Another edited extract from an advocacy email of mine - this one on racism

Dear Members of Parliament,

Years ago when we started accepting refugees from South Sudan, ... I wrote to my Parliamentary representatives where I was living urging that we plan for mental health aid for these human beings because they would have been traumatised by the conflict they had endured.

That's not rocket science: it is blindingly obvious knowledge for most of those forced to flee war - whether it is South Vietnamese fleeing communist abuses, Europeans during and after World War Two, or indigenous people fleeing violent colonisers. Several of my work colleagues over the years have been Vietnamese refugees, others fled Hungary in 1956, and others are here after having fled other oppression and/or war.

The overseas refugees I have known have all been wonderful people; and yet many have been traumatised: the two conditions are not mutually exclusionary.

Being traumatised is not a sin, crime or sign of being lacking in moral rectitude: it is a sign of being human and of having been in a traumatic situation - and it is a call for human decency and compassion.

The replies I got at the time were dismissive ... I was calling for forward planning because I had personal experience of what trauma (and intergenerational trauma also needs to be considered) does to humans, and I have lost friends to death by suicide as a result of discrimination.

We now have South Sudanese mothers calling for help to address the trauma linked to the way their children are being treated - and their calls are being backed by a UN working group (see https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-27/un-working-group-backs-south-sudanese-australian-mothers/101797212).

In that article, Australian Border Force (ABF) is reported as commenting that they cancel visas to "protect the Australian community" - and yet the racism of government bodies, rightwing media, and some Australians is causing the problem. How is eliminating a symptom of a problem addressing the problem of racism? 

If the problem is not addressed, it will recur - if not with refugees from outside our nation, then those who are effectively refugees within it.

The response from the ABF is, IMO, symptomatic of problems that were exacerbated by nine years of neoliberal nightmare, but have always been a problem in Australia - ranging from the frontier wars through the Irish rebellion, anti-Chinese "pogroms" of the gold fields, white supremacism of the White Australia policy and deliberate exclusion of human rights from our national Constitution to what appears to me to be xenophobic racism of some right wing parties.

For the sake of us as decent human beings and as a society that aims to be decent, I suggest that we need to do better - possibly including:

• addressing structural discrimination (including indirect) in all branches of our Commonwealth public service - and this report, on The Guardian website, applies;
  
• providing adequately resourced mental health resources to those affected by direct or indirect discrimination in service delivery - and I note the outstanding actions on this, including Royal Commissions, lived experience consultations, and other active responses, by the Andrews Government, but there is a role for the Australian Government as well; and
  
• countering the hate that is taught - especially to children - by xenophobes in the community. Perhaps the lessons of the Safer Schools programme would be of use here.
  

When advocacy led to changes to the Victorian Equal Opportunity for trans and gender diverse (TGD) people in 2000, that had to be followed up by a wider "education" of the community: the advocacy had deliberately worked very hard at humanising the TGD community, and the education continued that. That was continued afterwards by others - for instance, under Commissioner Nixon the Victoria Police used to provide a human library for recruits (which, IMO, had some flaws, and needed to be tied in with firmer direction against discrimination and ongoing work against unconscious police [as done by some overseas police]). With respect, I suggest that there is a need for such measures on a permanently ongoing basis for all government departments (and I am aware the Andrews government is working on rolling out the DPC LGBTIQA+ policy more broadly, for instance), and, in the case of police, mental health support to ensure that the trauma they can experience in their duties (which I have written about previously - several times) does not lead to a hardening of their hearts. On that, the ABC article I have linked to is an excellent example of humanising the effects of problems.

This is a complex issue: no reply to this email is necessary, but I hope these views will be given due consideration.

 

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Finally, remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing.