Remembering Salem!

All of the incidents of Indigenous politics are directly referrable to the truly terrible legacies of colonisation, disempowerment and dispossession.

Not only were our people dispossessed of our lands, our people and our languages, but also of fundamental aspects of identity including self respect, and what it means to be a man or woman in our societies.

The parameters of Race politics in this country have forever been set by Anglo-Australians, premissed on the alleged inferiority of our people, our alleged lack of intellectuality, and manifested in our extermination and exclusion, and accompanied by unremitting abuse and vilification against us as individuals and communities. The extent of race politics that have been displayed in this past week by the media and other [witless, shallow] commentators can be measured by a very simple test: if it were alleged that any one of the members of the Federal Government had sexually assaulted a person, would that incident have been reported? Would the accuser have had all the sleazy, sickening details spelt out? Would there be calls for the accused to stand down until the matter had been cleared? If he were charged, faced court and had the matters thrown out, would any section of the media anywhere, have re-run the allegations? The short answer to all these questions is a resounding no. The test, for those who've just missed it, is this: if it would not happen to another person in similar circumstances, then it is discriminatory. In this case it is racist!

An interesting sidelight to this spectacle has been the self-exposure of so many hypocrites. Leaving aside the media themselves, practising lawyers have joined politicians in calling for me to remove myself, or be removed from the Bench. While what I said is indisputable, whether or not I should have said it is debatable – and so be it. The calls made by these people are clearly premissed on the fact of my temerity or intemperance in saying it. On the other hand, those same people, along with other judges, and attorneys-general have been complicit in endorsing by silence, the racist, sexist prejudices spewed out by their ilk against the dispossessed and disadvantaged of our society. Their tolerance of the continued incumbency of those same purveyors of prejudice makes a mockery of their attempts now to appropriate the high moral ground.