Je Suis McIntyre?

Is there a difference between ‘Je suis McIntyre’ and ‘Je sui Charlie’? A thought mused by ‘Gabba’, a commenter on the Daily Mail following an article on how Fairfax journalist Geoff Winestock has stood by the now sacked SBS commentator. Of course, there has not been a violent raid where a number of people have been murdered, but a similar scenario has come to play. That scenario, where a cultural/religious symbol considered sacrosanct has been critiqued, eliciting widespread uproar, resulting in censure and removal from a space which supposedly generates critical and rational discussion. It is fascinating to consider how the ‘Je suis Charlie’ movement galvanised around a perceived threat to the supposed Western value of ‘Free Speech’ and critical thought, and yet we have a member of our public media sacked and shamed for expressing a perspective that is being whitewashed out of our commemorations of wartime history.

 

Indeed, as Charlie Hedbo were targeted by criminals with authoritarian ideology,  we too are seemingly allowing such a scenario to take place in our allegedly liberal society, as a mythology around the nature of our wartime history is built in order to solidify some shape of national identity. Ironic then, that it was forged during an invasion of another land at the behest of the colonial empires; empires which arrogantly stoked chauvinist fires of war all throughout the industrial age. As I have written previously, I have always known ANZAC to be a solemn time to remember family and the tragedy of war. Yet, I am finding that hard to reconcile with the larger than life, clean cut and unassailable narratives of honour and nobility being tacked on like cheap pins to those who did fight. Have we forgotten the nationalist rhetoric and propaganda of the time, which appealed to chauvinist masculinity and adventurism to lure young men away? Have we forgotten the aristocratic European leadership’s blood-thirst for war? Why does the murder of Japanese POWs during the pacific campaign, or the executions of Bita Paka by Australian soldiers have to be whitewashed?

 

War is never clean cut, noble or honourable. It is a nasty business, that these days, makes the rich and powerful more of the same, and a whole lot of people dead.

 

It is interesting that the political elite and the dominant conservative mass media help conjure such nationalist myths as a means of manufacturing solidarity and generating political capital for their culture conflicts, yet show a great reluctance to contribute to the ‘great society’ our soldiers have fought for. Indeed, the inability to address the frontier wars and the bloodshed they wrought on Aboriginal societies, or the steadily growing inequality in Australia. We have a political system that seems more concerned in preserving the interests of the wealthy and paralysed on the fundamental problem of climate change and environmental degradation — mortal threats to our society and well-being.

 

The sacking of McIntyre is perhaps an excellent example of a rot occurring in Australia. A fundamental failure of our leadership to act in our interests and to uphold the values that regularly drop like spittle from their mouths. An increasing bent of Authoritarian zeal at the expense of those who died during the military forays Australia has participated in, where values of ‘honour’ and ‘sacrifice’ are assigned to events in which they may have not existed in such absolute terms. I do not have a problem with commemorating our fallen, but we also have to remember the cost that war incurs on all. That we were not always on the ‘right’ side of a conflict, or even have a right to enter a conflict. We have to acknowledge the warts where they exist and not allow a false narrative to be created, which will inevitably be used as a means of justification for more war. McIntyre lost his job for expressing dissent, which is another side of our war history. He was not tactful or nuanced, nor was he necessarily wrong. McIntyre had the misfortune of calling into question a sacred lamb and the rituals we have enacted around it.

Je suis McIntyre?

Reflecting on ANZAC day 2015

The the nature war as we know it is a self-perpetuating phenomenon characterised by catastrophic political failure, followed by grand proclamations of peace which soon fade as history is refashioned again into a simple tool used by powerfully entitled lunatics to spill more blood. Wash, rinse, repeat.

 

ANZAC day is a time of the year that is increasingly becoming a source of embarrassment for me. Embarrassment that there are veterans today going homeless because our society and political class see fit to send young men and women like political footballs into conflicts Australia really should not be involved in, and turn a blind eye to the consequences. Our country apparently has the misfortune of being beholden U.S. foreign policy objectives as it seeks to project it hegemonic power globally; so like good little wind-up tin soldiers, our nation jumps when it is told to. Let it be swept under the carpet that the bloodletting occurring in Iraq is a monster created, in a large part by Western hubris. I am embarrassed that terms like ‘patriotic’, ‘national spirit’ and ‘traditional’ are, like the propaganda in those fateful years of the early 20th Century, being fired off indiscriminately like the machine gun fire from the trenches of the Somme. The absurdity of war is more than just the maimed bodies of the dead, but the social and cultural forces that sanction such arbitrary waste.

 

My family has a rich history serving in the forces during the World Wars and in Vietnam. My Dharug family have suffered under the forces of invasion, having their homes and livelihoods forcibly taken from them by a gluttonous empire. I spent a good chunk of my youth with the Australian Army Cadets and spending time serving community in the services  was a serious career option for me at one point. Civil service runs deep in the family and the idea of contributing to community through practical service is both honourable and admirable. Such strong values reinforce what I was taught about ANZAC commemorations, which were about family, community and sacrifice — not nationalism and certainly not the increasing marketisation of these stories and symbols. That the Australian polity seems to be increasingly caught up in the glamorised, mythologised and convenient re-imaginings war, rather than a solemn acknowledgment of the cost it incurs on all it touches, is embarrassing.

 

Such increasingly twisted messaging is also a profound disservice to those who currently serve in an organisation that is first and foremost (in principle and arrangement) a defensive and disaster relief force that has the capacity to contribute much to our society and helping others abroad in humanitarian missions. Yet, the recent years has seen them represented more as tools used by our political class for cheap points and for ridiculous military adventures that cannot be justified by sane and reasonable minds. I am disgusted that these messages are being turned into commodities by unscrupulous individuals and business’ selling cheap shit like candy to the gaping mouths of the masses, as they search for some piece of shared identity in a country that cannot reconcile its own inner hurts.

 

I am embarrassed that I cannot see where it started or where it ends, as my own experiences bring with them a certain bias.

 

Now I look on and feel repulsed by what is unveiling: the ANZAC spirit increasingly seems to be characterised by what is left on on the butcher’s floor. A spirit of willful blindness to the ‘Frontier’ Wars. Meek acknowledgement of the service of black diggers abroad, only to be returned and treated with racism and segregation. Or of the women who served and suffered invisibly to the rest of the nation. The ANZAC spirit seems to be blind to civilians who suffered allied war crimes, and who have been more recently at the receiving end of Western hegemony. A spirit that is holier than thou. However, our shit does stink, no matter how much you try to ignore it and spin around those facts with increasingly confusing messages. ANZAC seems to me to be no longer about the experiences of Australians at war, but about a political message. A narrative used to shape identity and quell critical thought without regard for the harsher truths.

 

As I grow older, I’m starting to understand why my grandfather threw away his medals and will never be seen at an ANZAC event. Ever.

This post was originally published on 9caratstories.wordpress.com. Kyle Webb is a member of Blacademy.

The reaction to ‘Black Guilt’ revealed so much and so little pt. 2

A stillness that I did not normally associate with the hallways of my school marked the occasion deeply enough that, if I draw my attention back to that point in time, I can feel every sensation as if it were occurring in the present. A sensation for which my vocabulary is far too limited to describe, yet is all too familiar. That was the 13th of February 2008, or otherwise known as the ‘apology’. It was a time where I was confronted with my Blackness. A time where I was so very separate from the school community, even more so than I felt at that point. Kevin Rudd’s voice wafted out through the those halls as students and teachers listened on and I wandered, for I had no place among those crowded into the school quadrangle. Later that day, I sat and listened to other students talk about the event, often debating its merits. Even more remained distantly silent, having little capacity to understand the extent and the significance these issues have on the lives of Aboriginal people. I feel as if I didn’t have that capacity either. Talk-back radio filled with white people annoyed that their neatly ordered vision of ‘society’ and how it came to be followed me on the way back home that day.

 

Another memory follows, where I am sitting in front of a person charged with the administration of an institution that provided a roof over my head. A space where I went about life trying to study, and figure out what my life actually meant to me. My entry into that space had come after a time where I had previously been rejected from a community for not falling in line and for my mental health. It followed a time where I had since experienced the recurring immediacy of a horrifying accident, where I had assisted with first aid and in which both victims had died. I had been engaging in extensive (and costly) therapy in order improve my health, which I knew had been slipped to a very low point, and it certainly did not help that I was ashamed of the way I had to quit my job at the time. The list of heart-ache goes on, and the question that was thrown at me and which pierced into me amounted to a ‘what is wrong with you?’ All I could tell this person was about the deep sense of shame and guilt that blanketed my existence then, and still haunts me now. I had worked so hard to pull myself through the low expectations and the indifference I had often been exposed to due to disability and my Aboriginality all throughout life. I can say I have experienced that point that too many face where, despite your best efforts to lift yourself up, you end up forced out of the only space in which you can rest and sleep with some comfort.

 

As I have discussed previously, the recent discussion around ‘Black Guilt’ has revealed so much, and yet so little. I feel that I cannot meaningfully translate the experience into a book, much less a piece of commentary for a blog, but I do feel compelled to share just a little bit of this experience, not for my sake but for others. Black Guilt has been an experience which has had me constantly questioning my right to enter spaces, especially spaces reserved for people who seemingly have their entire future spelled out for them. Spaces where privileged and/or lucky people are held up as examples for others to aspire to. Spaces for which the expectations of a new generation of ‘Indigenous leaders’ are placed around your head like a crown of thorns, and where if you dare to take roads less explored in the hope of building something, you feel the burn of angry white people and other Black people too. If you are Black, they are spaces that are unforgiving of mistakes. It is an experience where you even question your right to exist.

 

We live in a culture of celebrity, making it incredibly difficult to celebrate the act of sharing among ourselves as we search for healing. The stories of our remarkable youth who have no choice but to navigate incredible obstacles in the absence of generosity and empathy from their environment are not being heard, unless they are the prescribed visions of success demanded in a culture of relentless consumer-individualism. It is an experience made all the more harder when we are constantly being told that we are well off. Even more difficult when you can see that it is not all bad, and we often have some amazing things going for us. Fake or even genuine rationality does not account for the fact that we do exist as emotional beings, and we Black Australians have a few generations of trauma and dislocation running in our blood. Even when we are not conscious of it. It is certainly visible when we fight among ourselves, and get defensive about how we manage our daily affairs as Black people. It is there as we contemplate our lives which are often lived away from country and dreaming. It is there as we share our working and intimate spaces with those who fundamentally do not understand us and who often have some power over us. Black Guilt breathes softly on our necks and whispers in our ears when we question whether or not we have earned ourselves and what little we have.

 

When you get down to it this is our lot and it’s OK to say that is sucks. We do not individually or collectively command the very elements that coalesce into our existence and the subjective experiences that characterise it. What we do have is the spirit and soul of our forebears: some of the most resilient, wise and intelligent people to have walked the lands. Even for those of us who consider ourselves pariahs of sorts like myself, draw from this strength that keeps us going even when we struggle forth with a profound feeling of emptiness. None of us Aboriginal people are given a choice if we wish to remain true to ourselves, but we do not need to justify our existence despite the Black Guilt. What we must absolutely do is find generosity and empathy to guide us forward.

 

You can read the original article on ‘Black Guilt’ by Rachael Hocking here.

This post was originally published on 9caratstories.wordpress.com.  Kyle Webb is a member of Blacademy

The reaction to ‘Black Guilt’ revealed so much and so little.

All it took was a couple of quick sentences, a heavy swig of narcissism and a flock of pigeons to turn something that was mildly amusing at the start, to a reflection of the status quo. And I am angry with myself for playing a part in it.

 

The other day Rachael Hocking, who wrote a piece for SBS as part of its National Youth Week 2015 coverage, shared her insight into phenomena she termed ‘Black Guilt’. An experience shared by many Aboriginal people, especially youth, characterised by the complex interplay of socioeconomic and sociocultural factors that can be ascribed to the forces that disadvantage Aboriginal people. It is a phenomena that rarely gets talked about openly in the public sphere, and especially rare for a young Aboriginal person to be given such a far reaching platform through which to share this story from. My ire is directed toward one particular media actor and his engaging in, those literate in internet, would term ‘shitposting’.

 

I will not name nor talk any further about what is, nothing more than a narcissistic cyst that can afford to play the fool. In a few whiny sentences, he successfully shifted the topic from one that he was in no way the focus of, to that of his bruised ego. More galling than that, the social media response was to tacitly reinforce this. As quaint as drawing the ire of a pundit is, we need to be talking more about the experiences of our black youth throughout Australia. A profound sense of guilt and shame, deeply embedded in our consciousness as black people is a major barrier to improving the health of not only our individual selves, but also that of our communities. It prevents us from seeing our self-worth and acknowledging the walls we have to continually break down in a society that was built on our exclusion. It is a source of the rampant youth suicides occurring in our communities.

 

If we allow the experiences of Aboriginal people, the stories so fundamental to our heritage and wellbeing, to become victims of some twisted culture of celebrity, where powerful stories too often become the playthings of the hollow: what hope do we have of ever having a proper discussion? I fear it could be too much to ask, as we live in a time where the farcical Recognise campaign can draw millions in public funding and get in bed with the likes of Transfield, while entire Aboriginal communities and frontline services are threatened with state-sanctioned guillotines. A world where silk suits debate the value of Aboriginal knowledge and perspectives while we watch on from behind the bars of the twisted zoo contemporary Australia has created for us.

 

I watched on social media as wave after wave of ‘friends’ congratulated the author for drawing the attention of hot air, and very few sharing and discussing the issue at hand. I berated myself for taking part early on, thinking it was somewhat quaint, but only noteworthy as the kind of trinket you put on a shelf. I was upset that someone who had put so much thought and effort, and a lot of bravery in putting that piece out into the public sphere, had it hijacked from the start.

 

Some people can afford to be dishonest before a court of law, and spin bullshit around serious issues. We as Aboriginal people do not have that luxury, and if it were my media account, I would have told people to back off and consider what was actually relevant:

 

Laying down our burden as black Australians, so that we may examine it.

If you haven’t read Rachael Hocking’s article, you can catch it here

This post was originally published on 9caratstories.wordpress.com. Kyle Webb is a member of Blacademy.

Deregulation, Centrelink and Aboriginal student poverty

By Maddee, Bundjalung, member of Blacademy

As I write this I’ve been on hold to Centrelink’s Aboriginal line for one hour and fifteen minutes (and counting). I have a Centrelink debt after being overpaid. It was an honest mistake, I’m trying to arrange a payment plan to pay the government back the money which will be taken out of my future payments from them (unfortunately they don’t pay me an allowance to stay on hold to their 1800 number for hours at the beginning of every study period), but I have this sick feeling thinking about how if I hadn’t been wrongfully paid the money I’m now paying back I would have been in a lot of trouble last year. I was working as an Indigenous student representative in the University of Melbourne student union (which, thankfully, is a paid job, albeit with a honorarium of around $350 a fortnight for what is sometimes more than full time hours, less than a living wage but more than what a lot of others are paid) for the year in addition to taking on casual and sessional work as a teacher and researcher when I could get it.

This year I’ve started a Ph.D at the University of Melbourne and have had my first informal meetings with my supervisor. As we were discussing my timelines for study in the next six months she mentioned to me that I probably shouldn’t try to work more than two days a week because I should be working on my thesis every day-full time. I was kind of stunned even though I understood her reasoning and was aware that Ph.D’s tend to, you know, take a lot of time. I have been on Newstart (the dole) since graduating in 2013 and because it has been a year since I entered the system and the multiple sources of casual and part time work that I’ve been sustaining all year has slowed down (aka I’m now properly really unemployed instead of just underemployed), I now have to apply for a huge amount of jobs that I can’t actually do in order to get my allowance, and am threatened with the possibility that I’m going to have to go on a work for the dole program. My full-time Ph.D is, contrary to what the University has told me, not counted as work (or even as study) under Newstart.

Alongside this, I may not be accepted to be on a study allowance due to the fact that my discipline is, like lots of disciplines outside of science, medicine, and education, not considered by the department of human services or federal bodies to be one of the vital areas to be prioritised in giving out student benefits. I have not received a commonwealth APA scholarship (the standard Ph.D commonwealth living allowance granted to many PhD students, designated through universities) despite being ranked highly within our school out of a huge amount of applications, due to the downsizing of the arts faculty programs and higher education funding cuts over the years. Many of the senior academics have remarked to me that this increasingly pressurised situation is untenable within the faculty of arts and pushes even some of the more privileged students out of study.

This semester I am not able to teach in my discipline because Ph.D students within the faculty of arts are encouraged not to teach in their first year so that they can focus on their studies. This is because arts Ph.Ds tend to take a long time to complete. Universities, getting a lot of funding and research out of Ph.D cohorts, become impatient with low and/or slow completion rates because they need to balance out the costs and benefits of having the Ph.D students they take on.

Graduate students are squeezed into the university in this way all the time. We are expected to finish on time so that the university can be paid, and expected to teach, produce research, and participate in the academic community, often without being paid at all. In combination, all of this means that we are expected, at times, to be working for the university for free. The institution reaps the benefits of the work I produce, they congratulate themselves every year for meeting targets based on Indigenous presence and achievement, and ultimately they will get paid when I finish my doctorate.

Meanwhile I have no idea how I’m going to make this year financially viable. Even sessional teaching, despite how casualised it is and how insecure it leaves staff members, provides financial security during semester that I can rely on to pay some bills. I also involve myself in community work in various ways, as most Aboriginal people who are studying do, which we often do in unpaid roles.

When I first moved to Melbourne at 18 I was homeless and did not have access to Centrelink at all. I drifted in and out of houses and had intermittent periods with no income and no house of my own, couchsurfing with whoever would allow me to stay with them. When I did have a place, or was able to work, I wasn’t always in a place to be able to manage my own finances. The cracks in student services at the University of Melbourne were already appearing post-the Melbourne Model, the restructure of 2008 that preceded 2014’s next big shift, the Business Improvement Plan, which made and is still making up to 500 professional staff across the whole University redundant and needlessly impacted the health and stress levels of many more. Indigenous services at the University have been patchy and unreliable at best during this 6 year period, and have been restructured 4 times.  While the university funds targets like Aboriginal research, development, ‘partnerships’ and parity, Aboriginal students often have no support navigating study, housing, and the various bureaucracies of University life.

In 2009 when I first came to study, the University had just evicted SHAC, a housing protest by students on Faraday street against housing inequities. I was offered a place living in university housing for $600 a month under a scheme they’d developed in response to the protest, living with five strangers. I refused in favour of my own (what turned out to be quite dangerous and illegal) housing option I’d organised after answering an ad in a Melbourne paper, desperately, which was far cheaper and seemed somehow more reassuring. Melbourne University’s housing programs have since fucked over a lot of Aboriginal students I know and been partly abandoned.

One woman who had been a professional staff member remarked to me that the admin at the university was falling apart and the university with it. At 18, it surprised me. I’m the first person in my family to go to Melbourne University. My family were very impressed with me for getting in. The University has a facade of elitism, prestige, tolerance and worldliness that it cultivates and likes to represent with. It has been hungry for numbers of Aboriginal students in the past few years, keen to demonstrate their capacity for “reconciliation” and “parity”. My grandparents can proudly tell people I go to a sandstone when I sometimes had low expectations placed on me as an Aboriginal young person with mental health issues from a “troubled” family.

My Centrelink case worker has remarked to me in the past that over the last fifteen years that she has been in her job, it becomes more and more impossible. She is constantly having to force people into more and more difficult positions in order to get them their benefits, when we all know that not everyone will be able to get a job, it’s just not possible. I was surprised by the admission from her.

I have not really been studying lately, mostly because I am angry that I would have to do it for free, that if I was really wealthy or really employable or had well off parents that were supporting me then doing my degree would be something that wouldn’t send me broke or cause me unhealthy amounts of stress. I’m angry that I can’t justify doing this at all even though elders in my community have urged me to finish. Obviously my refusal to participate in my expensive degree only hurts me.

I’m not doing so badly right now; which is what I tell myself when I have no money-I’m living day to day with no savings but I still have transport, a bed and a roof and I’m not starving, and my support networks are really strong, which is the biggest privilege of all. When I’m broke I am absolutely certain that people will support me. If I became homeless I know I would be able to survive that. I know that because these possibilities have been present for me for years now and I know how to work with them. I can and most likely will work this year to sustain myself. It’s still hard not to have a meltdown.

This experience has reminded me how dangerous being an undergraduate student was for my health and how many times I nearly had to drop out because I was studying full time and working just enough to cover my rent, how many subjects I failed because I was too tired to read or attend class and I had no support. When I was a student representative I spoke to a lot of Indigenous students who slept rough, had really dangerous living situations, were intellectually brilliant and were treated like actual dirt by the University administration and non-Aboriginal student representative bodies.

It’s not about individual difficulty or one off cases of even just about one government or University policy in isolation, many things combine to create the situation where we can take care of ourselves adequately (let alone do real, good work that we want to do for our communities and have external lives) impossible enough that we can’t go to university. This is the reality for Aboriginal students who go to uni. It’s about our day to day experience, of having to be wary and strategic when dealing with organisations who are supposed to be making it easier. It’s not just about course fees or increases in HECS debt, but as I’m learning, debt does make it worse. It’s terrifying to think of how many Aboriginal students are doing worse off than I am, for longer periods of time.

Open letter on Christopher Pyne’s proposed ‘reforms’ to Higher Education.

We, the undersigned Aboriginal students of Blacademy, register our formal and complete protest against the proposed Federal legislative ‘reforms’ to deregulate Australia’s tertiary education sector. We register our serious concern regarding the current state of the debate, which is one of ideology over substance. We condemn the actions of many of the key actors, in particular, The Federal Government and Universities Australia. In writing this letter, we take it upon ourselves collectively, to speak out against the negligence that policy makers and representatives have shown not just to Aboriginal students, but also to students with disabilities and low SES students.

 

It is the position of Blacademy that our public education system should be properly resourced, and its resourcing through taxpayer investment be held  distinctly apart from private education interests in order to ensure an equitable and a higher standard of educational outcomes for all Australians. We oppose the transformation of Australian universities into profit driven corporations, with a two-tier system that limits accessibility of educational avenues. Such an approach is fundamentally at odds with role that universities have within our society.

 

The concerns of Aboriginal students being priced out of critical avenues to further their educational and employment opportunities have either been treated as an afterthought, or ignored in this debate. Access to tertiary education is about more than seeing higher future returns on income, but also about the ability for us to contribute more to raising the standard of living in our communities, and preserving our unique cultures. It should be common sense to policy makers and common knowledge that Aboriginal students do not have a comparable level of access to tertiary education than the average Australian, and addressing those issues require nuance that is beyond some nebulous concept of ‘scholarships’.

 

It concerns us greatly, how little evidence the Australian Federal Government has presented in its case for the deregulation of the tertiary sector as they pursue a ‘free market’ myth: that opening public universities to an open market automatically creates fair access, quality education and market discipline. This is occurring in a context where the Australian Federal Government is engaging in crony-capitalism, supplying welfare to powerful private interests, and stripping public investment out of services critical to the health and well-being of the Australian public. This has disproportionately impacted funding to vital services for Aboriginal people. The last year of Coalition Government leaves beyond any reasonable doubt, that it is a government that has lied to the Australian public in the most egregious ways possible. It is a government that has provided no evidence to substantiate its claims that deregulation will achieve the desired outcomes.

 

If The United States is the exemplar of deregulation, as Christopher Pyne incessantly proselytizes, then we find little hope in the future of ‘Closing the Gap’. Every major example of the deregulation of tertiary education, be it the United States or Britain, have utterly failed to achieve fair access, leading to a system that disproportionately benefits wealthy families. We find these scenarios completely and utterly unacceptable outcomes to gamble our futures upon.

 

As Aboriginal students, we hereby:

• Call on all Australian Vice-Chancellor’s and University establishments to abandon plans for deregulation.
• We call on the Senate to unequivocally reject the Federal Government’s education reforms.
• We call for a holistic review of education funding that draws from the entire sector and not mere partisan interest for deregulation.
• We demand that any review be evidence and equality based.
• We demand a far greater emphasis on access for the most disadvantaged students.
• We call for a fair and equitable funding structure for students in tertiary education, and unequivocally reject calls to deregulate fees.

 

Blacademy supports accessible education and extends solidarity to Aboriginal students at Universities across Australia. Tertiary education is an investment in our future, not merely future financial returns. Our education should not be reduced to a simple commodity.

Signed:

 

Kyle Webb, Dharug, University of Melbourne.

 

Azlan Martin, Nunga, Edith Cowan University.

 

Maddee Clark, Bundjalung, University of Melbourne.

 

Todd Fernando, Wiradjuri, University of Melbourne.

 

Hannah Armstrong, Moonbird (Palawa), La Trobe University

 

Sharlene Leroy-Dyer, Wiradjuri/Dhurag, University of Newcastle.

 

Kyol Blakeney, Gomeroi, President – University of Sydney Students’ Representative Council

 

Anna Amelia, Guringai – University of New South Wales

 

Alison Whittaker, Gomeroi, University of Technology, Sydney

 

Oscar Monaghan, Murri, University of Sydney, Sydney

Open Letter on NUS NatCon 2014

We, the undersigned Indigenous students, register our formal protest at the events which have occurred at the National Union of Students’ (NUS) National Conference and their detrimental impact to autonomous Indigenous representation through the peak body of student unionism. We call for the broader disaffiliation of member unions, and seek an increased focus on Indigenous student organisations on member campuses, and an autonomous peak body of Indigenous student unionism.

We understand that this open letter will not forge a change in policy, approach or practice for NUS, but we cannot let this disgrace be unspoken or without reply and condemnation, nor without the opportunity to present an alternative model of Indigenous student unionism, one which is autonomous, outside factional control and self-determining.

Our formal concerns and protest 

Whilst the National Union of Students has had a particularly flawed history of undermining and exploiting Indigenous students and their autonomy (including co-opting previous efforts to build an independent Indigenous student union and a more autonomous portfolio) the recent removal of the already-meagre honorarium for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Officer has caused grave hurt, disempowerment and concern to Indigenous students in a context of broader cuts by Liberal and Labor governments.

 Despite the fraught history of NUS and Indigenous students, we were nonetheless shocked to learn that National Labor Students (a student branch of Labor Left), Student Unity (a student branch of Labor Right) and the Socialist Alternative (a trotskyist organisation) had voted to strip the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, International and Disability departments of their funding.

Notwithstanding NUS’ poor performance so far in speaking to and acting on a foray of cuts to Indigenous education this year, including the effective end of the long-standing Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme, widespread racism and settler colonialism in proposed and implemented curriculums, and the restructuring of Indigenous accommodation options, the defunding of the department has guaranteed ongoing inaction and silence on Indigenous policy and on the attacks on Indigenous students.

NUS cuts to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander department come at a time of broader Indigenous education cuts and have left us devastated, with few places to turn for representation and the resources to work for equitable and radical changes to Indigenous education, locally and nationally. NUS has left us vulnerable and without defence from widespread failures in Indigenous education over the last decade.

Celeste Liddle, National Indigenous Organiser from the National Tertiary Education Union, has done excellent work in bringing these systemic failures to light, and we encourage you to read her work on them.

 It is not only the removal of resources and honorarium from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students department that is of concern, but the expectation that Indigenous students will contribute their uncompensated and disempowered labour to the Union in order to bring it to surplus and to ensure its continued relevance in education advocacy.

In order for us to continue to advocate through established means against the failings in Indigenous education, we are asked to work for free. Without working for free in NUS, we cannot guarantee that the organisation would even acknowledge these problems in Indigenous education. This binds our free labour to the union in exchange for having any national acknowledgement of Indigenous students or policy.

 

Context

NUS has a history of co-opting Indigenous students in order to appear to be engaging these issues, applauding the discussion of Indigenous policy and Indigenous commentary on ‘intersectionality’, but this engagement is shallow and self-serving. NUS’ conduct better reflects their attitudes towards Indigenous students, including the brokering of factional deals with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students department, the forging of proxy forms for Indigenous students , picketing against Indigenous voters and harassment of Indigenous students. This year, the General Secretary of NUS referred to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student, Disabilities and International portfolios as ‘useless’.

In light of the heavy focus on the gendered wage gap by NUS campaigns this year (some of which attempted to include a race analysis), this move to remove pay from International, Disabilities and Indigenous representative positions is revealing of their wider attitude to the value of the work of International, Disabled and Indigenous students.

This year, Indigenous students Kyol Blakeney and Anna Amelia rose to speak to NUS’ neglect of Indigenous policy, confronting conference floor on their apathy to Indigenous students and issues. They were met with praise from white students. When those same students rose to condemn the pulling of funding from the department, instead of being met with standing ovations, they were harassed, and accused of being ‘scabs’.

Developing the national NUS Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander position itself was an exercise in demonstrating how quickly mainstream unions and institutions reject Indigenous self-determination and autonomy. The model of autonomy put forward by Indigenous students was compromised by mainstreaming. Mainstream union protection for Indigenous students is frail at best. At worst, and as repeatedly demonstrated, introducing Indigenous peoples as merely a cog of a larger student and factional process is less well-meaning solidarity, as it is a means for self-congratulation.

Our labour and our language has been co-opted into feigning an anti-racist, anti-colonialist, anti-ableist and ‘intersectional’ appearance for a racist, colonialist and ableist union, and its factions. We can no longer allow this to be so.

We will no longer be brought into sessions to provide our Cultural and lived knowledge to benefit an organisation which uses us to perform interpersonal anti-racism as a cheap political trick. We will no longer provide settler-framed images of pity to then be negotiated out of resources and power to implement change, especially now that we can never be reimbursed for the pleasure of that exploitation.

We reject the false choice put on us by NUS and will direct our advocacy and labour away from the union. We seek to use this opportunity to emphasise that there are other choices for Indigenous students than NUS, and that we can and will build them.

We condemn individual vote-carrying members of those factions who complicitly directed their small power to deliver this blow to Indigenous students. We do not accept that your responsibility for this can be directed away to your binding faction. Moreover, we hope that you understand the structural and interpersonal weight of your actions. This is of grave and critical impact to Indigenous students as a whole, Indigenous access to education, and our material resources for autonomy, but also to each of us personally.

NUS cannot escape from the historical and social context of its actions when it chooses to axe the financial recognition of Indigenous contributions to the union. It is distinctly unsettling to see justifications of the greater good and student/worker rights used to justify disempowering Indigenous students in the name of buoying a union surplus. As the stations did to Indigenous jackaroos, as forced labour and separation did to Aboriginal house servants, as the present tethers welfare to forced work and land surrender, NUS seeks to profit from not only Indigenous images, stories, narratives and anti-racist currency, but from the invisible work Indigenous persons, including ourselves, have contributed to the union, while ironically labelling Indigenous student leaders “scabs” for protesting this.

If NUS cannot continue to exist over the next five years without defunding these portfolios, as President Deanna Taylor has suggested, then perhaps it is better to simply let the institution dissolve than to allow another union to be built from the unpaid, co-opted labour of Indigenous students, International Students and Disabled Students.

 

Call to action

As a group of Indigenous student leaders, we recommend to all campuses affiliated to the National Union of Students that it be disaffiliated and defunded immediately in light of the atrocious behaviour towards Indigenous students, disabled students and students of colour demonstrated at NUS National Conference and the culture that has made this behaviour the norm in student political circles. The defunding of national Indigenous, International, and disability representative positions at NatCon this year, and the election of a white South African man to the position of Ethno-Cultural representative, are recent examples in a long line of examples that NUS does not support autonomous politics that it cannot co-opt and control.

We extend our solidarity to all Indigenous students, disabled, students, and people of colour who have been affected by the recent events at NatCon, and recognise their efforts to create empowering and radicalised spaces within an often apolitical framework dominated by white careerists and factionalist power plays which do not support us, include us or value our participation beyond what capital we can produce for them.

We call for the development of a new, independent, self-determined Indigenous student union on a national level. We will no longer provide our work and expertise, Cultural, lived and learned, to the National Union of Students in attempting to secure one sliver of institutional capacity from which they will derive benefit. We can no longer attempt to educate or persuade, as that relies upon a good faith and sincere approach to Indigenous students, which NUS has demonstrated that it does not possess.

We hereby support:

• The disaffiliation of campus unions and student bodies from the National Union of Students
• Formal condemnation of the actions of the National Union of Students by campus unions, student bodies and student networks.
• A block on the sharing of Indigenous knowledge, labour and experience with the National Union of Students
• The development of independent Indigenous student bodies on every campus
• The development of a peak, autonomous Indigenous student union.

We ask for the support of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students nationally in doing this.

Alison Whittaker, Gomeroi, BA/LLB student, former UTSSA Indigenous Officer and Women’s Officer

Maddee Clark, Bundjalung, Indigenous officer of the University of Melbourne Student Union 2014

Azlan Martin, Nunga, BA/Psychology student

Oscar Monaghan, Murri, BA/LLB student USYD, Autonomous Collective Against Racism Officer Bearer 2014

Kyle Webb. Dharug. BA. Indigenous Officer of the University of Melbourne Student Union 2014.

Kyol Blakeney, President of the University of Sydney SRC.