By Rich Bowden:
A UN human rights committee has said discrimination against Aborigines is “embedded” in Australian society, criticising what it describes as the unacceptable level of social disadvantage experienced by Indigenous people in the country.
A report released by the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) found a number of concerns including the fact that the Australian constitution, according to the committee, fails to protect against racial prejudice, reported the ABC.
While CERD welcomed the Labor Government’s 2008 apology to the stolen generation, it heavily criticised the “unacceptably high level of disadvantage and social dislocation” of Aboriginal people which has continued under the Labor administration. It added the controversial 2007 intervention by the Howard Government (and continued by the Labor Rudd/Gillard Governments) had been mishandled.
“That may be a certain disappointment, if I may say so, that this issue particularly to do with Aboriginal communities – it could have been handled in a more sensitive and culturally sensitive way,” the ABC quoted committee member Patrick Thornberry as saying.
One of the key issues was the fragile nature of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act, which had been suspended by the Howard Government in 2007 in order that the Federal Government could intervene in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes said it was the third time the Act had been suspended in its 35-year history and said the UN committee had called on a future Government to implement legislation that would make it impossible to suspend the Act.
“The actions that needed to be taken in the Northern Territory could have been done on a non-discriminatory basis,” he said.
“So what the committee is recommending to Australia is not only we completely remove the suspension – which we haven’t yet done – but we entrench in the constitution a provision so that never again can race discrimination law be suspended in Australia.”
Mr Innes said Australia should “face the facts” and admit to “elements of racism.”
“We need to do much better in terms of having a national multicultural policy, which we haven’t had for almost 15 years, which includes an anti-racism strategy,” he said.
“I think the problem for Australia is that we try to pretend that racism isn’t there. What we need to do is face the facts that there are elements of racism in this country and take some positive action to address it.”
Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin agreed that, while a great deal had been achieved under Labor, more needed to be done.
“Federal Labor has allocated record funding to tackle indigenous disadvantage, including $5.75 billion over the next three years. Labor’s policy is to continue to drive long-term change on the ground. We have made a start, but we know there is much more to do,” she told reporters.
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[...] Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations, but since then it has breached most of the articles. The UN has criticised the government for breaching these conventions. The trouble is this does not get into the [...]