Racist Australians wearing Blinkers in Delhi

Anarchist Age Weekly Review 12th October 2010

Kings Domain - April 2006

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I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the strident tone of Australian reporters and commentators in India as they highlight the plight of the slum dwellers and homeless who have been forcibly removed from Delhi's streets during the Commonwealth Games. The newspaper, radio reports and television news coverage I've read, heard and seen have all been tinged with the assumption this high handed heartless government response would never, never occur in Australia.

It seems many Australians have conveniently forgotten the shameful treatment that was meted out by Australian government agencies and most of the Australian media to the group of radical indigenous activists who occupied a tiny corner of Melbourne's Kings Domain during the Commonwealth Games in 2006 to highlight the post colonial plight of indigenous Australians to the rest of the world.

The hysterical public debate surrounding their request, a fragment of Kings Domain be permanently set aside as an indigenous information centre in Melbourne highlighted how unwilling governments, the fourth estate and most Australian are to face their colonial past. The participants in the blockade were publicly humiliated, denigrated and eventually after the games were completed moved on by over a hundred police.

Four years later little, if anything, has changed. Next time some reporter or commentator gets on their high horse about the shameful behaviour of the Indian government towards their homeless in Delhi during the Commonwealth Games, maybe they should end their story with a sentence or two about the shameful behaviour of the Australian authorities towards a small group of indigenous activists who, at great personal cost, peacefully highlighted to the world the unfinished business that continues to exist between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

Anarchist Age Weekly Review - An Anarchist Society is a voluntary non-hierarchical society based on the creation of social and political structures which allow all people equal decision making power and equal access to society's wealth.

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