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'Alcohol, heat, grief triggered the riot'

By Paola Totaro, Connie Levett and Geesche Jacobsen

17 February 2004 - The Premier, Bob Carr, and the Police Commissioner, Ken Moroney, have blamed alcohol, grief over a boy's death and the unrelenting heat for the Redfern Aboriginal riot and announced three inquiries into the rampage.

Forty police were injured, parts of the railway station were torched and bricks and molotov cocktails were thrown during the wild melee over the death of a 17-year-old Aborigine, Thomas 'TJ' Hickey.

Mr Carr and Mr Moroney called for calm as emotions continued to run high over claims that police were chasing Thomas on Saturday when he lost control of his bicycle, landing on his back on the spikes of a steel fence. He died on Sunday, triggering the riot that was finally contained in the early hours of yesterday morning.

Despite the call for calm, the Leader of the Opposition, John Brogden, during a visit to Redfern, called for the use of bulldozers to resolve the area's problems.

"The fact that 40 or 50 police were injured whilst they stood there and copped it from young Aboriginal thugs and others is an unacceptable position going forward . . .

"I'd bring the bulldozers in because I think allowing this to happen every couple of years, which is what's going to happen, will never fix the problem."

But there was defiance on Eveleigh Street as more than 100 residents of the Block cheered and whistled approval when a community spokesman, Lyall Munro, using a megaphone, said "the streets were taken by our young people and we are all proud".

Another speaker said "there is no justice in this community for us. What about deaths in custody? This is another death in custody".

As a handful of uniformed police looked on from the railway station, with its gutted front offices, a young girl scratched on the footpath the words "Police killed TJ" with a stone, over and over again.

However, a later meeting of Aboriginal community leaders, police and members of the Premier's Department was amicable.

Peter Fernando, deputy head of the Aboriginal Medical Service, said of the riot that "everyone agreed it shouldn't have happened" and that as a result of the meeting an Aborigine will be included on an investigation panel.

Announcing that the Coroner, the Ombudsman, Bruce Barbour, and the police Critical Incident Team would investigate the riot, Mr Carr said he had been told that officers were not chasing Thomas Hickey at the time of the accident but were looking for an offender in a bashing case.

He thanked community leaders who had tried to defuse the situation but said some elements had stirred up the crowd. "There were three mediation attempts between 11am and 4pm [on Sunday] . . . I know that some Aboriginal community leaders did urge dispersal and I thank them for that.

"Advice from police is that the heat and alcohol played a large part . . . and orchestration by elements who urged a major incident."

Mr Carr added: "I've got full confidence in the way police tackled this incident . . . there's no doubt there was a group of people seeking to aggravate this situation; there were posters, bricks collected, molotov cocktails . . . there was a great degree of deliberation."

Mr Moroney confirmed that there was a current warrant for Thomas Hickey's arrest but stressed that at the time of the accident police had not given the teenager a "second thought" because they had been chasing someone else.

The Police Minister, John Watkins, insisted that during the riot officers were never "overwhelmed" and described the rampage as an "aberration" in police relations with Redfern's Aboriginal community.

Last night, Eveleigh Street was calm, with more than 50 locals gathered around a barbecue put on by the Aboriginal Land Council while children played at a nearby playground.

A street preacher, Colin Davis, said that the elders were sending a message to the community that "we will be there for you . . . from now on, the elders will stand up and be counted".

About 10 police watched the gathering from nearby.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Ongoing tensions helped fuel riot, academic says

February 16, 2004 - A senior academic says last night's riot in Redfern shows relations between police and the Aboriginal community remain volatile, despite years of State Government policy work.

Associate Professor Chris Cuneen from Sydney University's Law School and author of a 1990s report called Policing in Redfern says there have been a number of plans to improve relations.

He says while there may have some success with the community living in the block, there is ongoing tension with the broader local community in nearby areas.

"Clearly there's an ongoing level of antagonism which is underlying the riot or conflict that occurred irrespective of whether the police were involved in the death of the young boy or not," he said.

"There's enough antagonism in the community in relation to the police for people to believe they were involved in it."

Source: ABC News

No excuses can exonerate Redfern riot

Editorial

18 February 2004 - The riot in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Redfern on Sunday night must signal the end of the glib rhetoric that compounds the poverty, substance abuse and violence, and shackles a disproportionate number of indigenous Australians to misery.

It is time that politicians and community leaders, both black and white, accept the grim fact that many existing attitudes towards the most disadvantaged indigenous Australians are part of the problem. To assume that some Aborigines are so wounded by their peoples' past that they cannot function in society will leave them on the fringe of society, dependent on welfare forever. And without work, and the self-discipline and self-respect it fosters, the bonds that hold families together inevitably erode. The challenge for government and black community leaders is to integrate the most dysfunctional of Aboriginal communities, in suburbs such as Redfern as well as the bush, into the real-world economy rather than leave them to stew in their grievances of historical dispossession.

The confrontation between young Aborigines and the police in the small section of Redfern known as The Block followed the death of a 17-year-old boy, killed when he was thrown from his pushbike and impaled on a railing. His death is a tragedy; every Australian has a right to make the most of their innate abilities in life and this boy died before he had his chance. But this does not justify what followed the accident. A rumour that the boy was fleeing from police when he died was the immediate cause of the riot. This is emphatically denied by the local police who say they had no interest in the dead youth. But whether or not this is true, and as yet there is no evidence that it is not, there is no excuse for the thuggery that followed. It is not the Australian way to surrender the streets to mob rule. But what is worse is the way the riot is now being explained, even excused. A Redfern community leader says Aborigines should be proud of the way they took a stand against the police. A clergyman retreats into generalities about the difficulty of adjusting millenia-old Aboriginal culture to Western ways. And ATSIC acting chair Lionel Quartermaine calls for "the utmost honesty and transparency" in understanding the circumstances that led to the riot.

Predictably, Mr Quartermaine blamed government "inaction and ineffectiveness". He has a point. That a city block in the heart of Sydney resembles a Third World slum is appalling. It is a problem that has been there for decades and politicians of all persuasions and their attendant bureaucrats have done bugger-all about it. A small part of Redfern is a tacit no-go area for police and other Australians, where drug use is rife and where thieves prey on the surrounding community. But to blame everybody but the people responsible for this riot is part of the problem that confronts too many Aborigines - and it gets us nowhere. Refusing to accept that all Australians must take responsibility for their own lives, and those of their families, helps perpetuate the very circumstances that create the violence and despair that exploded in Redfern on Sunday night. As Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson warned us all in The Australian four years ago, welfare "as a permanent solution for able-bodied people is not just undesirable, it is destructive. The experience of Aboriginal Australians disengaged from the real economy tells us this plainly".

For Aboriginal residents of Redfern to live in poverty, with too many of them taking refuge in drugs and alcohol, is appalling. They are not in isolated communities where there is no work and boredom breeds despair. The Block is a pocket of poverty in the heart of booming inner Sydney, the powerhouse of Australia's economy. And they have every right to live there. The Block was purchased early in the 1970s by the Whitlam government as an inner-city community for indigenous Australians, and just because it has never delivered on its promise is no reason to abandon the ideal. But for The Block to work it must become a self-sustaining community. And that means children in school, adults in jobs or training. It means zero tolerance of drug abuse and crime. And it means Aboriginal leaders who focus on improving the circumstances of their community rather than blaming the past for present problems. It is the culture of present despair that is overwhelming Aboriginal families who have lost contact with the world of work that must be defeated first. This all easier said than done. But if the community needs money to fund support programs for struggling families, it should be found. Saturating the area with community workers who can relate to the needs of the locals is a far better solution than deploying riot police to keep Sydney streets open or involving more bureaucrats who see the problems of The Block in the abstract. However, the first step to saving indigenous communities is to end the double standard that searches for reasons to excuse mayhem in the streets depending on the race of the rioter.Source: The Australian

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