12:00 is the time that were meant to be starting and it's just turned 12, so we might make a start.
We've got about an hour and a half here.
Look before things get started happy NAIDOC Week everyone. Happy NAIDOC Week yeah Pay the rent!
Hi everyone. My name is Kevin Yow Yeh, I am a proud Wakka Wakka and South Sea Islander man.
Before I go any further in foregrounding indigenous sovereignty of these unceded lands, I'd like to first begin by acknowledging the Turrbal and Yugara people as a traditional owners, caretakers and custodians of these lands and pay my respects to their elders, past and present and to their creation spirits also.
As I mentioned, it is NAIDOC week and today we have a special event organised for you on behalf of QUT Library and QUT, Faculty of Health. I will be your MC for today.
Basically, we're going to kick start the first half an hour with 30 min of Incarceration Nation, which is now a Logi winning award documentary as of a few weeks ago.
We're gonna do that for about 30 min and then I'm going to ask Neta-Rie Mabo and Bob Smith to join me up the front to have a bit of a debrief and unpack some of the themes throughout the
documentary.
NAIDOC Week often is, especially in recent years, referred to as a celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. And while that stands true, and we can't forget that NAIDOC Week come out of the struggle and come out of the fight. And a lot of what First Nations folk have today has only come about because of the fight.
And we know that NAIDOC week first started as a day of mourning in the 1910s and 1920s, I believe.
And it's come to be a massive week in the calendar in the Australian calendar. Not just for First Nations people, but especially for First Nations people.
We can't celebrate our wins and our achievements without also looking at our struggle. And NAIDOC week has always been an opportunity with a captured audience to talk about issues impacting First Nations people in communities. And today will be more of that.
So without any further ado, we might make a start on Incarceration Nation. I will acknowledge that some of the content is quite heavy for those who aren't familiar with the, with the documentary. But that is the reality of First Nations people in the colony. There are some heavy themes, but we'll unpack that more with Netari and Bob as well.
So, yeah, let's, let's get that started. Thank you Sally.
Might just stop there and I'll welcome Kevin back to the microphone.
Yeah, bit confronting some of that footage and some of the themes that come through, especially if you're not familiar with the documentary.
So a couple of weeks ago, Incarceration won a Logi for factual documentary, I believe. Every so often, I think the film has been out for about a year-and-a-half now. And I know I've been to a couple of these events where we showcase the film and also speak to families or individuals that are working in that space.
And on that note, I'd like to first introduce our first speaker.
Bob Smith is a Kamilaroi man born on Yugumbeh country and raised on Malanjali country out in Beaudesert. Bob is an educator, works in the education space. Bob has worked in child safety in the out-of-home space as well. Youth programmes and men's groups. Bob does some work in the creative arts space as well as a way of supporting mob to come through healing in different ways.
Also, Bob currently works for Education Queensland, but today is here as a community member.
Thank you, Bob.
Neta-Rie Mabo is our next panel member, joining us.
Neta-Rie is a Miriam and Mumburra woman, is a mother, an artist, youth worker, activist, and currently works as a state youth programme manager at Sisters Inside, which is an independent community organisation based here in so-called Queensland, which advocates for the collective human rights of women and girls affected by the criminal legal system. Can you please make Neta-Rie feel welcome.
So this is our second event Neta-Rie and I have done for NAIDOC week and this is probably her 14th.
So when I messaged to her last night, I reckon, Hello Mrs. Naidoc week.
But no it's an absolute pleasure to be joined today by Bob and Neta.
Folks, this yarn will go for about a half an hour. We'll leave some questions for the end, but I'm very happy to make this conversational as well. And if there's any time that you have any pressing questions, by all means, jump in and do that.
Bob, I might start with you if that's okay.
Pretty confronting footage. I know we've watched it a few times together. What's your initial take from… not even thoughts, what do you feel when you watch that? Funny, not funny. The feeling sitting there, Next to sis, two kids. It's still sickening to the stomach.
These type of Docos need to be made to allow the truth-telling. But it's not lost on the reliving of trauma for mob to have to watch this time and time again. We see it on NITV, we see it on our media outlets a lot of the time. But to see it captioned in the way that it is still a big kick.
That stokes quite a bit of emotion, really. The fact that we're in 2022 and still having the same yarns.
And having mob still going through the same experiences. It's just disgusting.
Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. I know when we watched when it first come out, mob from across the country were dialling in to watch it. And I remember personally just feeling quite Oh, oh, that's... okay. Yeah.
That's sort of where we're, where we're left with.
Neta you and I've spoken at length about this documentary. What are your... we'll talk about your work in a moment, but what are your initial thoughts and feelings?
I know you and I had to walk out for a moment. I still feel like emotional, just watching that short bit and every time I've watched it, I get so emotional. Emotional now just even... I shouldn't have watched it. So, I could talk about it but just the seeing the visuals of the brutalization of black bodies is so... So traumatising just to see it and not ... but also understanding that this happens all the time.
And in the work that I do, this happen, this is not like just here and now and just random there's so many times that these things haven't been filmed or haven't been spoken about in public. And just seeing it together, put like that. It, it brings up so much emotion and it's so difficult to see. So difficult to see.
I think, I think Bob you raised a good point earlier. Like this is something that we see often, whether it be incarceration specifically, we're not unfamiliar with deficit imagery that fills our Australian TVs of First Nations people. It serves a purpose, right, it keeps the status quo where it is and keeps black fullas where we're meant to be on the racial hierarchy, which is at the bottom.
And if we're at the bottom, that black women are at the very bottom of that.
Neta-Rie, some of the work that you do at Sisters Inside. And when I was managing a bail
programme, I got the privilege of working with Neta-Rie in different spaces and having same clients and stuff like that. Can you tell folks here at QUT some of the work that you do at Sisters Inside and around the bail stuff that you do?
Well, majority of the work I work with girls. And I think that like in films like this, and a lot of times when we're talking about this, girls are actually left out of the conversation. And I think that it's important that we do talk about girls and we actually acknowledge these girls because they are the future and also they are the fastest growing demographic in the criminal injustice system.
And so, when just thinking about what prisons that we have in this state, we have three children prisons here. In all those prisons, we lock up girls. And in two of those prisons, a majority of the time it's 100% Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander girls. In the other prison that isn't always 100, it never gets to 100%. You think about, it's actually 80% Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander girls. You think the other 20% would be white girls, but it's actually Pacifica and African and other girls of colour. And probably white girls only probably make up 1% of that population.
And so when you look at our youth prisons, you actually see how racist our systems are because it's not just the girls, it's also the boys like in the newest prison that we have in this state, there's literally, I would say, only like 10% of white and the rest of all colour.. children of colour, Aboriginal and Torres Strait.
So, we have this, we have a problem. It's a definite problem, but it's not like children or children of colour. It's the system and the systemic racism that, that gets children to be in those places. And we, as adults in this community, in any community, we have a responsibility to take care of our children, and we actually, we put so much money into policing and so much of what I would say is already been said, but we put so much money into policing. And they are the root causes of why children end up in these places.
And it's not even just those, but it's also like the child protection system that is pretty much the pipeline from there to prison to then the adult prison system. And it's all controlled by the government.
And so when we, I think it's really important that we always make it, make it known that it's not our, it's not us. It's not black fullas or any people of colour. It's the systems and systemic racism, racism is the major issue.
And I was talking to somebody not so long ago, probably a week ago. And she was, she couldn't, she didn't understand when I kept talking about systemic racism. I think that ... I never thought that people didn't understand that. Like obviously it's something that I know and feel and understand and see every single day when I walk into a youth prison.
But, um Kevin had shared this, on your little holiday, this imagery of some pictures of black Watch House List Yeah. And that it was like, it was like in the 1920s. It was pretty much all Aboriginal people being removed from places to other places. And that was just a clear example that I can tell this lady, this is systemic racism. This is how the policing system started in this colony.
And it continues to be the same and it hasn't changed. It's always the other that is being locked up and it will continue to be the same unless we abolish the police, defund them.
Yeah. Neta, thank you for that because I do want to speak to you about, i know you identify as a prison abolitionist I wanna yarn to you about that and what that looks like and what that means.
You spoke about the root causes. And we know that when we consider the social determinants and the causes behind the causes, the beginning of that documentary speaks to past racist policies and acts of administration. They talk about the sale and protection of Opium. They talk about the Assimilation Era. They talk about the Integration Era.
These were all a part of the recipe was known by the time that so-called Australia was invaded.
Folks knew exactly what right moves to make. Race plays a powerful construct here in Australia. We know that race is a social construct. It's not real.
There's more things that connect me and Sally here biologically than makes us different. But then why out of 25,000 different ways that we can be different do we focus on maybe the half a dozen ways that we are similar. These are the, when we think about nose shape, eyes colour, the colour of the skin, and stuff like that. Race is a powerful mechanism here and it served the purpose.
Bob, you've got boys, we've got boys. High school and primary school, when you watch films like this, as a black man, what does that, what does that make you feel in terms of our future generation?
A few things I feel within it. I guess for me, making sure that my two boys come along to experience these type of truth-telling yarns is because we don't often get these truth-telling yarns happening in our schools, in our communities.
And so where better to learn than come and listen to your father spin yarns and watch these type of docos The reality of it is that these type of docos are part of our normal lives in our house. And so showcasing these truth tellings, we enable. My fear or how I feel about it, is the generation that we currently have. are still experiencing the same experiences that we had going to school, um, in our communities. If not worse, in some communities.
I remember growing up in the community in which I did, and often it would be a normal occurrence to have the police waiting up the front of our school waiting for mob to walk out. No fights, nothing going on, just purely standing there on standby. That in itself isn't over policing. Often Just having them waiting by the bus turnaround to make sure kids are paying their fair to get on the bus. If not putting them in the back of the paddy wagon, That's, if that doesn't instil trauma in you as a young fella I don't know what does in some areas.
But for me, I think the scary part is that we do have a lot of communities away from cities, away from urban areas that are experiencing this ten times over. The experiences that we had. And it's been normalised. And there's been so much disempowerment in some communities that some mob don't feel safe to speak up or call out.
I think truth-telling for me with our two kids is critical. So they go back to their communities and speak to their family and their friends and be able to encourage those yarns, and go this is the reality that's happening. Um, it might not happen to us as individuals, but it happens to our other family members and community members across so-called Australia.
Yeah. Thank you, Bob. Neta-Rie you identify quite proudly as a prison abolitionist. You work at Sisters Inside. Your colleague and friend, Deb Kilroy is very loud and vocal about prison abolition in so-called Australia. Can you explain for folks who aren't aware of that, what does that term mean? What's that look like?
So I guess I understand in my time they'll ...like, I probably will die before there'll be no prisons. But when I think about a world with no prisons, the journey that I'm taking is about decarceration. And that is the journey that I'm on, is decarceration And that starts with my mind first, we got to stop thinking in a way that is to... like policing, literally like being the ...
I don't know I've just been thinking about COVID times and people not wearing masks and people like ah they're not wearing a mask. Oh my God. And just thinking, well, we actually need to calm down, let them ... that person, and we just move away from them. Well, you know what I mean? Like we don't have to... the cop in our head needs to shut up and we need to push them away. And so that's kind of like the start of it.
So yeah. I don't know how I'm answering that question, but ... it is, I know it's a very loaded thing to hear, prison abolition, because everybody thinks about… ah where are all the criminals gonna go and whatever. But when we think about who's actually in our prisons, it's actually not, not as bad as what people would assume.
So a majority of women, and I would say probably 90, 99% to 99% of children are on remand and they haven't even been sentenced for whatever crimes they've been charged with and a majority of the time, they wouldn't even be sentenced to a term of imprisonment.
And then you think about when ... who's in prison are the most marginalised of our community, those that are living in poverty, those who are struggling, experience terrible racism. Like, I feel like a very privileged black woman in my position where I am. But there are so many more that aren't. And so there's all these layers of who's in prison that we just assume that these are hardcore, scary people.
But really they're just like people like us that have made a mistake in their life. And when we think about how we treat those people and also think about those people, we can not, we should never judge people by the worst thing they've done. We've all done stupid things or things that were embarrassed about or really bad things. We probably don't want anyone to know, but we don't, we don't necessarily judge ourselves for those bad things and call us offenders and criminals for the rest of our lives or whatever it is.
And I'm pretty sure everybody has driven around and texted or not worn a seat belt or anything like that. So, we're all not perfect. So, I think that I don't know if I'm going off track here, but to change the way we think about who's in prisons is the first step and a part of the decarceration journey to abolition. And I think if we value people more than we value property, and we actually make that a priority as a society. We wouldn't actually need prisons because when you take care... in the work that I do at Sisters, a lot of the work with young people is actually about building relationships and building healthy relationships.
Because once you have the foundations of healthy relationships, then from those healthy relationships, you can go on and to have other healthy relationships. And then when you feel connected, heard, seen and all these things, you feel like, you feel like you're part of a community and then you're more likely to prosper in all areas of your life.
And so, part of what I do and what we do at Sisters Inside, especially with young people, is building healthy relationships. And it seems like a crazy thing that that's what I do, but that's all I do is I just have very genuine relationships with young people and girls to make sure that they can then go on to have healthy relationships.
Once they have healthy relationships, they're less likely to be in domestic violence relationships, they're less likely to be violent, they're less even if they've grown up in a house or a place that is extremely violent. And that could even be in being in the care system, which is extremely violent.
Majority of girls that I've known that have been in care for a majority of their life as they get in adulthood, they end up in the most violent relationships because of the violence of the State.
And so being able to have relationships that are healthy and creates secure attachments then that can change the world. And that's what we gotta talk about.
When we think about institutionalised racism, we think about how these different pillars of society intersect and interact with each other. How does the school system, talk to the justice system, how does the justice system talk to the criminal justice system, the prison system, health system.
Neta-Rie, just touching on remand, when I was managing the bail and order programme about 12 months ago, the State, as in child safety, had taken full custody of care of a young person.
This young person was sitting out in BYDC so Brisbane Youth Detention Centre for I think by the time we got the referral, I think two months, this young person was literally in the care of the State. They were reminded because they didn't have a bail address.
So we're going to take... so that the State goes.
Mum and Dad, you're not meeting the care and protective needs of your child. I'm going to take that child. So the child is in care with the State Now, the law says if you don't have stable accommodation, then you can't receive bail.
So the young person sitting in BYDC, we get the referral, we go out to see young Johnny, we'll call them young Johnny, So your, your literal carers are the State, how are you sitting?
We're having this conversation with him and his worker. How are you... if the state can't find your accommodation and you're in their care why are you out here in BYDC? Child safety couldn't answer that.
And that Neta-Rie, I mean, you'll probably be able to flesh it out a little bit more. You've been in this space a lot longer than me, but like how often do you see...and their on remand! So you're not actually being charged with anything yet. We've got young people spending two, three months out here on remand?
We hold young people to our higher standard of behaviour than we do white men. You know, you, you see some of the shit that goes down on the news and you're like, Oh my God, how are they walking free and we've got... in this colony we lock up young people from the age of ten. I know there's conversations about raising the age. I mean, we're not even on par with the United Nations, the International Standard, and the age which is 14.
and Neta-Rie in terms of that remand... and like in terms of how child safety, youth justice, places where I've all worked, the red tape often is a massive issue. And when you think about legislative powers, you think about QPS and the powers that they have, and the powers that they try to always increase and that always benefits and discredits or impacts rather negatively on, on another group of people, often Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Bob, in terms of schools, I know you do some work in that space. We know that in this jurisdiction, so-called Queensland, its principals have an overwhelming amount of autonomy and power in how they run their ship.
What are ways that maybe schools could support young people who are... because we know that there's research that shows it that when principals received that autonomy and that type of power, that prison, that school to prison pipeline increased. Suspensions and expulsions lead there. If kids
don't have somewhere to go, between 9 and 3, that's a lot of time on your hands, right? Especially if you're hungry. Bob any thoughts around the ways that schools might better support ....?
One of those standards I like to throw around a lot in it, you know, teachers have a big workload in schools. They have large classes, but you know teaching standard 1.1 I throw that around all the time to teachers - know your students. We have so many teachers that don't know how to manage
behaviour because you don't know how, you don't get taught how to manage behaviours when you become a teacher.
Let alone having experience or knowledge around trauma, what does trauma look, sound, feel like for some of our young people. What is going on for that young person? There's no shared case
management around supporting young people in schools a lot of the time. There're silos that take place.
I think relationships, you know Neta-Rie touched on that earlier, is critical in the way of keeping our young people, having that trust with someone. We speak to... I want to touch on earlier when I'm finished school, walking out of school and having police waiting there just to make sure you pay to get on the bus. I don't think they'd have anything else to do.
That type of stuff causes you to disengage from education. You build fear, you build anxiety, all these different things that come along with... let alone any other experience of racism you faced within our educational system.
For me, if teachers and schools actually had the time, resources and understanding around white fragility, around racism, around oppression, around unconscious biases, around all these different things, rather than just focusing on our one little cultural awareness session that we do once every couple of years, that understanding would broaden a little bit. That's the beginning point - that'll then support you to know your students.
For me, stop suspending kids and kicking kids out of school, For the most littlest things. Swearing in class. When you live in a country town, or a discrete community and you have one high school. The next high school is three or four hours away, there's no other opportunities there. So, then you have no other option a lot of the time, but that pipeline.
A lot of schools are no longer do inter-school suspensions, they do out-of-school suspensions because they don't want to be seen to babysit.
What then happens when mum and dad are at work? Little Johnny has been kicked out of school, on suspension. Like little Johnny going to do what? There's so much work that needs to come along, but the second part to it for me is I see schools need to build better relationships with our communities.
Allow that self-determination and co-design methodologies that take place with our mob, So mob can work with systems.
Say, this is how we need to do business to intervene and support our young people. These are the resources, these are the funding requirements we need in community, not in the schools, are in the systems - in community. We can have local decision-making. So, we can have local determination and a say in how we do business here in support our young ones.
So for me, ultimately, schools having an understanding around a few different things there that I mentioned, especially around trauma. There's a lot there.
But then the second part is government and communities coming together and co-funding having those arrangements. But rather than sitting there and telling mob how to care after their young ones or how to do things in their community, sit down and ask how they want to do it, what's worked.
We'd been failed that many times before by systems. I think we're in a position to say what needs to happen. Yeah. I think you're right. In terms of what works. Obviously, prisons aren't working. They show stats and figures from the very beginning of this documentary about how prisons aren't working.
And I think there was a comment from one Aunty she said, well, who's holding the Treasurer accountable? Because at some point we've got ... who's holding the... Here we go. In terms of, let's say, you don't care about humans, who cares? they break the law. Go and do the time. Even if you don't care about humans, don't care about social justice. Don't care about history and the, the causes behind the causes. Just looking at, looking at it from an economic point of view and the money that's spent in these spaces and places, it's not working.
So this is what I know Neta, Bob in your respective spaces I know often we are talking about well, why can't we try something differently?
Nayuka Gorrie was on Q&A, I think two years ago and that was one of the only episodes that got pulled because there was an all-women’s panel, and they swore too much. But I remember Nayuka Gorrie saying quite specifically in that episode, Australia lacks the imagination to think of a world without prisons.
When you think about how, you know, Australia was a penal colony, when you think about the history of this place, it's very easy to stay in that pocket, right? And this is where a lot of people don't know the history of this place.
And Dr. Deb, who I have the pleasure of working with even this semester, looking at the social determinants of health, looking at the causes of the causes, Dr. Deb and I and our peers working in that space are a big part of that unit is letting folks know that the circumstances in which we find ourselves in are not our fault. The health disparities, the life expectancy gap, the mass incarceration, the overrepresentation in all these different, none of that is our fault.
And if we want to play Hansel and Gretel and follow the breadcrumbs. Well, it leads us right back to the beginning of colonisation.
Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson speaks of post colonisation and Australia not being that. She argues that until settlers of all colour and creed return to their mother lands, this is not post
anything. We're very much in the thick of it. Yeah. Obviously, folks aren't returning home. This is your home and we all got to share it. But then why is it that we find ourselves dying ten years younger?
Why do we find our nephews and nieces being mass incarcerated in these places? Something that I would encourage you to do is consider the history of this place and why, why do we find ourselves with some of these statistics that this documentary shows?
We only got a few minutes left. I'm wondering if there's any questions. For for Neta-Rie or Bob?
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your impressions of that shocking film that we've all just shared and learned lots from. My first impression was anger. That we could be a society today that enables and allows this to happen.
And then I'm thinking, what can we do? What can we do? And I love that principle Bob, you said about co-design. Because I think that's a powerful way where we can collaboratively work together to rectify this massive wrong.
But I also looked at that history. I hadn't thought about that before. It's really, really insightful.
Thanks to think when we were actually a penal colony. But also those people that you showed were white male leaders. And we are now still living in the legacy of that policy and that structure of government and the systems of government.
So do we have a power to create change in our systems to remove some of that institutional bias and systems. And if so, how do we do that collaboratively together with community?
So for me, one of the biggest things that I'm constantly having conversations with non-indigenous folk about. We often hear people saying where allies, Well, how can we do, What can we do better?
Do more lifting than what we're doing as mob, because we're getting ... our grannies and everyone that's gone before us are extremely exhausted. It's triggering, you're constantly reliving trauma.
The second part is across this nation, we have that many documents authorising environments, policies, mandates that government institutions should be enacting, should be doing. It's time that our non-indigenous counterparts learn what those documents are, those agendas, all these
commitments that federal, local governments have made and start holding them to account.
Why don't you have an Aboriginal person sitting on your governance? Why don't you have an
Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person sitting on your policy and decision-making bodies and start calling them into that account.
Because as long as that doesn't happen and hold them responsible to their role descriptions,
whoever creates these policies and agendas. They continue to make policy and legislation and what not based off of their privilege, based off of their world. And what that looks and sounds like.
For me, one of the most powerful tools I have found is working with community to walk alongside those non-indigenous folk as well. To be able to let them know that they've got that supportive community for advocating. Because there's nothing worse than having a non-indigenous person advocating for mob without talking to mob about what they want or need.
So it's not speaking on behalf of mob. But if mob feel like things need to be challenged and whatnot, then walking with yeah, allowing opportunity. Lost my train of thought. Yeah.
Okay. Thank you for that question. And I think the reality of the situation is that First Nations folk only make up 3% of the population. The heavy lifting has to be done by non-indigenous people and you got to pay the rent. There’s no good coming to NAIDOC events to celebrate the dance and the art and the paintings. If we're not also going to be across the struggles, right? So on that note, pay the rent..
and so on that note on behalf of QUT library, on behalf of the faculty of Health, my colleague, Dr. Deb Duthie, Sally, who's here today, Nicole who's the QUT Librarian, and Kate who's on holidays. Thank you very much for joining us today and thank you, Neta-Rie and Bob Smith for joining us as well.
Thank you.
