Aboriginal groups campaign to defeat Olympic bid
By Karen Fredericks
SYDNEY - The Aboriginal Legal Service has launched a campaign
against Sydney's bid to host the Olympics in the year 2000 -
despite claims by bid officials that Aboriginal people in NSW
support the bid.
Activists from local land councils and sporting, arts and other
community groups gathered at the legal service in Redfern on
October 28 to support the campaign to inform the members of the
International Olympic Committee, and the international community
in general, of the human rights abuses against Aboriginal people
in Australia.
``Australia is a racist country'', said Paul Coe, chair of the
legal service, in his opening comments at the launch. ``It is a
colonial regime. Its laws are based on a legal fiction. Despite
the High Court's decision in Mabo, where it was held that `Terra
Nullius' [the concept that Australia was uninhabited at the time
of Cook's landing] no longer applies, a new racist form of
imperialism called `discovery' has been substituted. For the
first time they have said native title exists, but that native
title can be extinguished by any act of state.
``We the Aboriginal people know that a precedent was set some 20
years ago, when the Olympic movement said that South Africa would
not be allowed to participate in the Olympics because of
institutionalised racism and oppression of human beings. The same
conditions apply in this country.''
Coe said letters had already been sent to all members of the
International Olympic Committee outlining the continuing
oppression of Aboriginal people. He said the committee members,
and members of all the other bidding committees, would also be
sent video compilations, including footage from Cop it Sweet, the
ABC documentary on police harassment of Aboriginal people in
inner-city Sydney, and home-video footage of police officers
play-acting black deaths in custody at a party in outback
Australia.
Coe said the service was currently compiling statistics
indicating that government strategies, such as the Royal
Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, were having no real
effect. Amongst other atrocities, he said, there has been an
increase, Australia-wide, of 25% in the arrest rate of Aboriginal
people since the close of the inquiry. A further 34 people had
died in police or correctional services custody, 11 of them in
NSW.
``We will be tabling all these figures'', he said. `` We'll also
be tabling the Human Rights Committee report on racist
violence ... to the United Nations, and all the bidding
committees. When I address the United Nations, at the
commencement of the year of indigenous peoples on the 10th of
December, I'll be making it quite plain, on behalf of the
National Aboriginal Legal Service Secretariat, that Australia is
not a fit and proper country to host an Olympic games. This
country practises institutionalised racism and has a policy of
genocide towards Aboriginal people.''
The community campaign against the bid has received support from
local land councils such as Worimi, Wiradjuri, Metropolitan, Mogo
and Nambucca, as well as community groups such as the Redfern
Allblacks, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the Redfern Aboriginal
Dance Theatre, the Mudjinigal Women's Centre and the Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody Watch Committee. Their protest gives the lie to
a Sydney Morning Herald report on October 6 that declared
``Sydney's bid for the 2000 Olympic Games has won the backing of
the Aboriginal community, whose support is regarded as essential
if [the bid] is to be successful''.
According to the article, the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, ``the
elected body which represents Aboriginal interests in the
state'', voted unanimously to support the bid, thereby providing
the required ``perception of racial harmony'' which so enhanced
Atlanta's bid for the 1996 games.
In a letter of support for the campaign against the bid, the
Worimi Local Aboriginal Land Council has said that it ``considers
the support for the bid given by the New South Wales Aboriginal
Land Council to be that of the Council members only, and in no
way reflects the views of Aborigines of NSW''. The letter
confirms that there was ``no consultation prior to the release of
the article in the SMH''.
Jenny Munro of the Metropolitan Local Land Council told Green
Left she believes the problem lies with the land council
legislation, and particularly with amendments which have made
councillors less accountable to their local communities than to
the NSW government. She said that although the legislation says
councillors should report back to their locals and take the
opinions of their locals to state level, that is not what happens
in practice, and there is very little communities can do to call
their councillors to account, except vote them out at the next
election.
Munro said community activists had gone outside the land council
structure to mount this campaign, so as to be able to have a
voice independent of the government.
``This protest is being mounted by community-based organisations,
where we began from'', she said. ``The government wants to ignore
the initiatives of the community-based organisations and set up
statutory government bodies like the Land Council to thwart
communities and their initiatives for self-determination.''
Cecil Patten, of the Redfern Allblacks Football Club, summed up
the attitude of the community activists at the launch of the
campaign when he said, ``What chance have our children of
becoming Olympic athletes under the present system? Until the
human rights problems are looked at within this country and our
sovereignty is recognised, our children will go nowhere and we
will not support Sydney's bid for the Olympics.''