Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, justice and education professionals are being urged to contribute their thoughts and experiences on racism to the National Anti-Racism Framework consultation in the coming weeks.
Below, Marie McInerney reports on the critical need for such a framework, especially in the wake of the Voice to Parliament referendum defeat.
Marie McInerney writes:
Shocking examples of the entrenched racism faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are being revealed as part of a national consultation to develop Australia’s first National Anti-Racism Framework.
Marni Tuala, a Bundjalung woman who is a former chair of the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives (CATSINaM) and now CEO of consultancy group First Nations Co, told Croakey about some of the truth-telling that the consultation is enabling.
Community members across Australia have shared “really powerful stories”, Tuala said, recalling a number of conversations particularly with Elders in Mparntwe/Alice Springs.
One Aunty expressed her concern that racism is getting worse in Australia “and she really fears for our young people”.
Tuala herself was shocked at the entrenched racism she witnessed in the Northern Territory.
“I’ve never experienced the number of security guards that there are at a Woolworths. It’s just unbelievable,” she said, recounting a conversation with an Uncle about all the barbed wire and bars on windows in retail settings in Alice Springs and telling him that “everything here screams to me that I’m not safe”.
He was grateful it had shocked her, because he said it had become so normalised in his community that “we don’t even see it anymore”.
Conversations in communities highlighted systemic and structural racism as well as “those day to day interactions that are just dripping in gross racism, whether it’s the [level of retail] security, whether it’s a refusal of service, whether it’s a curfew on youth, whether it’s just complete stereotyping of a whole race of people,” Tuala said.
So the feedback has been “broad but deep at the same time”, as well as showing just how long Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been looking for embedded mechanisms to protect them from racism and deliver their rights.
That was underscored for Tuala hearing from another Aunty about having been married on the day of the 1967 referendum, casting her vote in her wedding dress.
“Just to hear that, and to hear they’d been fighting this fight for so much longer than I’ve even been alive, that’s where it hits for me, that it’s my responsibility to ensure that these old people see some type of change and some type of reward…[after] fighting this for such a long time,” she said.
Consultation opportunities
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, justice and education professionals are being urged to contribute their thoughts and experiences on racism to the consultation process in the coming weeks.
“It’s huge,” Tuala said about the scope and significance of the framework being developed by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), particularly coming after the devastating defeat of the Voice referendum last year.
“Australia has been on the…edge of this for a really long time and what we’re hearing across the country is that it’s well overdue,” she told Croakey.
Partnering with the AHRC, First Nations Co, a majority owned Aboriginal consultancy business, has been conducting face-to-face community consultations since late April. Three locations have been selected in each state and territory, including this week in Perth and Kalgoorlie and next week in the Torres Strait, with planned return visits to Adelaide, Bowraville in NSW, and Brisbane.
“We’re doing everything that we can to make sure that the engagement is broad and deep, and that we’re hearing from a lot of different communities and perspectives throughout the project,” Tuala said.
Tuala said locations were selected by a number of data-sets including population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and percentage of ‘no’ votes at the referendum.
“So we really went into some hot areas, where there’s just a plethora and range of experiences of racism,” she said.
“We really felt honoured that community felt safe enough to share those stories with us, but equally it was so hard and difficult to hear that [racism’s] widespread, it’s entrenched in our systems, it’s individual, it’s overt, it’s aggressive, it’s everywhere — which we knew but hearing it firsthand from old people, younger people, and everyone in between, has been really confronting.”
That has been particularly so in the wake of the referendum, with the first questions raised by participants about whether anything meaningful could emerge from ‘yet another consultation’, “because there is distrust…from years of promises, years of changes, and politicisation of racism and Aboriginal rights and self-determination,” Tuala said.
Some communities have also not been ready to talk about the framework so soon after the referendum, “while others are ‘we need to do this now!’ because [the defeat of the referendum] was the most violent, public act of political racism that we as a people have faced in this generation,” she said.
Tuala said the recent row over ABC broadcaster Laura Tingle describing Australia as a racist country is nothing new for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – they know too well the experience where the person who calls out racism becomes the target, rather than the focus being on addressing racism and providing better support for those who experience it.
“It’s this constant requirement for us to validate our trauma,” she said. “We’re forced to interrogate our identity and our experiences and our ways of doing every single day. I don’t see any other group of people in Australia that are forced to do that. So whilst it’s immensely sad and frustrating [to see the Tingle row], it’s not new. My way to address that is just to keep forging forward, to embed these solutions.”
Background
The AHRC released a proposal for a National Anti-Racism Framework in 2021, saying it was doing so “in response to enduring community calls for national action after heightened experiences of racism and racial inequality in recent years, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic”.
From March 2021 to April 2022, the Commission consulted with the public, peak and community organisations, experts, service providers, human rights agencies, and government at all levels on the scope and vision for a framework.
Its scoping report, released in 2022, provides an initial evidence-based summary of what the Commission heard, highlights some existing good practice anti-racism solutions being undertaken across Australia, and nominated data, education, cultural safety, media regulation and standards, justice and legal protections as cross-cutting themes and sector-specific priority areas.
It also identified key considerations for principles that should underpin a framework, with one overarching principle being widespread acknowledgement of the need to centre First Nations experiences, including the experience of colonisation and its ongoing impacts (also outlined in the highly readable 2021 Concept Paper for a National Anti-Racism Framework).
The First Nations community consultations are being guided by the Project Advisory Group, led by Fiona Cornforth, head of the National Centre for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing Research at the Australian National University, and including newly appointed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Katie Kiss and Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman.
The development of the framework is also being guided by international examples, particularly Canada, another colonised nation, which has developed an anti-racism strategy, as well as the United Kingdom, which conducted a Race Disparity Audit (last updated in 2018), to shine a light on how people of different ethnicities are treated across public services including health, education, employment, and the criminal justice system.
Asked whether the Australian framework will likely draw from models like Canada, Tuala said it will of course consider them. But, she said: “I think this really needs to be uniquely built for Australia.”
Collective knowledges
Tuala said she can’t “let the cat out of the bag” too much now in terms of themes emerging from community consultations and a sense of what the framework might look like.
However, she could say “community have definitely thought about it and they’ve definitely got some community-led solutions, self-determined solutions, which we will be ensuring are fed up to the Australian Human Rights Commission in our report.”
Poignantly and not surprisingly, her overall sense to date is that what communities are hoping for is “to see their voices reflected” in the framework and its mechanisms, a way to be heard, from grassroots up to the national level, that provides ongoing accountability and implementation.
Acknowledging that this sounds like a Voice proposal, Tuala said it was all but inevitable given Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of working that also informed the Uluru Statement’s call for Voice, Treaty and Truth.
“It just goes back to our ways of doing, where we operate on a collective knowledge system. That’s how we operate in our community so it makes sense to scale that up.”
There’s not too long to wait though for more detail, with a draft report due to be available for feedback from communities, services and organisation in late July.
“We’re pumping,” Tuala said of the quick turnaround. The focus of the next round of online consultations is on health, justice and education because “they are all interconnected, they all play a crucial role in eradicating racism and improving cultural safety of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”
She urged mainstream services to provide space for their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff to participate in the consultations, “to acknowledge that it’s crucial they have a voice”.
She also hopes that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander professionals will not “swat it away” as another consultation that will likely go nowhere, saying First Nations Co had faith in the AHRC’s ability to press for change and would not have been involved if they did not.
Truth-telling
“I believe that if anyone has the power and the courage to do this, it’s the Australian Human Rights Commission,” Tuala said, pointing to the Commission’s capacity to elevate rights issues at the global level, through the United Nations, if governments fail to back the Framework and its implementation.
“It’s not airing dirty laundry, it’s truth-telling and that’s where it needs to go. We need to have some really deep truth-telling to move anywhere in this country.”
“This is above all a human rights issue: we can no longer accept racism as just a common part of our society. It’s harmful and it kills people and we deserve better.”
First Nations Co will soon publish the dates for sector consultations here. They are expected to be held Tuesday 25 and Wednesday 26 June, and Tuesday to Thursday 2-4 July.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health organisations are also welcome to make online submissions, while individuals can respond to an online survey if they can’t make the online dates.
Mainstream organisations and non-Indigenous people have other opportunities to contribute to the framework, but the First Nations Co consultations are focused on hearing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on racism and health.