Leetona Dungay, the mother of an Aboriginal man, David Dungay, who died while being restrained by prison guards in 2015, has asked if Australians will support her family by demanding charges be laid against the officers involved.
Appearing in the audience of the ABC’s Q+A on Monday night, Dungay spoke of the outrage felt around the world over the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.
“My son, David Jr, was killed in very similar circumstances,” she said. “David was a proud Dunghutti warrior who was killed in custody in Long Bay jail hospital on the 29 December 2015.
“David was 26 years old. Just like George Floyd, David was pushed down into the ground by heavy officers. David cried out ‘I can’t breathe’ many times in the space of his last nine minutes.”
Leetona Dungay asks the panel to stand with her in demanding justice for her son, David Dungay Jr. #QandA pic.twitter.com/8XLnaMVnp8
— QandA (@QandA) June 8, 2020
Despite 437 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the 1991 royal commission, no police or prison officer had ever been charged, she said.
“Will you join us to demand charges are laid on the people responsible for my son’s death?” she asked the panel.
Monday night’s episode of Q+A, hosted by Hamish Macdonald focused on Australia’s record on Aboriginal deaths in custody, the global Black Lives Matter movement, and marches attended by tens of thousands of Australians over the past week.
The actor, writer and Gamillaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman Nakkiah Lui said she had grown up feeling scared of the police.
“I’m lucky because I have fair-skinned privilege,” Lui said. “Sometimes that’s the difference between being alive and being dead.
“I want that to be clear. We’re not crying out for justice, Hamish. We’re saying, ‘Don’t kill us.’ That’s a simple, basic request. Do not kill us.”
Lui said comments by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, that Australia did not need to import issues from other countries were purposely ignorant.
“Black Lives Matter has been, as said, an issue here since colonisation,” she said.
The writer, actor and Wongutha-Yamatji man Meyne Wyatt said Morrison’s remarks were a denial of the experiences of Indigenous Australians. He spoke of having his pockets searched and being arrested at the age of 11.
“Last Friday, a brother boy died in Western Australia,” he said. “It’s a denial of what’s happening right now. These institutions are killing us. And it’s just the continuation. The whole time, since 1770.”
Two MPs, the Liberal senator Andrew Bragg and Labor’s shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, were on Monday night’s panel. Both said Australia had failed on Indigenous policy.
But they were criticised for offering platitudes, instead of concrete ideas for change.
“I don’t see any change,” Wyatt said. “I don’t see anything that’s put it forward. Both things that came out of your mouths was hot and lovely fluff.
“That’s what it was. Can you give a real answer? I don’t know.”
