Australian indigenous affairs policies "racist": UN specialist
Updated
A UN envoy has described the Australian government's handling of indigenous affairs as "racist" and in breach of international obligations.
The UN's special rapporteur on indigenous rights and freedoms, Professor James Anaya, has called on Canberra to reinstate race discrimination laws, which were suspended to allow new policies in Aboriginal communities facing dire social troubles. He also also says the Australia should pay reparations to the country's indigenous people.
Presenter: Linda Mottram, Canberra correspondent
Speakers: Professor James Anaya, UN's Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights and Freedoms
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ANAYA: The policies of the last decade or so apparently have done little or nothing to address the entrenched problems that existed before and they continue or in some instances apparently have been exacerbated. And so something new is needed and I'm happy to hear from the government and learn that they are attempting new initiatives and have devoted significant resources to addressing the issues. My concern is that those issues really be grounded in local solutions as I believe they must to succeed. As a philosophical matter it is important that indigenous people genuinely be in control of their own destinies as all other peoples want to be, to be able to make the choices that determine the important issues in their lives, and also as a practical matter I think that experience shows across the world unless people are actually in control of the solutions for their problems, it is very difficult for those problems to be resolved.
MOTTRAM: The big question facing the Australian government presently is in the Northern Territory with the so-called Emergency Response, the intervention. Your take on that seems to be that it is simply not acceptable, why is that?
ANAYA: In its current configuration it's not compatible with Australia's international human rights obligations in my opinion. I have stressed though that some measures are required in order to address the stress that indigenous peoples, particularly women and children, are suffering in the Northern Territory. My point is that the broad sweep of the measures in place, the outright ban on alcohol in all designated areas, the quarantine of benefit income within the so-called income management regime, the compulsory leasing scheme; all these things that are targeting specifically indigenous peoples, but not non-indigenous peoples are discriminatory and simply go too far. They need to be better configured, reformed in order to not be discriminatory to the extent possible and to actually be in furtherance indigenous people's self-determination to the extent possible.
MOTTRAM: Because one aspect here that stands out very starkly for indigenous people was the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, the anti-race discrimination laws federally and in the Northern Territory. Is that something that should be changed immediately? The government is committed to changing it, but over time?
ANAYA: Yes it needs to be done right away, I think. The government needs to apply both the international non-discrimination standard and its domestic counterpart, and that standard needs to guide and frame the government policies to address the problems of Aboriginal peoples in the Northern Territory and elsewhere.
MOTTRAM: One of the issues that this government has ruled out is the issue of paying reparations to indigenous people, what's your view on that?
ANAYA: My view is that the government should pay reparations or at least should do everything to give very careful consideration to reparations. I think that the presumption is heavily in favour of reparations and if it's not going to do that then there needs to be a very, very good reason. The UN Human Rights Committee and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have called for reparations and I think that that's the correct response. I'm not saying what form exactly the reparations should take. But there needs to be something, we're talking about wrongs that have tangible ongoing consequences, and those tangible ongoing consequences need to be addressed by some kind of reparation.
