Today’s the National Day of Action in Solidarity against the NT Intervention. [Ok I’m online late, but it’s being a pre-election busy weekend and it’s still Saturday somewhere in the world!]

There’s so much to address here, I’ll make a change from the news and views posts to focus on one aspect of the post Little Children Are Sacred Report debate, the relevance of the C-word.

I’d been spending lots of time in services for People With Disabilities in the period when the NT response was announced and the blame passing really let loose. Those groups had high rates of white, mainly professional, abled people in them.  I was really struck by the contrast in how service access for health needs was being discussed publically for Aboriginal people vs. all other Australians.

Coming from the same state which offered financial election sweeteners for women like me having more babies and disability recognition – the public turnabout on treating Aboriginal health rights as optional is frightening. What verges on surreal is the vigorous opposition to naming colinization and racism in this rights gap [relics of the past, forget them] even as those values flaunted in responses to The Response daily.

For a colony, we’ve got pretty low public articulacy around what colonization is and how it relates to contemporary inequalities. At least two parties on the Federal election ballot paper have leaders who don’t understand that declaring yourself to be a “regular Australian”, as a white Anglo person promoting xenophobia, is a statement about colinization and nation, not an ethnic description and expression of general goodwill.

If the NT measures and their authoritarian tangent is news to you please check the National Aboriginal Alliance site for the 101 or the rest of this post mightn’t make sense.

SO: a little exercise recording colonial impacts on health and social services entitlement, taking my cue from Peggy Mackintosh’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” . That exercise aimed to make white privilege visible by giving examples of common experiences where the impact of white supremacy and race constructs in daily life are often  taken for granted by people deemed white. The line “I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.” leapt out as relevant here.

So here’s a list in knapsack format of things I witnessed which reflected colonial values in some way, since June. Some are transparently public events, some things I’ve witnessed in health services personally, but none remain in some totally distant ‘get over it’ past.

I can be sure as a white PWD accessing health and social services that:

1. I will never be denied treatment at a hospital that was built with the unpaid labour of me or my elders. (1)

2. I will never be subject to sneering accusations of ‘special treatment’ or ‘reverse racist handouts’ should I utilise public health services that all citizens of my nation are entitled too access.

3. I will never have my testimony about the impact of sexual assault crimes on my current health appropriated to make a national spectacle of slandering my entire culture.

4. I will never have my testimonies about sexual and child abuse used to justify members of the military entering the communities of people identified of my ‘race’, without my consent or consultation.

5. I will not have a range of self identified progressives who gate keep my access to health and child welfare services claim me as their personal ‘token friend’ in public debates – in exchange for nothing or access to services that they are already paid to deliver to all their clients.

6. My views will not be overridden in favour of people of other cultural identities and complexions to mine speaking as ‘experts’ on my safety needs in influential forums- and being treated as ‘experts’ even if I have better qualifications and experience.

7. When health workers who fail to met professional standards in my treating me confide privately that they are hindered by long term under resourcing of their services and infrastructure for my community – I will not be subject to some of those same workers publicly claiming that the problem is caused by people of my ‘race’ being ‘too difficult’ to deliver services to.

8. I never hear staff in organizations dedicated to child protection and public health express outrage at the term ‘racist’ being used to describe the fact of their ongoing neglect of clients of my ‘race’ influences who dies early of preventable diseases in this wealthy nation.

8 (a). No one says that it proves how ‘angry’ Women of my Race are when I observe aloud that defensiveness about a word – racism – can attract more attention than the ongoing reduced life expectancy of an entire demographic harmed by it’s perpetration.

9. If I’m scapegoated as a ‘bad’ patient for problems in the public health system – I take some reassurance in the range of disability, family, feminist and health ‘consumer’ groups promoting messages supporting the rights of people like me. I never worry that they won’t support me out of fear that their own ignorance about racism may be exposed.

10. I am never accused of child abuse simply because the doctor is ignorant of something about my demographic – such as mistaking birth mark patterns not common in white children as abuse bruises on my child. (2)

11. If I report child abuse, and seek assistance from police, health and child welfare agencies to address this – I will not be told that I can’t have it ‘both ways’ after people of my identity stood up to abuse and child abduction by members of these same agencies. (3)

12. I have never been told that receipt of state health assistance is conditional on denying my rights under international human rights laws– including property rights, freedom from racial discrimination and access to state distributed parent support services.

Some of these are too specific to really work the knapsack approach.  Plus I’ve used the term race although many POC use other terms-because the response relies on dodging the Racial Discrimination Act. The aim here is just to illustrate by repetition what should already be obvious. .

The National Aborigonal Alliance and Women For Wik have actions and things you can do, within Australia and out.

(1) Refers to both the Stolen Wages era and present day. I’ve met many Queensland Aboriginal people who grew up building public institutions –including health institutions and hospitals –without being paid. Since then, to the present, they’ve been turned away from hospital emergency sections when their distress at medical pain was dismissed as evidence that they were ‘drunk blacks’.

(2) This was done to a friend recently, and is also given as an example of grounds for child removal in the Bringing Them Home report

(3) See also the Bringing them Home report and about ongoing concerns about role of child separation by welfare and juvenile justice systems today.