a Royal Commission conveyed the impression that guilt was already established and the inquiry was merely the formal and wholly independent instrument of investigation to find out ‘whodunit’, and how often.
Ultimately, that the Inquiry failed to find the required evidence, for the simple reason that none was to be found, was a bitter disappointment to the instigators but, as events transpired, this mattered little. The media version was always what really counted. After all, as the spinners know so well, the public perception is always the ultimate political reality.
It has recently become topical, ever since concerned Aborigines began to demand the legally protected freedom from alcohol chosen by Northern Territory communities more than three decades ago; to consider the true role of alcohol in Aboriginal crime, and in typically insular focus, at least initially inasmuch as this contributes to domestic and Aboriginal community violence. As yet, little serious research has been devoted to the role of alcohol in Aboriginal crime per se, or from a national perspective, the relationship between welfare, alcohol and crime for all Australians! There is undoubtedly a relationship and it is a growing one. Alcohol is Australia's great but hidden killer.
It has long been known, at least on government files, that Aboriginal offences invariably involve alcohol, and it has to be accepted, however reluctantly, that these factors are the consequence of an entirely voluntary chain of actions and behaviour.
Offenders are forced, neither to drink nor to commit these offences. They do so out of choice and their lifestyle is entirely one of choice.
It is true that for traditional people it is difficult to avoid demands that they drink with reciprocating and ‘obedience’ relationships but these demands are usually presented (by pseudo-anthropological opinion) as impossible to resist, which is most certainly not true.
Many very traditional Aborigines continue to be teetotalers and continue to justify the love and respect of their relations and other people in their community.
Those naïve aspirants to social science sophistry who adopt the position that the lawbreakers are merely victims of the clash between tribal cultures and western law are ignoring and demeaning the majority of traditional Aborigines who choose not to behave this way.
On the contrary; in point of easily provable fact, the more traditional / tribal that Aborigines are, the less likely they will be to breach western law or, even more obviously, their own tribal rules of behaviour.
Those Aborigines that live closer to traditional ways in their homelands (outstations) are rarely represented in prisons at all (the exception being young people who deliberately offend, as with Anandilyagwa-speakers who for forty or so years have seen a prison term as being a rite of passage to manhood, and who have often made up some 80% of Aboriginal prisoners in their region).
Significantly, Aborigines who seek education and jobs are also rarely in conflict with western or tribal law.
The time is well overdue for the world to recognise that, those Aborigines who pursue a hedonistic and self-indulgent existence, abusing alcohol and other drugs, are that same group that is most represented in prisons. Not surprisingly, if we apply these same criteria to European Australians, we discover that a similar pattern of behaviour produces similar consequences in western culture. What this reveals is that we need to be talking about the behaviour of people, not Aborigines alone.
As one highly respected Aboriginal elder, the late Bill Ngulpurray Waramirri, noted wistfully some decades ago to unionist Brian Manning, “If we all concentrated on what we have in common, rather than how we are different, we would all be happier”.
As noted above, Aborigines tend to have shorter lives than other Australians. Once again, it is never mentioned in the international, or even the Australian media for that matter, that this is in spite of Aborigines enjoying better access to health services and receiving higher levels of welfare assistance, and developmental and home financial assistance than is paid to other Australians.
It is galling to ordinary Australians that they are then blamed by implication for poor Aboriginal health and shorter life spans.
The question that is never asked is, is the mooted quality of health care per se justified? I would say NO! But then I am wholly unqualified to judge. But as a jaundiced health product consumer My own observation is that most western medicine could better be described as the Sickness Industry, one that is dominated by pharmaceutical corporations and willingly gullible doctors.
We are here drifting into two distinct but over-lapping categories: people who choose unhealthy lifestyles and those who are simply unaware that their diet and lifestyle is tantamount to slow-motion-suicide. Given the now-sedentary and self-abusive lifestyles of many in the NT, a short life span is hardly surprising:
- · Any person, who spends almost all of his or her entire life sitting under a tree playing cards and eating takeaway foods, would be foolish to expect robust health.
- · If they also abuse alcohol on a daily basis, a short life is a reasonable expectation, as will be that of the embryo within the habitually inebriated mother.
- · If they smoke heavily, as virtually all Aborigines do, including women throughout their pregnancies, a short life for the smoker can not only be anticipated, the baby will be born to more real disadvantage than fashionably perceived social disadvantage and other causal diversions would suggest.
- · If they also ignore the basic rules of hygiene that are indivisible from western style housing and sedentary living, and refuse to complete prescribed courses of antibiotics to cure the many diseases they expose themselves to, then dying early becomes an anticipated outcome.
(What the Australian public is not being told is how many careers and government departments depend for their existence upon a continuing breakdown in Aboriginal health. In another article perhaps...).
To those people who feel compelled to deny Aborigines any responsibility for their own behaviour, they should at least become aware that in almost every traditional Aboriginal community there is the option of healthy homeland (clan outstation) lifestyles, and there are powerful exhortations by family members to live in these places.
Unfortunately, Government has abandoned Homelands and increasingly attempts to draft people into the ghettos that are mainstream communities, or into cities.
This is unfortunate because in the North there is much enterprise and employment potential on Homelands.
Depending upon actual location, northern Aboriginal communities have industry potential in buffalo, market gardening, fishing, wildlife and conservation management, mining, timber production; air, sea and road transport, home and road construction and maintenance, stores and retail, and local government, not to mention tourism and artifact and art production and marketing.
Meanwhile, The rise in Aboriginal crime has paralleled urban drift. If Aborigines move to larger towns in Australia, they should automatically be required to take on social responsibilities that go with urban living, like anyone else. This includes western-style parenting, considering the absence of extended family in cities.
However, for the majority, the unwanted weight of family responsibility is the reason why most left the home communities in the first place. They want, instead, as most will readily admit, the freedom to get drunk whenever they like. The price of this ‘freedom’ is progressively damaged health, reduced personal security, wasted financial resources, and the likelihood of finding themselves at odds with the law, Australian law and so-called traditional law, if this latter still applies.
Reported conflict with tribal law is exaggerated by a sensationalising media, and by a few opportunistic magistrates who like to ride the very profitable community courts circuit. Seeing that this is not covered elsewhere in this book, perhaps there should be some brief mention here about the silliness of ‘thigh spearing’, supervision by tribal elders, and other so-called tribal punishments, which are oversighted by childishly naïve magistrates, and which are damaging distortions of what were once traditional conflict resolution protocols.
Government and the media should be more responsible and check the bona fides of people making claims about tribal this and tribal that, especially if the people quoted have only a few years association with their subject or are otherwise circumstantially unqualified to comment.
Thigh-spearing (the highly misunderstood Makarrata) was part of a conflict resolution ceremony which provided hot tempers with time to cool; enabled offended parties to save face; and which imposed a termination point on all aspects of the dispute, once blood had been spilled. A more detailed description is provided elsewhere in this series. However, there can be no comparison with torture, as shrill human rights activists insist.
The thigh-spearing approved by magistrates is a barbaric and pointless parody of the original act. Similarly, the tiresome repetition of the term ‘elder’ conveys no Aboriginal reality other than ‘older’. Being older does not guarantee special knowledge or qualifications in either Aboriginal or European societies, with the notion of bloody old fool having currency in all human communities, only more good-naturedly and fondly applied in Aboriginal settings.
With specific communication skills and appropriate relationships it is sometimes possible to identify that special maternal uncle who can certainly make a miscreant conform to acceptable behaviour, if he wants to and if the miscreant is not of a mind to tell the uncle to bugger off, once the silly magistrate is out of sight. Unfortunately, Aboriginal family authority is suffering from the same crisis of recognition as are all other families on this planet; thanks to UN treaties attacking parenting.
On other occasions, purported supervisory elders are simply no such thing; more often than not, the obedience factor operates in reverse, which is how the “elder” was coerced into accepting the role for the whitefella magistrate in the first place, much to the amusement or bemusement of the community once the court has lumbered on to its unworldly chambers in the city.
The bottom line is that none of this has any connection to causative factors in Aboriginal crime or to behaviour modification later on.
In summation, if we consider that:
- · If Aborigines have a tendency to drop dead at a relatively young age, and
- · If this is strongly tied to unhealthy lifestyles and alcohol abuse, and
- · If a disproportionate number are offenders and criminals, and they are subsequently arrested, then
The truly surprising thing is that this so rarely occurs and it was clearly to the credit of police and prison officers that, at the time of the Royal Commission, fewer Aborigines died in custody than did Europeans.
One might ask, why then did the Commission not give police and prison officers credit where this was so obviously due?
In all justice, given the circumstances of baseless accusations, surely some kind of apology or reparation was called for, if for no other reason than to restore their standing in the community. Churlishness perhaps… or some less prosaic motive?
It should reasonably be presumed that the relevant investigative authorities must have been aware of all of these factors. Answers to many of the questions raised were already available in hundreds of government files and reports and known to thousands of reliable personnel. So, why a royal commission?
Perhaps readers should first ask themselves, have the measures instituted by these authorities to ameliorate Aboriginal problems worked in the past?
The simple and observable answer is no.
On the contrary, since 1980:
- · Alcohol abuse has worsened;
- · Educational standards have declined while services have expanded;
- · Health standards have continued to fall while services have been expanded and “Aboriginalised”;
- · Real Aboriginal culture is disintegrating; and
- · Welfare dependency is now endemic and is finally accepted as being so, thirty years after the original diagnosis.
Quite obviously the authorities have access to relevant statistics and information, but they do not understand the problems, much less have any insight into the answers.
Many Australians may have difficulty accepting this but; Government has blacklisted those individual ex-employees who do understand, and who are capable of identifying strategies which would reverse the Aboriginal downward spiral. These people were forced out of government service during the 1980s and replaced with the compliant and the malleable; the sycophants and the politically correct.
Police and prison officers
As we have previously noted, it is a matter of public record that Aboriginal deaths do occur in police cells and in prisons, although not in the significant numbers claimed by Aboriginal activists and their irresponsible groupies.
There have been two kinds of deaths in custody that became the initial targets of concern. These will be covered here because they continue to create problems for police, who will continue to be exposed to unjustified harassment over their handling of Aboriginal prisoners.
Firstly, it was alleged that police beat Aborigines so severely while arresting them that they later died of their injuries. Other claims were that police beat prisoners in their holding cells. There can be absolutely no doubt that both abuses occurred sporadically, as they do with non-Aborigines.
What, in all commonsense, must be recognised is that Police and prison officers who are brutal tend to be brutal to everybody. These are violent people and they reflexively provide violent solutions to confrontations, especially when frustrated by unrealistic and racially selective regulations. These individuals identify themselves for all to see during crowd control situations and the recent peace protests, and the anti-Lebanese gang riots, recorded on TV showed baton-wielding police officers using very little restraint on anyone.
In recognition of this there has been ongoing monitoring of police behaviour since the 1960s when police violence first became a widespread public concern. Similar measures were taken in respect of prison personnel.
The harsh hand of reality intervenes here preventing 100% solutions. Police are employed to deal with extremely violent criminals and, it must be said, many of these criminals are Aboriginal, or to be more accurate and fair to traditional people, are invariably part Aboriginal and of western culture and language.
Only the most social fringe dwelling of academics and armchair critics would seriously suggest sending in social workers and counselors to apprehend drunken and violent criminals. On a police officer’s pay it is the successfully aggressive officers who are going to perform competently in this kind of work and this is an unavoidable fact of life. Police discipline is designed to keep excesses in check. The situation in prisons is the same but, normally, without the provocative element of alcohol in the metabolisms of prisoners.
On street violence something needs to be said and to be understood by critics of the police. A successful street fighter enjoys what he is doing, and to be good at this he needs regular real-life practice. The person who does not enjoy this exercise is the one who is injured or who dies. The regular restraining of violent criminals requires street fighting ability and reflexes, and officers who do not have the necessary instincts are the casualties.
Official references to restraint technique development are pure sophistry and public relations, as is the quaint belief that if one studies martial arts one will learn to defend oneself. Those who are successful are successful because of their fluid and reflexive response and their willed capacity to strike a pre-emptive crippling blow.
Police officers who work in high risk areas, and who wish to survive, employ defence and subduing techniques that involve the least risk of injury to themselves and, if they have any commonsense at all, once attacked, they will ensure that the criminal cannot repeat the attack; that is, he is incapacitated.
The decision to attack police was always the free decision on the part of the violent criminal and few criminals are not aware of the retaliation they invite. If someone is to be hurt it is better if it is the criminal rather than the police officer, who is after all doing what we employ him to do, and who more than likely has a family that does not want him injured or killed. The wider community generally endorses this outlook.
All of this applies equally to constraining and disarming of psychotic offenders. If undiagnosed sociopathic psychiatrists and psychologists did not release these people onto the streets in the first place, the police would not need to deal with them. But once they threaten the community, their mental ill health status is irrelevant.
It is accepted that certain professional personal defence experts (especially trainers) will dispute what has been said here, but these always neglect to mention that their degree of skill is dependent upon some five hours of combat training and exercise per day; and that they have a remunerative axe to grind. The taxpayer does not wish to pay every police officer for this time (20-25 hrs per week) and, addressing the alternative, it would be incredibly unreasonable to demand that this time be invested at the expense of his or her family and life.
These media-worshipped critics of the police, who for some strange reason always seem to be men who talk like women, would be well advised to do two things: confront the real world; and, understand that they are setting themselves above an increasingly irate majority of Australians.
Nevertheless, ruthlessly exploiting this, Aboriginal criminals cry police brutality and victimisation at every opportunity. What are needed are senior officers who will take disciplinary roles seriously and who will also stand by their officers when they become the unfair targets of ruthless and unscrupulous lobbies and the media. This is where it all breaks down. As so many front line officers will attest, “We are not backed up by our senior officers and hierarchy”.
As a result, police officers close ranks, with the good and with the bad. Unquestioning loyalty to fellow officers becomes the one sure means of survival. Ignore this ethic and be labeled an outcast 'dog'.
The current practice of appointing a politically correct hierarchy (including implementation of affirmative action policies) is not only the cause of the problem, it ensures that there can be no resolution.
An additional factor in the violence equation, which prompted the Inquiry, is the Aboriginal propensity for being arrested during drunken brawls. Very often it would be difficult, if not impossible, to conclude if injuries were received before, during or after arrest.
And, considering the usual nature of injuries sustained by Aboriginal protagonists during fights, and comparing them to the kind that might be inflicted by police, the chances will favour a conclusion of death through injuries received during the initiating brawl.
Predictably, relatives of the deceased did, and will continue to, blame the police, regardless of circumstances and evidence to the contrary. It has become fairly typical Aboriginal behaviour to embrace a popularly identified cause of death, and then to physically enact revenge. This is all a flow-on from the traditional payback mechanisms that all societies impose in one form or another, either in institutional form or enacted at a more personal and immediate level.
Incredulous readers, those who are still held captive to the nineteenth century belief in the noble savage, should become aware of the following: This is a sufficiently common enough phenomenon for NT Police to advise drivers that, if one of a group of drunken Aborigines stumbles onto the road in front of their car and is consequently run over, they should keep driving. Most certainly, phone for an ambulance and police, but “keep driving; do not stop and attempt to render assistance”.
In 2002, failure to heed this advice led to a European grandmother in Mount Isa, Queensland, being badly beaten by a mob, and hospitalised for a lengthy period. Although she was in no way to blame for the death of an Aboriginal man who leapt in front of her car during a fight, she was fortunate not to have been killed. A series of similar incidents occurred in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and Katherine, and minor equivalents are routine events in almost all rural towns.
It is accepted that this is all part of a not unnatural initial grieving process when a loved one dies, but it is one that has been stripped of the moderating protocols, rituals and conventions that adhere to such situations in the sober and constrained tribal situation, which is volatile enough under the best of circumstances
Taking a wider view, this is also typical enough of grieving in non-Aboriginal families whenever it is possible to apportion blame over the death of a relative. This is, in other words, an essentially human response, taken to extremes.
In spite of pre-arrest injuries sustained by Aborigines, there were more European deaths in custody than there were Aboriginal. Where the statistics did vary dramatically was with a new set of circumstances, suicide.
During the 1980s a series of copy-cat Aboriginal suicides occurred, usually involving depressed youth. Somehow this came to be regarded as the Police’s and the prison authority’s fault. This rather preposterous assertion ignored the offender’s responsibility in the initial substance abuse, the committing of the offence or offences that resulted in the Aboriginal person’s arrest in the first place, and then his later responsibility over the taking of his own life.
This blame syndrome puts the police in a no-win situation. If they let a prisoner have blankets / sheets and clothing, he might tear these into strips and hang himself. If they remove these they will be accused of racist victimisation and the denial of basic human rights.
The demand by activists that there be 24 hour visual observation of prisoners would incur costs that, ironically, these people rarely contribute to in taxes. As an ethnic group, they are also unwilling to undertake this role on a voluntary basis. Their credibility is suspect to say the least.
In initiating the Inquiry, the long and the short of it was that, if the suicides were taken out of the equation, Aboriginal deaths in custody was an issue requiring routine investigation into the actions of and procedures adopted by the actual officers concerned.
In each genuinely suspected instance, and there were two or three, this would have been supported by appropriate evidence and there would have been a murder investigation. This is the normal procedure. As the Commission later mumbled into its collective gown, this was not warranted by the circumstances.
There is a universal concern here and it is that investigations into police behaviour are always conducted by police.
The majority of Australians consider that such investigations should be carried out by a completely independent body, with wide-ranging powers, and in circumstances of total transparency. Very significantly, it is government that resists this. Obviously, resolution can only be found in compliance with democratic process, by responsible government; not by initiating a Royal Commission of Inquiry which only succeeded in blurring and obfuscating the issues.
Career injustice
Finally, regarding the matter of police and prison officers being unjustly accused of racism, brutality and murder, it would be reasonable to conclude that these accusations would have affected their standing in the community, the social standing of their families, the attitudes of their children to their parents, and the personal confidence and dignity of each individual officer.
At the very least, there should have been a public apology to these people, one that was heard in every home in Australia, and through overseas media outlets. These were people who had been libeled, not accidentally through pursuit of the public interest, but deliberately and maliciously, and for personal gain.
Surely, in compliance with the most elementary concept of common justice, this apology should have been made; and, where appropriate, compensation provided. That these standard responses of a civilised society did not take place clearly demonstrates that real justice has never been on the agenda. One of the intentions of this article is to ensure that the names of these officers and their respective services are cleared.
Systemic failure of the judiciary
So why then, the Royal Commission?
Transparently, there was malice borne of ignorance, and absence of normal human values on the part of some witnesses and participants of the Inquiry; and career opportunism and shameless mercenary motivation for others who stood to benefit, yet at the highest levels, the Commission was permitted to proceed.
There appears to be only two motivating factors:
(1) The first is that there was political and lobbyist interference in the initial politico-judicial process, clearly attributable to intimidation caused by enforced political correctness. Those who could have spoken out, particularly well-informed public servants, dared not.
In response to representations made by the radical urban Aboriginal lobby to several international ‘rights’ organisations (dominated by dubious "rights funder" Geroge Soros), and the resultant ill-conceived and misinformed allegations being uncritically accepted and then magnified by partisan elements of the United Nations bureaucracy, Australia’s political leadership wanted to be seen as doing something.
For its part, the United Nations understood very well that a royal commission would be interpreted by the world as Australia’s tacit admission of guilt. To justify the introduction of ‘governance’ the UN has long attempted to show Australia in a bad light.
It reflects little credit on the entities involved that the ‘rights’ organisations accepted the unsubstantiated and often falsified evidence of oppression and racism provided by Aboriginal lobbyists.
There can be little doubt that these people were aware that they misrepresented the situation; or put more bluntly, they lied, and in so doing seriously damaged Australia’s international reputation and the reputations and integrity of officers and services.
There should be no misinterpreting what happened here. The UN bureaucracy was the prime driver of the campaign for a Royal Commission, and Australian politicians and judiciary were consciously aware of this.
(2) Personal prestige, judicial power and consequential conflict with democratic process
Although judges and magistrates are fond of defending their notorious insularity from the wider community; as a combined manifestation of that farce... preserving the Independence of the Judiciary... coupled with selective media reporting; evidently some judges have additional motives and many are evidently not at all averse to political back-scratching. Was the appointment to head the Royal Commission one such instance?
In an atmosphere of genuine integrity, if there was a reason to hold an inquiry into deaths in custody, it should have been the outcome of a preliminary study into the circumstances and cause of death of any prisoner in custody: in police cells or in prisons.
The decision to study only Aboriginal deaths in custody, which were already known to be statistically less significant than non-Aboriginal deaths, and reportedly, a feature noted by ALP Senator Bob Collins from the outset, leaves one with only one conclusion to draw: that it was politically motivated and a cynical exercise in southern state urban Aboriginal Lobby-generated racial divisiveness. This followed a now-familiar pattern.
A worrying aspect of this is that the integrity of the inquiry system is now in tatters. Given the farcical nature of this and a series of other unsatisfactory public enquiries, the Australian community can now have limited confidence in prison, police or any other inquiry systems. This sentiment will prevail until the extent of such political intervention has been identified and excised, and mechanisms installed which will prevent future corruption of legal processes.
All of this should have been quickly apparent to a veteran judicial mind.
The obviously spurious nature of the inquiry should have resulted in a refusal by all persons of integrity to even entertain the notion of accepting a nomination as Commissioner.
At least that is what the average Australian would have every right to expect.
The unfortunate reality is there has never been a shortage of people on the Bench who would leap at the opportunity to command the personal power and prestige, and not to mention historical immortality, of a Royal Commission.
The courts of Australia have always provided a stage for those of a class who were ‘born to rule’, a means by which they could satisfy their need for wealth, power and privilege. This has culminated in a judiciary which fails to perform the functions expected of it by the Australian community (a sentiment revealed by countless surveys).
This has been amply demonstrated with the recent epidemic of plundering of trust funds by solicitors, and some years earlier with Sir Garfield Barwick’s little venture into reinterpreting tax evasion legislation, both phenomena barely rating a murmur of dissent from the Law Society.
It appears to matter little to the legal profession if their members are lacking in personal and professional integrity, that they are without a sense of social perspective or responsibility, or in the case of judicial members, even a sense of justice.
If the Law Society has ever felt concern over these issues, no record of this has been evident other than a single knee jerk ‘not guilty’ plea when, in December 2002, the Queensland’s Attorney General launched a scathing broadside, critical of the Society’s wish-washy excuses for professional auto-regulation.
Public disapproval is almost universal. Not only does the legal system engage in activities that it shouldn’t in a democracy (judicial activism), it completely fails in its essential roles.
According to a sample survey that accompanied the preparation of this book, more than 96 % of Australia’s population believes that judges and magistrates are far too lenient with sentencing of violent criminals; a figure repeated in a national TV survey (Channel 7). Follow-up interviews revealed that the judicial preoccupation with rehabilitation of criminals represents incapacity to address reality, and an application of values and priorities that are seriously antagonistic to those of the wider community.
It has been well-recorded in prioritised detail exactly what the community believes:
- That protection of the community should be the foremost priority
- That there should be careful compliance with community-perceived concepts of justice
- That serious and violent adult crimes by juveniles should be treated as adult
- That there should be no protection of identity for convicted offenders, adult or juvenile
- That there should be no reduction in sentencing, no concurrent sentencing, no parole, and no early release for good behaviour in prison. Parole has been a farce from the outset, and behaviour in prison does not relate to compliance with wider community norms.
- That restitution for the victim should be mandatory in all cases, and
- That rehabilitation of the criminal should be a last consideration, even then only if sound evidence demonstrates that rehabilitation is actually feasible and that all other conditions of sentencing have been satisfied.
In the case of violent rapists, child molesters, serial killers, violent robbers, psychotic offenders, and participants of serious assaults by gangs, the evidence does not support compromising public safety with rehabilitation. In most instances, the community wants permanent incarceration or the death penalty for serious violent offenders. (Ironically, politicians most fear the death penalty).
That the legal profession does not see this situation as flouting the essence of democratic process, or even that democratic process is an issue at all, speaks for itself.
The claims that all other expert opinion is at odds with public sentiment is a deliberate misrepresentation. Many highly experienced police, prison, court and other government officers were in full agreement with the public. They are now silent or sacked or retired.
Thus it may be clearly perceived that the dedication of the judiciary to the subversion of democratic process provided a climate in which a frivolous or mischievous inquiry could be successfully launched.
All things taken into consideration, the basic legal system itself should be workable. If it isn’t, perhaps the task of fine-tuning it should be the role of future generations. In the meantime, there is a more obvious place to look for imperfections. It is no coincidence that the people who run our legal systems today have few admirers in any community in the world: Of course, we are talking about lawyers.
Why do we look beyond the obvious?
Justice and Law are seen purely as conduits through which wealth can be poured into the pockets of lawyers, whether these are barristers, solicitors, magistrates or judges. It is probably an otherwise sound legal system by concept, but one which is mercilessly exploited by people who are bereft of personal or social conscience and there must be few Australians today who believe otherwise. Those who do will not be reassured by the afore-mentioned Channel Seven survey that found that only 12 % of respondents trust the courts. This exactly confirms the results of all other independent surveys and polls.
The rounds of ‘lawyer’ jokes which may be heard in every country of the world indicate the level to which this so-called profession is held in contempt. It should not be difficult to guess why a judicial system doesn’t work for the people, when it is operated by lawyers whose behaviour is seen as non-criminal only by virtue of legal drafts of defining legislation, effectively oversighted and approved by the law society.
The small percentage of lawyers who do maintain integrity are ineffective against the majority. Their reformist efforts are rendered counter-productive, being used as they are for their public relations value by the unethical majority, in much the same way that doctors use nurses and residents (interns) to provide their ‘profession’ with an aura of heroic altruism.
Although it is beyond the parameters of our examination of Aboriginal deaths in custody, to even begin to identify all the malfunctioning components of the legal system, it is clear to critics that a complete review of its functions is overdue.
In the meantime, for the purposes of this address, we must look at the leadership of the judicial system itself. This is appropriate because the very existence of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was enabled by the system’s NT judicial leadership.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was but one of a series of court scenarios whereby the rights of the vast majority of Australians were alienated and overridden. The current activities by the high court, making judgements that set aside parliament and the people, so-called ‘judicial activism’, are but tips of very dangerous icebergs which threaten the lingering buoyancy of our almost scuttled democracy.
But this is a complex national situation that cannot be addressed here, linked is at it to the ambitious hegemony of the International Criminal Court. For now, it will be sufficiently enlightening to take an immediate look, not at the globalist legal hierarchy, but at the calibre of Commission leadership itself. As every surviving swordsman learned, watch not the sword, but the eye of its wielder.
This exercise may orientate the initiators of a future inquiry because if we are continually critical of actual decisions, and this appears to be the case in the minds of the majority of Australians, it is as likely that the people who operate the legal system are as much a problem as the system itself. From whatever aspect we currently view it, it would appear that these leaders are wholly the problem.
Accordingly, there can be no better window into the absence of integrity in the Commission of Enquiry system or in the Courts themselves, than a series of cameo case histories of the illustrious judge who launched the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
This also provides an insight into the courts that is not ordinarily available to the man on the street. Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions.
Case One
Some years prior to the Royal Commission, a seventeen-year-old American youth on holiday in Darwin, NT, met members of a bike gang at a local pub and accepted their invitation to a bush party. He did not suspect that he was scheduled as the entertainment.
At Darwin’s East Point Reserve, among other abuses, he was beaten with chains and raped. While gang members made drunken and drug-ridden preparations to toss him over a cliff into the rock-strewn sea, he escaped into nearby bush.
When the case went to trial, the feelings of Territorians were that the gang members had engaged in premeditated torture and rape and fully intended to kill the boy, and that court sentences should reflect the seriousness of the crime and the perceptions and values of what was then an intensely cohesive community.
The consensus appeared to be that, failing reintroduction of the death penalty, this should be life imprisonment, or at least something like twenty to thirty years.
In actual sentencing, Justice James Muirhead handed down non-parole periods variously of three and a half, and four and a half years.
The Northern Territory community was outraged. This was their first experience of judicial new-age activism and arrogance.
Case two
A few years later, in 1976, a Commonwealth community welfare worker, myself as it happens, had occasion to interview a young lady who was demanding financial assistance because, she said, she was pregnant (but not visibly).
In the course of the interview it was assessed that she was not eligible for financial assistance and that her early stage of pregnancy was not an issue. As she did not accept this decision, I referred her to the Director of Welfare to facilitate an immediate appeal.
In those days, interim non-statutory financial assistance was provided strictly on the basis of demonstrated need only. As the young lady was actually on holiday visiting her family in Darwin, the Director of Welfare confirmed the refusal of assistance, the interpretation being that the taxpayer was being asked to subsidise her holiday. She was unable to demonstrate any particular need, staying as she was with her relatively wealthy mother and father.
Upon rejection, the young lady threatened that she would report the matter to her father who, she claimed, was a Supreme Court Judge. It was explained that criteria were regulated by the Commonwealth Government Treasury and that flexibility beyond a certain point simply did not exist. Sorry.
A day or so later I was summoned to the Judge’s Chambers and told in no uncertain terms that, in the Judge’s opinion, his daughter was eligible for assistance, and that it should be paid forthwith.
Incredulous, but also quite intimidated, I politely but firmly refused.
The following day I was informed by the Director of Welfare that he too had been summoned to the Judge’s Chambers. The Director, John 'Black Jack' MacDonald, remarked that he anticipated pressure but that the decision would not be changed. For the Director and I, with whom I was generally in conflict over client advocacy issues, this was a moment of rare accord.
Two hours later an obviously humiliated Director of Welfare advised me to make the requested payments to the Judge’s daughter. Quite evidently, the judge had knowledge (evidence to land rights/ uranium mining Fox inquiries?) which gave him leverage over the Director of Welfare. In the normal course of events, such a situation should be impossible.
Case three
At around the same time, a number of Aboriginal children, the youngest of whom was seven years of age, were sent to a remote island off the northern coast of Australia, Bremer Island, as ‘treatment’ for petrol sniffing.
There were no facilities other than a tarpaulin.
Some of these children were from Yuendumu; a Warlbiri community 2000 Ks away and far out in the desert, north-west of Alice Springs. Others were from communities in the Northern Territory’s Top End.
The reason that these children were sent to this isla, Jeff Sargent, that it would cure them of petrol sniffing.
Before proceeding, a few things need to be said about petrol sniffing at that time.
· The first is that it was not illegal
· The second was that the Aborigines themselves did not see it as a serious problem
· The third was that settlement and mission Europeans did see it as a serious problem because kids stole petrol from European’s cars, and neglected to reinstall the fuel lines resulting in a considerable loss of fuel. Once stoned, they also tended to vandalise school property, something that afforded immense, although diplomatically covert, amusement for Aboriginal adults. Amusement was especially the prerogative of every boy’s primary uncle and every girl’s primary auntie and granny, these being the people whose roles (and material security in old age) had been unintentionally usurped by the white teachers and the education system.
So, it may be seen that, to some extent, petrol sniffing was seen as a sort of urban resistance to white control, by (in those days) reticent and extremely polite traditional Aborigines.
It was also only Europeans who perceived petrol sniffing to be seriously injurious to health. This was largely because of the tetra-ethyl lead accumulation aspect of petrol inhalation in long-term habitual sniffers. In real terms there were relatively few of these hard-core cases, perhaps twenty to thirty Territory-wide.
What should be footnotes to the entire Aboriginal petrol-sniffing, and perennially media-regenerated sagas, are that:
One of Aboriginal Australia’s most competent and intelligent Legislative Assembly Members, the late Wesley Lanhupuy, was himself as a child a former petrol sniffer, and
Legitimate cessations of petrol sniffing had been achieved; which throws the Bremer Island saga into illuminatory relief. As this episode demonstrates that real solutions are available, and also just how negative is the influence of the judiciary, it is worth providing the narrative in detail.
The Aboriginal community of Bamyili, now Burunga, once a virtual nightly riot of petrol sniffing and associated juvenile and adult crime, was converted into a crime-free model community through the supportive intervention of an annual high-discipline Aboriginal ceremony.
There was also the directive to apply the teaching of respective clan languages and culture; and for grandparents to participate in school education. The somewhat unconventional measures introduced were specifically sanctioned by the Children’s Courts (respectively magistrates McGregor & Thomas). The local police officer, Dave Walter, although initially and understandably skeptical and antagonistic towards the proposal, was impressed by the results and wholeheartedly supported the internally directed intra-family programme.
Significantly, this reinforcement of family power and people power has gone unrecorded and unrecognised other than on obscure NT Police, Court and Child Welfare files. Unnecessarily, petrol sniffing continues to be a problem in many communities, and millions are spent on fuel modification (opal), sports projects and counselling which do not address the causative issues.
European power control appears to be the central factor (colonialism, to give it its old-fashioned name). Well-intentioned or otherwise, medical (particularly doctors who suffer from what I regard as Albert Schweitzer syndrome), academic, public service and judicial interference, are all problematic. The Bremer Island saga provides a unique insight into this perennial game of blind leading the blind:
Petrol-sniffing boys were sent to otherwise uninhabited Bremer Island, under an unofficial arrangement between a District Welfare Officer, and the Aboriginal family ‘purported owners’ of a lesser part of Bremer Island, represented by the Rrirritjingu language group president of the local mainland Community Council at Yirrkala, Roy Marika.
For the desert boys it was a terrifying experience, the coastal boys had told them that the giant mud crabs would come ashore at night and tear them to pieces alive, and then eat them.
All boys missed their families intensely, dysfunctional as many of these were, at least by Aboriginal standards.
In a paper tabled in the Australian Crime Prevention Council, Darwin, it was pointed out by the Department’s formal representative and welfare officer (who, as it happened, was me) that the Devils Island concept of treatment was unsustainable by any measure, Aboriginal, or European; and was illegal and potentially litigational.
Boys of different languages and backgrounds were flung together and the welfare officer in charge (an ex-Catholic brother), had no relevant linguistic skills and little local cultural knowledge. There was no constructive programme and it was impossible to identify any merit in the scheme at all.
Furthermore, the entire exercise amounted to abduction and was not the result of any genuine consultation with the parents, with whom real resolution resided.
In fact, inquiries revealed that the whole idea was part of a strategy devised by Roy Marika as a contesting ‘landowner’ of Bremer Island, and was directed at ‘stealing the march’ on the absent Dhamarrandji clan ‘owners’, in the issue of disputed territoriality.
Eventually it was firmly confirmed that this was an exercise in Aboriginal geographical hegemony and was part of the ruthless competition for resources between the thirteen-odd language groups which were represented on the Yirrkala Mission, conflict that was generated by iniquitous royalties arrangements set up by the courts for the then Swiss-owned Nabalco Gove bauxite mining company Comalco (and then ALCAN of Canada, and later Rio Tinto).
In more specialised quarters there was additional concern because ongoing cumulative and conjunctional studies demonstrated that Aboriginal family stresses caused by European-generated ‘power imbalances’ between clans were the primary cause of the identified family dysfunctionalism which led to petrol sniffing in the first place. The Bremer Island scheme actually enhanced and accelerated family alienation, rather than ameliorate it.
In less pedantic language, (and this would come as no surprise to any normal parent) the Devils Island project defeated its own purpose by exacerbating interference in family relationships.
As many mature traditional Aboriginal interviewees pointed out so succinctly, petrol sniffers were children who felt that “their families did not care about them”. Packing them off to a terrifying barren island in the care of complete strangers would hardly convince them otherwise.
The Bremer Island affair blew out of local control when the international press got hold of my submission to the Crime Prevention Council and the whole world knew about Australia’s Devil’s Island for Aboriginal children. This was both unfortunate and unfair on Australia because it set the pace for later international libels. This would have repercussions for decades to come.
Nevertheless, Justice Jim Muirhead, in his capacity as President of the NT Crime Prevention Council, declared that in his judgement, “Bremer Island was a worthwhile experiment”.
That a Judge should consider that he had relevant knowledge or expertise to judge such a matter is cause for serious concern. That he believed experimenting with children’s cultural, psychological and emotional security to be “worthwhile” should have had alarm bells ringing in more balanced and responsible circles. Nuremberg trials had a lot to say about such attitudes.
That his judgement continues to remain unchallenged says much about the power of judicial authority, legitimate or otherwise. We have already seen how that power was abused.
Case four
In another instance, the same judge was presiding over a Supreme Court trial whereupon a naval rating successfully avoided just and serious penalties after he had deliberately ploughed a car through a large group of Aborigines grouped outside the Berrimah Hotel, outside of Darwin. His motive was the mistaken belief that they were the group who had unceremoniously ejected him from the pub for sexually harassing the wife of one of their number.
It was known that he had then returned to the Navy Base and attempted to borrow a rifle from a colleague. When this was refused, he stole a car. That he had multiple-murder on his mind was never in doubt. That he was a trained fighting man, is icily relevant.
At least two people were permanently maimed in the incident, and others sustained a variety of less serious injuries. (The author interviewed two of the victims).
In what was plainly attempted and premeditated murder, the navy man avoided any penalty, other than losing his navy job, by virtue of the Police Prosecutor being a Navy Reservist, who constructed and presented such a weak prosecution case that, in the minds of all observers the rating got off virtually without penalty.
Aboriginal legal aid officers were angry but lacked the knowledge to react and later felt powerless to pursue the matter further.
There was no reported inquiry about police competence or conflict of interest. In fairness, it was reported in the NT News that Justice Muirhead did comment that he believed that this represented a “grave miscarriage of justice”, but certainly, as far as the public was aware, nothing further was done and no boats were rocked. As a matter of justice there should have been a retrial. Much could have been achieved had the issue been referred to the electorates and their representatives, entirely appropriate in a democracy.
Instead, silence reigned... as usual.
In all of the above instances this was the same judge who presided over the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The issues of integrity and commitment, and capacity for sound judgement both personal and professional, are left for the reader to decide.
Eccentricity, arrogance, ignorance, delusional elitism, and outright corruption are not only endemic to the judicial system, thanks to political appointments.
During the past four decades, the High Court has consistently made judgements which are way beyond the competence of the judges to make (deliberate and literal misinterpretations of tax law, Aboriginal land and so-called sea rights, and the status of illegal migrants), and they have been equally consistent in their variance from the beliefs and values of the wider community.
Principles upon which decisions have been made are in conflict with centuries-old principles incorporated in common law; and with basic concepts of justice and truth.
For example, precipitated by the manipulations of the Law Reform Commission and the Land Councils, urban Aborigines have criticised Europeans for claiming to own land, and then claim to own land themselves (ie via the entirely alien notion of 'traditional owners').
Genuine traditional people point out that the land owns the people, not vice versa. Nevertheless, easily corrupted individuals claim ownership themselves and proceed to ban others from entering 'their land'. They claim that their ties are purely spiritual, and then claim royalties. Opportunists claim open sea rights, yet had no oceanic boats (other than those obtained or later copied from Torres Strait Islanders or Macassans from Indonesia. Far North Queensland Islanders used outriggers and they alone may have a basis for such argument, but using traditional hunting methods only).
The word of academics has been taken as gospel and as expert evidence, yet it has been later admitted that much of the ‘evidence’ was concocted and fabricated, but of course with ‘the purest of motives’ (ie Kenbi).
Other, less influential Aborigines, have been led to believe that they have secured their traditional lands when it appears they have access to a mere token 100 metres of wilderness intertidal beach front, with hunting grounds and water still owned by cattle stations (or manipulative land councils).
Ergo, Judges have willingly become the terminators of traditional Aboriginal consensus systems of decision-making, turning this role over to easily corruptible individuals who can be relied upon to profitably defer to mining companies and even, in the case of Muckety Station, the storage of toxic waste.
Judges decided that their personal wisdom entitled them to override the opinions and insights of an informed wider Australian community. Non-academic evidence and opinion has been dismissed as ‘anecdotal’; the social science word for unacceptable.
In a Democracy, the ultimate authority is the people. As Thomas Paine put it: "All authority resides in The People".
Thus, any authority exercised by the judiciary is enforced on behalf of the people. If the judgement of a member of the judiciary is at odds with the people, then he has exceeded and abused this authority.
High Court and Supreme Court decision-making over the past twenty years has been little more than a litany of abuses of authority, with the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody being only the most transparent example.
In the words of Thomas Paine, in The Rights of Man, (1790):
The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; nor can any individual, or any body of men, be entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it.
The law is an expression of the will of the community. All citizens have a right to concur, either personally or by their representatives, in its formation. It should be the same to all, whether it protects or punishes; and all being equal in its sight, are all equally eligible to all honours, places, and employments, according to their different abilities, without any other distinction than that created by their virtues and talents.
These definitions also reflect the beliefs of the vast majority of Australians, and are in clear agreement with the thrust of this book; and the judiciary is in equally clear opposition.
Manifestly, our judges believe that they are above the Law, and they believe either they are above legitimate authority or they are the source of this authority. Although they pay declining lip service to common law, in their interpretations they manipulate, distort or abandon as they see fit.
If any Australian ever doubted this, it was abundantly evident when the court attempted to override a government decision regarding the refusal of entry by illegal immigrants, into Australia in 2001. This was a deliberate attempt to breach Australian sovereignty in favour of an unelected and unaccountable United Nations, the template for global governance.
This betrayal disregarded an absolute majority of Australian citizens who were clearly opposed to the forced entry of illegal immigrants, and the people supported the timely (albeit politically opportunistic) government response to this issue. (However, the pro-sovereignty response would probably not have happened at all if it had not been for a then concurrent and closely fought Federal election).
The people of Australia are faced with a new need: to play a more active role in the management of our most vulnerable of governmental institutions, the legal system.
Finally, a sobering comment on the damage caused to Australia’s international reputation by the pursuit of such non-legitimate issues as Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
We Australians are now falsely known to most of the world as a people who repress and arbitrarily imprison our indigenous members; it is believed we deny them access to jobs, education, health and welfare services. What is more, it is said, our brutal police routinely torture and kill our indigenous people and we, the majority, stand by and approve (beliefs gleaned from interviews with 5000 young European travelers between 1988 and 1995).
Government has made no move to successfully counter this outrageous impression.
Those who continue to serve hostile foreign interests, which includes the action of lobbying United Nations and other undemocratic and unaccountable international agencies to place sanctions against Australia, must comprehend that they are willing collaborators in the destruction of our nation and they should understand that they may be regarded by history as traitors to Australia and enemies of all patriotic Australians.
As if an entirely spurious Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody were not a sufficient insult to long-suffering Australians, the total cost of this calculated betrayal has been an unbelievable twenty million dollars (other estimates being as high as $80 M).
In other chapters within this website can be found the genuine causes of Aboriginal genocide.
Qualifiers...
I should state from the outset that a significant part of my extended family is Aboriginal, to which I am deeply loyal. Moreover, most of my life has been immersed in Aboriginal culture in the Northern Territory's Top End.
My interest in judicial interventions is partly driven by concern for the heritage that may soon be lost to my Aboriginal grandchildren, and over the ravages inflicted on Territorians by foreign powers and by governments that clearly act at the behest of foreign interests, with ample complicity on the part of the Judiciary, the law Reform Commission, and the Law Society. All Territorians had the truth of this brought home forceably with the betrayal of the democratic majority by the NT Government over fraccing and the associated inquiry.
In broader terms, there can be no hope for a prosperous and independent Australia until political power returns to the people of Australia. This includes judicial power.
Fate or destiny placed me in the right place and right time to observe and, often, participate in the below-mentioned events.
Because of my work as a Commonwealth and NT Government welfare officer, I had access to files of the former Dept of Native Affairs, Dept of Aboriginal Affairs, Welfare Branch of the NT Administration (Commonwealth), and Community Welfare Division of DCD, NT Government... until 1983. On certain projects, I also had access to the files of other departments, which consideraably broadened my overview. Because I was long regarded as an advocate for Aboriginal rights, both cultural and civil, I was a first port of call when Aborigines claimed persecution or victimisation by the police, and during the 1970s I often acted as interpreter for Aboriginal Legal Aid officers in the field.... an unlikely role considering my precarious grasp of Yolngu languages at that time, but nevertheless reflecting the complete absence of competent interpreters during that era.
Finally, because critics will declare this paper to be presented in far to much detail, I reply in advance that the Northern Territory is a legal geographical locality in which two separate worlds co-exist: western and traditional Aboriginal... one to the detriment of the other. This conflict is entirely due to the failure of outside (or even most residents) observers to study the region in sufficient detail to appreciate that what works elsewhere need not necessarily work in the NT.
This especially applies to the Aboriginal/European interface,
Around that time, I became aware of an expanding industry of greed and dishonesty built on US-imported and ill-fitting rights concepts, to the point by which it was no longer possible to take anybody's word at face value. Exacerbating this, employing tabloid journalism and leading with unchallenged allegations, the media presented all events in ways that suited the foreign corporate agenda.
Ruthless bureaucrats and judges saw this journalistic chaos as an opportunity for self-advancement, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was initially viewed as a plumb appointment in this regard. As the evidence relentlessly exposed the lies of complainants; the complicity of opportunistic and ignorant bureaucrats; and the outrageous publicity given to fabricated statistics; the reigning Supreme Court judge, Justice Jim Muirhead, eventually bailed out of the Royal Commission, claiming ill-health.
Years later, in 1991, the Inquiry commissioners eventually reported that the charges were not supported by the facts... a conclusion never reported in the media. Yet the good names of police and prison officers were smeared for all time, and senior officers have, to a man, failed to stick up for their command. There are now serious issues of command disloyalty, injustice, and the spawning of a destructive new culture of 'rejection of consequences for ones own actions' on the part of urban Aboriginal youth. Not one indigenous person who I have interviewed is aware of the truth of the Commission's findings. Few of mainstream Australians are any better informed. Yet all Australian policies regarding Aboriginal justice are predicated on a lie. This ain't healthy.
This paper provides the context and detail for the Deaths in Custody saga, and can be used to explain why measures recommended by the Commissioners, and adopted by governments, have resulted in a more than 20% increase in incidence of Aboriginal youth crime (as calculated and reported by a NSW Aboriginal group). Until the truth behind the Royal Commission is told, resolution of Aboriginal crime cannot be resolved, because the real issues are not being addressed.
A final observation about evidence offered to the Commission by complainant families:
In Aboriginal culture family loyalty is everything, which makes it difficult to be objective about issues that effect family. Yet relying on subjective belief, rather than evidence, is the biggest obstacle to resolution to the many problems besetting most traditional Aborigines. In diametric contrast, objectivity is the overriding regulator of this discussion paper.
The reader can judge if this has been achieved or not. Regardless, readers should obtain for themselves the relevant documents and then ask themselves why the single element not to emerge following the Royal Commission's revision by the media, has been Truth.
-Tony Ryan
