Tory Shepherd: Australia is not the US, but we still have far too much in common
As Australians watch protests continue across the US, we are right to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Not least because much of George Floyd’s death holds a mirror to our own abysmal record, writes Tory Shepherd.
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Are you feeling relaxed and comfortable?
Grateful to be in Australia, and not the burning streets of the not-so-United States? Are you a good, quiet Australian?
That’s what the Federal Government wants.
But we should be feeling distinctly uncomfortable about what’s happening in the US in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.
George Floyd, whose death you can watch on YouTube. As he dies, he pleads again and again: “I can’t breathe,” as a cop kneels on his throat. As his life ebbs away, bystanders plead with (now former) policeman Derek Chauvin to stop asphyxiating him. You can watch as he calls for his mother.
Our Government would like Australians to stay quiet despite the obvious parallels with our own history.
Maybe it’s time we were noisier, and angrier, in the face of hundreds of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Including David Dungay, who died in police custody. Who also said to his captors: “I can’t breathe”.
As the protests in the US fire up, they have lit a spark here. A spark the Government would like to douse swiftly.
Our leaders urge gentleness instead of anger, calm instead of the storm. While in the US President Donald Trump calls for a response so disproportionate as to be apoplectic, unhinged and violent.
But, really, we’re not so different.
Our two countries have a shared history of not hearing the pain those black deaths cause.
A shared history of enslavement, of occupation, of gaps of all kinds. Of health gaps, of human rights gaps, of incarceration gaps.
Alongside those colour-specific blinkers, Australia and the US share a deep belief by many in power that protesting a wrong is, in itself, wrong.
President Trump went straight to DEFCON when the protests over George Floyd’s death started.
He immediately started painting them as chaotic outbreaks, with “terrorists” and “thugs” as the main protagonists.
It was entirely proportionate for Americans to take to the streets in pain, and in fury. While the organised protests have been mostly peaceful, there are increasing outbreaks of looting and violence.
But it is crafty, mean and disingenuous to ascribe that violence to the core protest, which is fighting against structural violence, racist police, and deep inequalities.
President Trump would have you believe it was the antifa, the hard Left Anti-Fascist League, which is behind the protests.
The FBI has found no evidence they are any part of it. That is a man with small hands throwing a large red herring.
The situation in all those US cities started escalating when his rhetoric ratcheted up several notches. When he declared: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
When the cops started shooting rubber bullets at people on their porches, started bashing journalists just there to record the events, and started herding crowds into dead end streets. When a cop pointed a weapon at a kid sitting on their parent’s shoulders.
When President Trump kept merrily feeding the fire by threatening to send in the military and when the chopper hovered menacingly above the crowd. When he shouted at state governors to be more aggressive, to “dominate” the protesters.
His reaction to the pain of his people has been disproportionate and authoritarian. He’s trying to paint the protests as chaotic to undermine the fundamentally righteous basis to them.
But we’re OK, mate, aren’t we? How good’s Australia? None of that race malarky here, our leaders would like to think.
In 2005, with the sand still settling on the Cronulla riots, then-prime minister John Howard said there were no racial undertones.
The crowds sported Southern Cross tattoos and Australian flags, and targeted men “of Middle Eastern appearance”, but there were no racial undertones. Mr Howard liked his people “relaxed and comfortable”.
This week, his protégé Scott Morrison reflected on the protests in the US as though it was an entirely different world.
“As upsetting and terrible that the murder that took place – and it is shocking, that also just made me cringe – I just think to myself how wonderful a country is Australia,” he told radio station 2GB, warning against anything similar happening here.
“There’s no need to import things happening in other countries here to Australia,” he said.
“Australia is not the US.”
Then, just as Australia picked up the rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter”, we saw an Aboriginal youth thrown to the ground in Sydney.
Not just thrown – the footage shows a policeman sweeping the man’s feet out from under him while his hands are held behind his back, smashing his face into the brickwork.
Smashing the idea that everything is just fine, here. As if it ever was.
As protests pick up in Australia this week, Mr Morrison is hardly likely to teargas activists while he holds a Bible upside down.
But let’s not forget that just a few months ago he was threatening to outlaw protesters, calling environmental groups who were urging boycotts of resource companies “anarchists”.
Australia is not the US.
But we have in common our histories of violence towards black people.
And we have in common leaders who would prefer that we just stay quiet.
Tory Shepherd is a columnist for the Adelaide Advertiser.