Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers please note that this article mentions deceased persons.
Last month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the date of the upcoming referendum. At the launch of the government’s official Yes campaign, hundreds of people filled South Australia’s Elizabeth Civic Centre in anticipation, with thousands more tuning in online. It was a historic moment for some, in a historic place for others. The frenzied attention afforded to the Albanese government and its referendum was once afforded to murdered Black lives, a now-distant memory the penal colony insists we forget.
A few hundred meters away from the Elizabeth Civic Centre sits the Elizabeth Police Station. In its cells, my elder brother Wayne Fella Morrison spent his first two nights in custody. He’d never been in lockup before. On September 19, 2016, he applied for bail at the Elizabeth Magistrates Court, situated between the centre and the station. The magistrate ordered bail reports and remanded Wayne to appear by audio-visual link (AVL) in a few days’ time. At 12pm on that Friday, my mother, sister and I sat waiting in that court, excitedly anticipating Wayne’s release.
My brother didn’t make the AVL appointment. Instead, he had been brutally restrained with a spit hood by more than 14 officers at Yatala Labour Prison up the road. Still on remand, he was cuffed and placed face down into the back of a prison transport van with eight officers inside. Wayne died three days later in hospital. During the ensuing coronial inquiry, the officers refused to speak on what occurred in the van. Instead, they reiterated the word “privilege” hundreds of times in the Coroners Court, claiming their legal right to the penalty privilege against self-incrimination. Our family was left without accountability and my brother was again deprived of dignity.
It is telling that the location chosen to announce the referendum date would be in the same vicinity of Wayne’s week-long death journey at the hands of the state. As a reflection of the insensitivity of this referendum, our loved ones’ lives and deaths have been rendered invisible. And much like this referendum, my brother’s life was toyed with till its bitter end.
It’s also not surprising that Australia, which lawfully hoods children as young as 10 years old, would exercise its privilege to silence those who call for accountability, reparations and justice for the ongoing genocide it commits. Indeed the proposed Voice to Parliament is supported by a statement, from the beating blue heart of the state, that we are at the forefront of not their minds but their political prison.
This referendum and the proposed Voice to Parliament attempt to politically capture First Nations peoples and pacify our transformative movements. We endure state-sanctioned violence and fascism so the Australian population can bathe in the glory of their streamlined democratic state. I’m left questioning how we went from calling to defund the police, abolish prisons and #burnitdown, to completing the Commonwealth and entertaining the perspectives of racist tropes like “Advance Australia Fair”.
For generations, our families who have lost loved ones in custody have been wailing for change. We have attempted to meet with prime ministers countless times to discuss solutions critical to saving Black lives. Time after time, we have been refused and neglected, left to linger along with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and other reports that outline the hundreds of recommendations voiced for the purpose of tangible change.
It’s not that the Voice to Parliament proposal is overdue, it’s that it obviously holds no power. As Kerry O’Brien opined, it’s “simple, unthreatening and unambitious”. An acceptance of the status quo — as if the crumbs will feed us.
Linda Burney says the Voice to Parliament is not about reparations. I’m concerned this is because government is spending our reparations on what many expect to be a failed referendum. Currently the Voice to Parliament proposal and referendum have received more funding than that budgeted to keep Aboriginal Legal Services afloat.
This is an abomination, especially as Labor’s state and territory governments continue to wage war on First Nations communities. The Northern Territory government continues to renege on the recommendations of the 2017 royal commission to incarcerate more Aboriginal children. The Queensland government has twice suspended the Human Rights Act to cage more Aboriginal children, too. It’s not lost on us either that Australia has failed to fully ratify the United Nations Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture — a treaty to eliminate torture for all people on Aboriginal Lands.
This referendum is not asking us to vote on something that will sustain us, nor for compensation for that which has failed us. We’re not voting to end deaths in custody, to end state-sanctioned brutality or the continual desecration of Aboriginal Lands. It’s not a vote toward action on exasperating climate action and raging inequality. If you’re like me and you support political participation for the sole purpose of radical transformation, then this referendum is about stifling what’s possible in order to maintain what’s palatable — a means to our end.
As the civil rights giant Harry Belafonte, an outspoken opponent of Trump, said: “Dissent is central to any democracy.” In that vein, I continue to insist we dissent. For non-First Nations peoples that might look like voting No, or, better yet, not participating in the referendum at all. Instead use the day to call for tangible justice for murdered First Nations peoples at the hands of the state, and those surviving and resisting its abuse. Use the day to remember the movement for the inherent and inalienable rights that this referendum ignores. Return to the underpinning momentum, that which has been co-opted; movements anchored in resurgence of justice, sovereignty and decolonisation.
I’ve asked for years now: who will be accountable for our deaths? Because the hope of a First Nations future is predicated on us being alive. The proposed Voice to Parliament has given us no reason to believe that we will be fed. And we cannot survive off crumbs.
