Better to bash Aborigines than whites - Opinion

Phil Cleary
June 29, 2006
Source: The Age

THERE'S nothing like the sight of a scapegoat to fire moral indignation in the Howard Government. Queue-jumping refugees "throwing children overboard", un-Australian Muslims and trade union officials have all had their moment under the spotlight.

Now it's the turn of indigenous Australians, accused of chronic violence against women and children, to feel the heat. From condemnation of the alleged use of cultural defences to calls for an end to indigenous language and the teaching of traditional culture, we've heard many solutions over the past months.

"There is no such thing as a cultural defence to rape and murder," Treasurer Peter Costello told Parliament on May 23. Only days earlier, Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough described Aboriginal customary law as "a curtain that people hide behind".

What a shame Costello and Brough weren't in the Victorian Appeal Court in 2004 to hear the cultural defence offered to Iraqi Mazin Yasso (pictured). Despite an intervention order, Yasso had stabbed his estranged wife Eman Hermiz more than 20 times in broad daylight in Meadow Heights. The trial judge denied Yasso a defence of provocation, saying there was nothing his terrified wife had done that a jury might conclude could have provoked him to act in such a way. However, the Appeal Court's Justice Stephen Charles didn't agree.

"In Chaldean tradition (they're Christian) a wife's marital infidelity is a source of strong social disapproval not only for the wife but for the husband with the potential to result in a lifelong smear upon the husband who is considered responsible for the acts of his wife," said Charles. It didn't matter that there was no real evidence of an affair and that the dead girl's family vehemently denied it.

If Peter Costello so abhors cultural defences, why didn't he rail against the Yasso decision? Nor is it the first time such a cultural defence had been used. After Kemalettin Dincer stabbed his 16-year-old daughter Zerrin to death in 1981, Justice George Lush ruled that because Dincer was a devout Turkish Muslim he was likely to feel greater humiliation than an ordinary Australian father upon learning that his daughter might be having sex with her boyfriend. This was, he said, sufficient reason for such a provocation defence, based on culture. Dincer was found guilty only of manslaughter and sentenced to four years' jail. There was no public outcry.

From the chronically violent Peter Keogh, whose supposed personality problems were enough to allow a provocation defence after he stabbed my sister to death in 1987, to businessman James Ramage who was deemed to be suffering "adjustment disorder" when he strangled his estranged wife in 2003, the courts have bent over backwards to accommodate the foibles, cultural and otherwise, of violent white men. Four years' jail for Keogh, and the same for Kevin Crowe after he shot his wife dead in front of her two children in 1987. Eight years for Ramage. Do these sentences suggest our lawmakers have enshrined a woman's right to be free of violence?

And what about the unreported rapes and domestic bashings that until recently women dared not talk about? When they do "cry rape" there's always some bloke, as we saw with Sam Newman during the rape in football allegations, prepared to suggest that women lie about such things.

If the explanation for violence in the Aboriginal communities is to be found in their culture, how do we explain the now documented statistics concerning violence towards women in "whitefella" society?

The real truth is that violence towards women and children, whether in an Aboriginal community or behind the picket fence of middle Australia, is a product of misogyny and patriarchy, not cultural or ethnic disposition. That it took until 2005 for any Victorian government to abolish the barbaric law of provocation only shows how deep-seated is the misogyny. For although the law of provocation has gone, the excuses for "whitefella" violence towards women have not.

By the standards of any civilised society, mainstream violence towards women and the way our courts have interpreted it is a national scandal. Yet true to form, politicians, frightened by the potential backlash from the "men's movement", remain silent. Better to bash Aborigines than point the finger at white blokes who vote in the big cities.

If Peter Costello and Mal Brough are prepared to break with convention and attack the judiciary when the perpetrators of violence towards women are Aboriginal, why won't they point the finger at violent white men and compliant laws.

I rang Costello's office a few weeks back seeking an answer to that question. Although we often talked during my days in Parliament, to date there's been no reply. It only confirmed what I thought. The summit on Aboriginal violence was nothing but a political stunt that did not throw one shred of light on the extent and origins of violence towards women. And for that, Costello, there can be no defence.

Phil Cleary is a writer and broadcaster and former independent member of Federal Parliament. His latest book, Getting Away With Murder, deals with the Ramage case.