‘It's been interesting': The awkward questions Brooke Boney gets in England
RELIGION
Did you grow up with religion? It's a common misconception that all Aboriginal people are super-left or really progressive. There were always missionaries in Aboriginal communities, so in the country areas [Christian] religion is a big part of Aboriginality. My [maternal] grandparents believe in god; we weren't allowed to say any swear words, we weren't even allowed to say 'fart'. I used to go to church with my cousin and her nan and pop and they bought me a Bible, which I still have. The things we were taught about at Sunday school – about fairness, generosity and charity – are good principles.
What do you tick now for 'Religion' on the census? Oh, I don't think I'd tick anything.
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ABC News
14 hours ago
- ABC News
How can we solve the moral problem of indigenous deaths in custody? - ABC Religion & Ethics
There is near universal agreement that the deaths in custody of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are a shocking outrage. But repeated expressions of shock and outrage are of little use if people keep dying. I want to offer a philosophical diagnosis that makes clear why these failures are systemic. They cannot be fixed by cultural sensitivity training for individuals working in the justice system. Some individuals are at fault, but they aren't the real problem. The system is at fault, especially when it promulgates 'tough on crime' crackdowns on crime waves. In a broken system, even good people doing their best can find beneficent intentions come to nothing — or even make things worse. Philosophy has a long tradition of thought experiments that place individuals in morally terrible circumstances. One famous example was advanced in a 1965 paper by the Australian philosopher H.J. McCloskey. It was published at the height of the civil rights debates in the United States and involves an imagined sheriff in a Southern town who must decide whether to frame an innocent black man in order to prevent mob violence or social unrest. The following thought experiment updates this approach to expose how even well-intentioned individuals may be powerless, or even complicit, in an unjust system. This deliberately inverted scenario draws on the stereotype of the racist cop — not to trivialise injustice, but to make visible how systems entangle even those who aim to rectify injustice. The reverse-racist cop Frank is the moral mirror image of the stereotypically racist cop. He is committed to correcting historical harms suffered by First Nations peoples. To balance the scales of justice, Frank decides to be especially tough on crime committed by wealthy people of European descent. Determined to redress what he sees as a long history of disproportionately punishing indigenous people for minor infractions, Frank targets white-collar offences like corporate tax evasion. He petitions his superiors for drone technology to track expensive cars exceeding the speed limit. Once suspects are detained, he resolves to make no effort to accommodate their emotional or cultural needs. His colleagues caution him that two wrongs don't make a right. Frank understands that many of those he arrests have legitimate grievances. But he replies that even the best judicial systems sometimes treat individuals unfairly. His dominant concern is fairness between peoples , not fairness to individuals . However, Frank's new approach coincides with politicians' announcement of a law-and-order crackdown. During such crackdowns, police don't simply pursue justice. They go where politicians and voters want them. The people Frank wishes to target have taken the hint and avoid the areas now labelled as 'crime ridden'. Frank would love to report that there is no crime to pursue. But his is a reported high-crime area during a politically designated crime wave. Needing arrests to prove he's doing his job, Frank finds himself, despite his intentions, arresting the usual suspects for the usual kinds of crimes. I don't mean to morally endorse Frank's policy. It is simply wrong to consign to solitary confinement a Porsche driver for wilfully travelling at 60 in a 50 zone. The thought experiment shows that the system has a biased view about which kinds of crimes to punish and which to tolerate. Its purpose is to illuminate how even those determined to correct historical harms can be thwarted by flawed systems. The thought experiment isn't meant to be an empirically accurate description of policing in Australia. But that shouldn't matter. Consider Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous story about an individual hooked up to a sick violinist for nine months. Her scenario carried a moral lesson that paid little regard to the biological specifics of pregnancy or abortion. Populist politicians understand that identifying specific individuals who have committed terrible crimes can swing an election. Police forces cracking down on crime can apprehend many such individuals. There is a crude-but-effective electoral logic in presenting immigrants as inclined to crime. So long as you can find some actual examples, such claims are not straightforwardly falsified. There is, in contrast, little emotional gratification in blaming the system. Isn't the system just the system? Who should we blame for the system? If we need individuals to blame for the justice system's current failures, we can find them? Today's morally malfunctioning policies and laws were enacted by individuals in the past, most of whom are now dead. Aboriginal peoples have at least 65,000 years of continuous occupation of Australia. But it was the ancestors of settlers who made most of the laws — laws that may have made sense in their own time. We live in another. If we are going to respect the views of the dead, we must not omit the views of indigenous Australians who had insufficient input into our nation's laws. Suppose you could talk to those ancestors and update them on the fact that Australia is now a rich multicultural nation. They are unlikely to suggest logging onto social media to hashtag #CancelThePolice. What might they say about indigenous deaths in custody? What recommendations might they make? Fortunately, we can do better than idle speculation. We can ask their descendants. The Voice to Parliament would have offered a format for that advice to be given on a regular basis. I have avoided the easy trope of the racist cop. Most people in law enforcement are decent individuals doing their best. But, as Hannah Arendt and others have shown, even good people can be slowly reshaped by bad systems. Just turning up to work each day can require moral adaptation. Over time, a kind of moral dulling sets in, required by those who continue to work within the system. For those who want to advance in the system, the path may demand more than compliance. It may demand vocal endorsement of policies they privately know are unjust. We don't need to wait for history to judge the system. We are the system. And we must change it. Nicholas Agar is Professor of Ethics at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is the author of How to be Human in the Digital Economy and Dialogues on Human Enhancement, and co-author (with Stuart Whatley and Dan Weijers) of How to Think about Progress: A Skeptic's Guide to Technology.
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
It's clear what was behind Kumanjayi Walker's killing. So why can't we say it?
Indeed, some are calling for a federal truth-telling commission while simultaneously lamenting the non-implementation of those royal commission recommendations. It speaks to the absurdity of the status quo and post-referendum fragmentation in Indigenous affairs to call for the same form of inquiry to achieve something we unequivocally know it can't. What can history tell us? While formal policies of compulsory racial segregation established by protection legislation ended in the latter part of the 20th century, there was little institutional reckoning with the role police had played in administering that regime. Police forces, which for over a century had played a key role in the enforcement of the system of Aboriginal reserves, missions and curfews, were reconstituted in the post-protection era as ostensibly neutral enforcers of the rule of law with no corresponding effort to reform the institutional culture or confront its origins in racial control. Loading The phenomenon of over-policing – where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly youth, are disproportionately surveilled, detained and prosecuted for conduct that may not attract the same police or judicial response when committed by non-Indigenous peers – is not speculative. It is extensively documented across decades of institutional review and legal analysis, including the 2017 Australian Law Reform Commission's Pathways to Justice report. These are not isolated or anecdotal claims. They form part of a consistent body of empirical and legal evidence that demonstrates a structural problem embedded within our institutions. But equally confronting, for those calling for more truth-telling to replace structural change, is that Australians say they know the truth but want to move on. That's a truth that needs to be grappled with. This is possibly why the sky did not fall in with the Yoorrook findings of genocide in Victoria. They were, by and large, not controversial because this was already historically supported, perhaps demonstrating that societies do move on and the temporal, ideological motivations of the Aboriginal history 'culture wars' have disintegrated with the passage of time. It has been more than three decades since the release of the deaths-in-custody royal commission report, Australia's first truth-telling commission. There is much sentimentalising of the report. The inquiry emerged in a markedly different Australia, an era in which Australians trusted public institutions and politicians. Its findings were released when Aboriginal political structures were more unified and institutional forms such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission provided a national platform for Indigenous voices. In the intervening years, the landscape has changed significantly. Aboriginal communities have experienced fragmentation, and the post-ATSIC policy environment has become saturated with a proliferation of individuals and organisations purporting to represent Aboriginal interests, often in unaccountable ways, and which commodify identity and political authority. Loading The royal commission was unequivocal in its central finding: that systemic change would be achieved only by reducing Aboriginal contact with the criminal justice system altogether. This imperative remains as urgent now as it was then. Yet, despite its clarity, much of the contemporary criminal justice response has been directed towards superficial modifications at the sentencing stage, design interventions and cultural overlays that attempt to 'Indigenise' the system without altering its foundational logic. These are, to borrow a phrase, cosmetic adjustments, lipstick on a pig that leaves the structural drivers of over-incarceration intact. The royal commission's recommendations on non-criminal justice system solutions are a pathway forward. The pursuit of these should not form part of the closing-the-gap monolith that hoovers up all things Indigenous these days – the wicked problem they've created to solve the wicked problem. A core insight of the royal commission, too often cited but insufficiently read, is that communities need autonomy and agency, and the safety of Aboriginal people depends on them avoiding the system altogether, not their adaptation within it. We've done the reverse over 30 years and wonder why the gap in disadvantage grows wider. The royal commission further called for a withdrawal of bureaucratic control and the reallocation of authority to Aboriginal communities. Ironically, the most recent national attempt to institutionalise this principle, the proposed Voice to parliament, was framed by its opponents as an exercise in bureaucratisation, despite its primary aim being to devolve authority to communities and reduce administrative gatekeeping. Loading In the aftermath of the failed referendum, bureaucratic entrenchment has, if anything, intensified. Critics of over-bureaucratisation have grown conspicuously silent, while initiatives such as justice reinvestment attract significant public expenditure without demonstrable systemic returns. The Justice Policy Partnership, established under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, is dominated by bureaucratic actors. Several Aboriginal members have made serious accusations about its ineffectiveness. Yet, as is often the case in Indigenous policy, their concerns about the bureaucrats are ignored by the bureaucrats, and the dysfunction continues with no course correction. Today, the right of self-determination, as articulated by the royal commission, is far from the concept defined then. It has been reduced to 'partnership with government', whatever that means, and in practice it means incorporation via corporations statutes. In this way, self-determination has become synonymous with corporate compliance. What relevance these observations to the NT Kumanjayi Walker coronial inquest? The second version of the closing-the-gap framework adopted in 2020 pushed the Commonwealth's constitutional obligations and leadership responsibilities from 1967 back to the states and territories, which were notoriously bad at Indigenous policy. Now Aboriginal organisations are required, by agreement, to stand side-by-side with state and territory governments which claim to be in partnership with them while they implement draconian and ruthless criminal justice policies that render nugatory the various KPIs of justice, health and wellbeing that the closing-the-gap framework purports to achieve. The asymmetry and absurdity of the arrangements were evident when the Walker coronial inquest recommended, among many things, diversionary justice programs for Indigenous youth four days after the NT announced restricting youth offenders from accessing diversionary justice programs. Two ships passing in the night. The federal government has declined the invitation of the Indigenous sector to take more leadership. The most compelling solution here is for the Commonwealth to assume responsibility for Indigenous criminal justice and bring some leadership, accountability and coherency to the sector, if we are serious about the national closing-the-gap agreement and its justice outcomes. Something more serious is needed than the annual performative lamenting the gap.
The Age
3 days ago
- The Age
‘Only a very evil person would ask': Trump lashes out at reporter while visiting Texas flood zone
'I'll tell you some other time,' Trump said on Tuesday, when asked by a reporter about FEMA. Before the most recent flooding, Kerr County declined to install an early-warning system after failing to secure state money to cover the cost. Lawrence Walker, 67, and a nearly three-decade veteran resident of Kerrville, said the county and state had not spent enough on disaster prevention, including an early-warning system. Asked about the quality of the government response, he said, 'It's been fine since the water was at 8 feet.' The Texas state legislature will convene in a special session later this month to investigate the flooding and provide disaster relief funding. Abbott has dismissed questions about whether anyone was to blame, calling that the 'word choice of losers.' Dozens still unaccounted for Search teams on Friday were still combing through muddy debris littering parts of the Hill Country in central Texas, looking for the dozens still listed as missing, but no survivors have been found since the day of the floods. Heavy rains sent a wall of water raging down the Guadalupe River early on July 4, causing the deadliest disaster of the Republican president's nearly six-month term in office. As sun poked through dark clouds on Friday morning, search crews in hard hats painstakingly walked inch-by-inch along the ruined banks of the river, marking damage and looking through wreckage. After the president arrived in Kerr County in the early afternoon, Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott drove to an area near the river, where Trump received a briefing from first responders amid debris left in the wake of the flood. The county is located in what is known as 'flash flood alley,' a region that has seen some of the country's deadliest floods. More than a foot of rain fell in less than an hour on July 4. Flood gauges showed the river's height rose from about a foot to 34 feet (10.4 meters) in a matter of hours, cascading over its banks and sweeping away trees and structures in its path. Kerr County officials say more than 160 people remain unaccounted for, although experts say that the number of people reported missing in the wake of disasters is often inflated. The dead include at least 36 children, many of whom were campers at the nearly century-old Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer retreat on the banks of the river. Jon Moreno, 71, a longtime Kerrville resident whose property on high ground was spared, praised the government response - local and federal. He has heard the debate about what more could have been done - including sirens - but said he did not think it would have made much difference, given people's desire to build along the flood-prone riverbanks. Loading 'It's unavoidable,' he said. 'All those people along the river - I wouldn't want to live there ... It's too dangerous.' At Stripes, a gas station in Kerrville, the building was tagged in large white letters, accusing 'Trump's Big Beautiful Bill' of cutting 'our emergency funding.' The president's massive legislative package, which cut taxes and spending, won approval from the Republican-controlled Congress last week and was signed into law by Trump on the same day that the flooding hit Texas.
