RETREAT, TAKE A MINI RETREAT, LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF YOUR SOUL.


Truth lost to victim politicsAugust 25, 2004
IT is becoming clear that Australia's Aborigines have been most damaged by those who claim to be their friends. Encouraged to see themselves as victims, rather than individuals responsible for their own lives, too many indigenous people are looking for blame in all the wrong places. That is the postscript to the dreadful death of a young Aboriginal boy.At about 11am on a Saturday morning in February, Thomas "TJ" Hickey jumped on his red bike, told his girlfriend, April, he would be 10 minutes, and sped away to see his mother who lives in Sydney's notorious Aboriginal estate, The Block. As she had done before, April timed her boyfriend's dash to the inner city suburb of Redfern. But this time TJ did not return.
By 11.21am TJ had catapulted off his bike, over the handlebars, and become impaled on the blunt metal spikes of a fence behind a housing commission building. He died the next day in hospital from injuries to his neck and chest. Last week, NSW Coroner John Abernathy handed down his findings. "This was a freak accident," he said.
After TJ's death, many in Redfern's indigenous community believed police had caused his death. It was, said activist Lyall Munro, a black death in custody because police were chasing him. By Sunday, 24 hours later, pamphlets on the streets of Redfern called police a "gang of child killers". That evening Redfern erupted into the worst riots seen in Australia for years.
Six months later, on the day the inquest finished taking evidence, the ABC's 7pm news bulletin reported closing submissions by counsel assisting the coroner, Elizabeth Fullerton. Although some of the police evidence to the inquest was "disingenous", Fullerton said police did not "directly or indirectly" contribute to TJ's death. They were not chasing him, she said. That was big news, given that many people were looking for a different finding.
That same night, just over 17 minutes later, the ABC's 7.30 Report ran a story on TJ's death, pushing a familiar agenda. Compere Maxine McKew claimed: "Now, evidence has emerged which casts doubt on the police version of events." In fact, the "evidence" was all old news, such as claims by Roy Hickey, TJ's cousin, that police were chasing TJ.
Astonishingly, in a story that went for more than 10 minutes, neither McKew nor reporter Matt Peacock included the news of the day -- Fullerton's closing submissions. Here was an independent person -- not a policeman, not a politician, not a member of the Aboriginal community, someone with no axe to grind. She concluded, and the coroner later agreed, that based on all the evidence, including that of Roy Hickey, police were not to blame for TJ's death. Yet The 7.30 Report failed to say that.
Writing in The New Statesman in Britain even before the inquest finished, journalist John Pilger peddled the same line that police chased TJ. His violent death was not unusual, Pilger said. It was just another example of institutional racism.
Only far-sighted Aboriginal leaders such as Noel Pearson acknowledge that promoting indigenous people as victims has done nothing to help them. Only a few reality checks can do that.
Here are a few that emerged from TJ's death.
In the early 1970s, the Whitlam government handed over inner-city land and houses so Aborigines could manage their own lives. Three decades on, The Block is a shambles of sad, wasted lives, a microcosm of all that is wrong with no-strings-attached welfare.
More than 80 charities and agencies operate in the area but the results are still grim. The rights agenda, with no accompanying responsibilities agenda, has proven to be a poisonous cocktail.
The other wake-up call is equally confronting. Redfern police Sergeant Paul Huxtable told the NSW parliamentary inquiry into Redfern's riots that Redfern's problems were caused by "heroin dependency rather than racism". There is a thriving $50 million heroin trade, he said, a "one-stop shop for heroin with a ready supply of robbery victims, heroin and injecting facility".
While activists such as Munro claim Redfern has no serious crime problem and criticise over-policing, the opposite is much closer to the truth. The area health service says its drug van handed out 262,607 needles in Redfern last year -- or 702 each day. And, as newspapers reported, police cannot clamp down on drug use in Redfern because an agreement with the NSW health department bans police from "harassing, targeting or searching" people using the drug van. It seems that the softly, softly approach to law and order is destroying indigenous lives.
THE final reality check comes from the NSW Coroner. He found police were not chasing or pursuing TJ and nothing police did contributed to his death. TJ rode into the middle of a police operation aimed at catching a man who seriously assaulted and robbed a woman earlier that morning. TJ had good reasons to avoid police.
There was a warrant out for his arrest. His bail conditions meant he was forbidden from going to The Block. TJ had a habit of riding his bike very fast and was seen on that fateful day to be riding fast. The brakes on his bike were defective and TJ's girlfriend knew this. The Coroner also found allegations that a police car tailgated TJ's bike "were totally unfounded and incorrect". There was no evidence that TJ even knew police were behind him. TJ's death was, he concluded, a "freak accident".
Sometimes the truth hurts. But it may prove to hurt a great deal less than the harmful fallacies that have fuelled indigenous politics to date.