Recording: Is Australia 'doing better' on systemic racism?

Descriptive transcript

Thank you, everyone, for joining us at today's event.

Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that where I am, which is the campus of the University of Technology Sydney, is on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, land that was never ceded, and also, of course, the Gadigal people were the traditional custodians of knowledge for the land upon which this university is built, so pretty fundamental to our being here. I also want to extend my respect to Elders past, present and emerging on all the lands where every person joining us is meeting today, and have you do that as well.

So my name is Verity Firth. I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS, and I also lead up our Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. It's my pleasure to be opening this event today, because, in fact, it's a tripartite event co-hosted jointly with the Whitlam Institute, which, of course, resides within Western Sydney University, and, of course, the University of Sydney.

There's a couple of housekeeping matters that I want to quickly say before we begin. Firstly, the event is being live captioned, so to view the captions, you click on the link that's in the chat, and you can find that at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel. The captions then open in a separate window.

If you have any questions during today's event, there is an opportunity to ask questions from the floor. We just want you to type them into the Q&A box, and, again, you can find that Q&A box in the Zoom control panel. What that allows you to do is it also allows you to upvote other people's questions, so please go in there. If you see a question that's very similar to yours, just upvote somebody else's questions and try to keep them as relevant as possible to the topics that we're discussing here today.

Indigenous Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that race is the organising grammar of Australian society. Australian racism is built on stolen land, and as Professor Moreton-Robinson explains, "the unfinished business of Indigenous sovereignty continues to psychically disturb patriarchal white sovereignty in this country. It is this guilt, this unfinished business, that makes white Australia so desperate to own and host the nation's space. Everyone else who has arrived here since white colonisation is also treated with the same hostility. White Australia is almost childlike in its assertion that this country is ours. We did not steal it. It belongs to us. We are the boss of all of you."

With this history in mind and white Australia's inability to cope with our past, the question we're asking today is: how do we do better? The title of today's event, "Doing Better? Institutional and Systemic Racism in Australia Today", was inspired by a report released this year into the instances and responses of racism at Collingwood Football Club. Professor Lindon Coombes, who is one of our panellists today and we're very excited to have him with us, co-authored the report alongside Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt. I'm just going to read a brief extract from the report: "If racism is endemic throughout the broader community, it is not surprising to find it is within institutions such as sporting clubs. Racism takes many forms. It became clear in our discussions across the club that there are certain forms of racism that are more easily identifiable. Interpersonal racism includes things such as the use of racial slurs, violence or deliberate exclusion from opportunities. But racism is also structural and cultural, producing different outcomes for people who are not white and resulting, even if not intended, in a hostile environment for Indigenous people and people of colour. It is these more entrenched and tenacious forms of racism that people find harder to identify, to call out and address." The authors go on to point out that complaints about racism within the club are handled defensively, with an eye on public perception rather than internal reflection and action. In their words, "Nothing is learned from the experience and those who have stood up to raise issues feel they pay a high price for speaking out."

Those observations could be applied to most institutions, corporations or sectors in Australia. They can also be applied to other issues of structural discrimination, including issues of gender and sexual harassment in powerful institutions.

Tomorrow, the Government's Closing the Gap report will be launched. It's titled "Leadership and Legacy Through Crises: Keeping Our Mob Safe". This Sunday is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. How do we ensure that institutions reflect on their behaviour, learn from it and then change their actions? And how do we translate these actions to change the racist defensiveness that characterises Australian society more broadly? In short, how do we do better?

So, thanks for joining us all today. This is a big, important conversation and a huge thank you to our panellists. It's now my pleasure to hand over to Professor Tim Soutphommasane, who will be moderating today's discussion and Q&A. For those who don't know him, Tim is Director, Cultural Strategy and Professor of Practice at the University of Sydney. He is a political theorist and human rights advocate and he was, of course, Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner from 2013 to 2018. He is the author of five books, most recently "On Hate", which was released in 2019, and a regular columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian. Over to you, Tim.

Thank you, Verity, for that introduction and for so ably setting the scene for this afternoon's panel. I'm joining you from the University of Sydney and would like to acknowledge that I'm standing on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

As Verity has said, on Sunday we'll be marking the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, though here in Australia it's more commonly referred to as Harmony Day. That we call the International Day by a different name perhaps says something about how we struggle in Australia to talk directly and frankly about racism and racial discrimination, and that's one reason why we've come together from three of Sydney's universities to have this important conversation today.

It's hard to see how you can counter racism if you can't even bring yourself to name it. You certainly can't fight institutional or systemic forms of racism if you are unable to name it.

We've got a great panel this afternoon to examine how we can do better on this front, so let me quickly introduce our panellists to you. Joining us is Lindon Coombes, who is Industry Professor at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at UTS. He was previously a Director at PwC's Indigenous Consulting and has worked in Aboriginal Affairs for more than 20 years, including as CEO of the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples. Welcome, Lindon.

Also joining us is Antoinette Lattouf, who is a senior journalist at Network 10 and Director and Co-Founder of Media Diversity Australia. In 2019, Antoinette was named among the AFR's 100 Women of Influence and is currently writing her first book, titled "How to Lose Friends and Influence White People", which will be published in early 2022. Antoinette, welcome.

And finally, we've got joining us Dr Valentine Mukuria, who is Engagement Facilitator in the Office of Engagement at Western Sydney University. She's also an Adjunct Fellow at Western Sydney's Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative. Valentine holds a doctorate in educational policy and leadership and is currently undertaking a second doctorate at the University of Sydney on higher education and refugees in Kenya. She's held visiting appointments at Oxford and the University of London. Welcome, Valentine.

So let's jump straight into it because we've got a lot to cover and not that much time to do it in. I wanted to kick it off by asking our panellists to explain what institutional and systemic racism involves. Obviously, many of us will understand what it means but many of us might also find it unclear or confusing. I might begin with you, Lindon. Can you tell us what you understand institutional and systemic racism to involve and how do you see it in the work that you do at UTS?

Thanks, Tim. I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners on which I'm coming to you from today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. In the Collingwood report, what it was in that particular situation was particular structures and systems and policies and processes that don't allow racism to firstly be adequately identified and, when it is, be able to be effectively dealt with so that there is a process and a system.

One of the examples we used at Collingwood was that players were acutely aware of what would happen if they were late to training, if they missed a training session, if they missed a video session. They knew the penalties for that and what would happen and the process by which they would make right around that. They had no idea what would happen if they were involved in a racist situation. They had very little idea of how to adequately identify and be aware of that process and, indeed, then what would happen.

So you can have very good people with very good intent trying to do the right thing, but if those structures and systems are not in place and are not understood, those good people and that good intent can come to nothing and actually do harm.

Thanks, Lindon. We might come back to that issue around intent and impact later in our discussion. Valentine, can I turn to you now? How do you understand institutional and systemic racism and how do you encounter it in the work that you do?

I'd like to start with first acknowledging the traditional owners of the land and paying respect to Elders past and present and looking to the future generations with the hope that they carry for us. One of the first instances of an experience of racism was the description that one of my mentors said: "I did not realise that I was African until I left Africa." So the whole notion of racism was not necessarily anything that's in your conscience in terms of how you even think of the issue in and of itself.

After my many academic pursuits, it wasn't until I moved to Ohio when I realised that racism was real. It was something. But, like Lindon says, it's subtle, it's covert, you can't put a finger to it, which then makes it more difficult to deal with because, as much as it has the name 'racism', the evidence of its happening is not as explicit, and when you live in cultures where evidence has to be something objective, measurable, then you cannot rely on your gut feeling about what you've experienced as a racial incident.

So we have racism as the subtle and very covert forms of discrimination initially, primarily around your skin colour, things that you can't quite do much about, but then also around ethnic and ethnicity backgrounds. I usually say the line crosses over to as soon as your skin colour has been identified, the minute you speak and you speak with an accent, then you get into another different box of sub-racism categories. So I think it's something that is real that we can't quite put our finger to and it's deeply embedded within our institutions where, despite the best of efforts in terms of policies and implementation strategies and how to hold people accountable, it still does not solve the issue, particularly when we look at how organisations will put these policies in place merely as token achievements. So you have your token African American, your token person of a particular race and ethnicity, so the organisation cannot claim that for all intents and purposes, it seems to be open and is representative of the people, but then the reality is that the representation does not always equate to the dignity that the people represented should be treated with. Again, because you can't put a finger to it other than a gut feeling to it for the most part, it's your word against the system in terms of having the experience of racism.

Thank you, Valentine. We'll come back to that question of how we put a finger on racism and identify it when it's so subtle and elusive. Antoinette, can I bring you in? How do you understand institutional and systemic racism and how do you encounter it in the work that you do as a journalist?

I'd like to also begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. For me, the best way to encapsulate or capture what racism is is when we think about the theory or the suggestion that Australia is about a fair go and that, as Scott Morrison says, if you give a go, you get a go, and this idea that if you're hardworking, no matter what minority you are or what group you hail from, you'll be able to have equal participation and equal rights, and we know when we look at our institutions that that's not in fact true.

When we look at who brokers power and who has a voice, so whether it's politics and business and media, it's still overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. So when our systems and the dictators of power don't look like the rest of Australia, for me that system shows that we are not an equal country where everybody has a fair go and it counters that theory that if you just put your head down and work really hard, that model minority myth, that you'll get ahead. For example, we've had Chinese Australian migration since the 1850s but where are they in terms of in politics and power? So, institutionally, if you look at the pillars of democracy, we don't have an equal voice. Minorities continue to be shut out. And I think that for me speaks to our institutional racism.

So when we want that to be addressed, be it through policy, be it through who has a voice in our media, who is at the decision-making table? The people that are at that decision-making table continue to be that same – they look the same. They're the Andrews and the Michaels of the world. And when they are the ones who are confronted with the issue and tasked with addressing it through policy, through appointments, through strategies, and continuing to fall short, well, that system isn't working, and I guess to me that's how I see systemic racism.

Thank you, Antoinette and to our panellists, for kicking us off there. Lindon, I might bring you back in here. Just building off Antoinette's point about representation and that as a symptom of systemic racism, was this consistent with the findings that you and Professor Larissa Behrendt had with your review of the Collingwood Football Club? Can you talk us through how – you have already touched on some of this – how the systemic dimensions of racism manifested within that club? We talk about institutional racism as involving values or beliefs, attitudes, practices, as well as policies that involve discrimination or disadvantage. Can you sketch us a picture here of how you found systemic racism to have existed within Collingwood Football Club?

One of the issues, and probably the instigator of that process, was Heritier Lumumba, who has had a long-running list of complaints with Collingwood when he played with them around a decade ago and had always felt that those issues were unresolved. And when we started talking to Collingwood about the type of project that we would do, a lot of it was around – Valentine talked about how vague and covert and subtle these things are. One of Heritier's complaints was that he was called a racist nickname and that players thought it was OK because he thought it was OK, and it was a coping mechanism that a lot of people do at different times to fit in and sometimes it's just easier.

When we started that process, that particular issue was contested. People said, "No, we never heard that" and some people said, "Yes". Since the report, that is now a verifiable fact. So one of the issues that came back was around the defensiveness around that, the failure to be proactive, to meet these issues when they come up because they are complex and uncomfortable. But we ended that report into Collingwood saying they had the opportunity to meet the moment and that applies across the board. So being active, having an uncomfortable conversation early on, actually prevents the thing landing on your doorstep or finding out about it in the papers.

The other thing that we picked up on – and because I'm quite into my sports – is that globally, we see lots of players of colour dominate, so whether that be basketball in the US, NFL, a whole range of sports, Indigenous players here, there's no matriculation into coaching. They're quite absent. That's a global issue, not something just for Collingwood or the AFL. So to me that is a real indicator that something is not right here, that when you look at those percentages, great players doing great things, great minds within their respective sports, but somehow they're not making the mark in the coaching ranks or the administration of the game, and so that's another particular issue we sort of picked up on. But, as I say, Collingwood was just a little microcosm in a greater ecosystem and hopefully will be doing really good things to address that.

Watching the coverage of your report and the responses to it, I was struck by just how many of the issues you diagnosed in that report may well apply to organisations outside the AFL and outside sport as well. Reflecting on the response, do you expect other organisations to conduct similar exercises to what Collingwood did, or do you think the experience with Collingwood might deter other organisations from having searching examinations of their cultures and leadership on race?

Yes, a bit of both. I know that the AFL has distributed that report to every AFL team, and I am pretty sure they would have been onto that prior, and NRL clubs and others I think would have taken note because of the impact and the discussion that went on. We were contacted just recently by Club Respect, which is based in Victoria, and do work around respect within community sports clubs and they have taken parts of that report – some of the recommendations and have distributed that out to community clubs and that was one of the proudest things that has come from this.

But what I would say and what I have said is a bit of a warning, that what I was saying before, these complex and uncomfortable conversations, if you're a CEO or you're a senior leader in an organisation and something happens under your watch, and it lands in the newspaper tomorrow, that's a much more difficult conversation to have, rather than one 12 months ago when the issue arose. So I would say to people, and as a former CEO, I wouldn't want to be going to my board to explain the front page of The Australian when an issue happened under my watch and I didn't address it.

If I could just add there, Lindon, that seems like a really rational and responsible strategy, "Let's deal with the problem", rather than it become even more problematic and the front page of a newspaper. But I would suggest that people don't want a mirror held close to them and they would prefer to, in my experience, from what I have seen in the media – they prefer to sweep it under the rug and hope it goes away, that these uncomfortable conversations are too uncomfortable, A, to have it in the first place and then, B, to actually do something about it.

Yes, I would say to that it is a natural human response. If your friend is accused of something, your immediate response is to defend them because you know them as a good person, and the culture within a footy club, these guys go in to physical contests, they are very tight, they have trained really hard, they have a connection to each other, and their immediate – one of the parts of that culture is that you put in for each other, you look out for each other, and so it is a difficult thing to have the wherewithal to understand the issue, to have the courage to stand up and, if your mate is doing something wrong – this is part of the discussion we're having around what's going on in our Federal Parliament as well with treatment of women – if your mate is doing something wrong, you have to have the integrity to stand up and do something about that.

Antoinette, can I just follow on from that and ask you – I'm struck by how in other countries, media exposure of racism can provoke systemic responses from organisations and leaders, but yet we have had series after series of racism controversies in Australia and it feels to me as though media exposure doesn't necessarily guarantee that response. You work in the media. How do you make sense of this? Do you think it has something to do with how Australian media might be reporting or commenting on racism itself?

Yes, I can't speak directly to the coverage of Collingwood. I didn't monitor it too closely. But there has been some interesting research done on Australian media when it comes to opinion pieces, either across the digital platforms but also editorials delivered on television. It looked at who was delivering these editorials and based on different cultural groups, so it was Indigenous people, Asian Australians and Muslims, and whether or not the coverage was divisive and racially inflammatory. I've got the figures here. So it was 315 news items were analysed and 75% were negative when they were talking about Muslim Australians, 55% were negative when they were talking about Chinese and 47% were negative when they were talking about Indigenous Australians. But the interesting thing – I mean, that's pretty alarming itself but the interesting thing is that 96% of negative articles came from Anglo Australians or those with a European background, so those who tend to be more inflammatory towards minorities are overwhelmingly Anglo Australians. So I think the make-up of our media and how hard we interrogate racism, I think there's certainly a direct correlation.

Our reports – so Media Diversity Australia last year looked into who tells our stories. So it was the first time we got a snapshot of TV presenters, journalists and on-air talent. That's only half of – I guess we captured half of the picture, and that was how does compare to the Australian population and how is Australia doing in terms of being representative of its population when we compare it to the UK, the US and Canada.

The second part of that, which this report dabbles in, is what is the impact on coverage? How does this impact how hard we interrogate things, how much we stir and provoke things? Arguably some outlooks look as though – you know, fear and division is their business model, so creating a culture of understanding of cohesion isn't going to get them the clicks. There is definitely more scope for research on who is it that tells our stories and the impact of the stories that are told and how that may fuel or counter racism?

I think, Lindon, you mentioned what we are seeing in Canberra this week. What I noticed was some really amazing, strong female journalists who were interrogating the issue, who were part of the press gallery, who have skin in the game, who probably have lived experience, and I would argue 15 years ago, the press gallery wouldn't have had as many senior female editorial voices and those questions and that interrogation wouldn't have been as hard. So I am hopeful when I see what is playing out in Canberra it that if we work on having a more representative media, that that is part of the solution in terms of the way we have these uncomfortable discussions and that we're not actually adding fuel to the fire, trying to have nuanced conversations, and promote social cohesion and change.

Thank you, Antoinette. I might bring you in here, Valentine. Antoinette mentioned, and Lindon has mentioned too, the current groundswell of public criticism around sexual harassment and violence and we saw the marches around the country this week. During the past year or so, Valentine, we have seen a global movement around anti-racism inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. If you look at what's happened in Australia in the past few weeks around sexual harassment, violence and the shift we appear to have had in some of the public conversation about the issue, do you think a similar shift has occurred in Australia around racism as a result of Black Lives Matter? You work with students. You will have a sense of what many of our communities in Western Sydney might be feeling here. Do you detect a similar shift going on as a result of social movements and protests around race?

I think, yes, with the Black Lives Matter movement, I think one of the – it did two things in acting as a double-edged sword. So on the one hand, it raised public consciousness about the inherent racial divide in the US and, of course, with America leading the way in so many shapes and forms, it actually brought to the surface what has been surfacing under cover for decades, since Martin Luther King's speeches and efforts, and Rosa Parks', here we are decades later and still having the sort of racial divide that became quite explicit. I think that was the explicit part of racism that we can actually see and talk about.

It was actually also very interesting to see young people mobilise and actually be passionate about taking part or trying to recognise or be part of this movement that happened in the first place, and again it wasn't exclusive to youth of different backgrounds but just a whole general collection of views that were actually addressing the passion and the tensions that they feel around the whole racial issue and having an opportunity to put a name to something that has probably been a gut feeling for the most part.

Also, on the other flip side to it, there was the issue about the hypersensationalisation of this divide, as well as the polarisation. So Black Lives Matter became a movement that's between black and white, so the dichotomies of colours in that scale, so anything that ranged in between felt like it was – there was nothing left in behind in it, so you find people of other ethnic minority groups or those who do not identify as black or white dropped and there was a gap that happened in between that where we found that some of the students or some of the people, colleagues and community partners that I was working with did not identify with the issue simply because they did not identify as any one of the colours in the spectrum.

And it was interesting – one of the questions I got, and hopefully someone in this forum can answer it or someone in my lifetime will be able to answer it, is the terms 'black' and 'white' have been really entrenched in how we describe people and the language that we use, and in watching one of the media presentations in the US where a crime had been committed by a person of Hispanic descent, was described as 'brown' but you could see the covering that news had difficulties describing this person as brown and resorted to calling the person 'of Hispanic background', and yet when it comes to any other crimes, it's a 'black' person who committed or a 'white' person has committed X, Y, Z. So while it's what is the language that's used to describe it, I think in many ways the language itself becomes very inflammatory and then it creates the risk of leaving a lot of people behind who do not identify in those two polar contrast colours.

One of the things that then became difficult to do was to look at a situation that's been hypersensitised from the American context into Australian context and the thinking behind Australia as an 'egalitarian system' operating on the same principles of meritocracy, which like Antoinette mentioned, just work hard and you will succeed, and we know very well it doesn't work that way. But it seemed that it opened up an area that needs to be determined in terms of when looking at racial issues and when looking at how they are represented, the dichotomies and the labels that we put on them sometimes may help address an issue in terms of mobilising immediate action but it also poses the risk of leaving very many more behind where then the issue is not dealt with collectively. It's dealt with more of those who have been identified of a particular race.

So it was a very interesting way to look at it, where in many ways, it did promote a lot of social action and a lot of voice as to all these injustices, past and unfortunately present, but then it also calls to mind the question: are we just putting a bandaid on this issue, just, "Yes, we have heard about it and, yes, we are doing these things institutionally", but what about the depths of what is happening in these institutions and how are we addressing those and who is getting left behind simply because they are not identified in the issue itself?

Valentine, you raised a really interesting point in terms of those who have left behind. Something that I noted amongst some Middle Eastern communities of Western Sydney was I guess a lack of empathy towards the Black Lives Matter movement, which I found a little bit surprising – perhaps a separation from it, all because they're unsure where they were placed in it. They were neither black nor white. And they decided that it was perhaps easier if they just started posting "All Lives Matter" and separating themselves from being a minority. Of course, there's a pecking order. I refer to it as the hierarchy of hate, and in terms of racism, poor health outcomes and all the issues we see with Closing The Gap – we have Indigenous Australians at one end and white Australians at the other and then migrants and refugees somewhere in between. As you pointed out, it depends how dark your skin is, whether you have an accent. All of those things placed you somewhere in between.

I was fascinated and sometimes a little disheartened by those in the middle, like myself, who are brown or olive, who didn't want to identify or didn't want to sympathise with those who were worse off than them, that we came here and after a couple of generations we got our shit together – sorry, captions crew – and so should everybody else, or just being so uncomfortable with that language that they decided to just go with denying the issues, the very real injustices towards black people, and I use that term broadly, and I found that a little bit disheartening.

Valentine, any quick reflections on that?

Yes, I think it's almost the principle of divide and conquer, where the issue itself ends up dividing different people and the way that they identify. What then, unfortunately, happens is the reinforcement of the same racial issues. I think, Antoinette, what you are mentioning – there was almost a need to actually focus on the issue of the impact that this sort of thing has on people who have already been marginalised for the most part and people who have experienced difficulty as a result.

I think there's almost, to an extent, a lack of feeling or a lack of empathy as to what that could possibly be, or if there was empathy, it almost seemed distant because it's not representing who you are or what you're classified as or what you're labelled at. I think in many ways, as society, yes, we do want to label things so we are able to deal with them better and I think one of the issues and particularly looking at it also from the spectrum of university and community engagement, I think beyond just recognising racism and all the implications that come along with it, I think as a society we've continued to think in a deficit model, where there's always something that somebody else has short-changed or been short-changed about, and we rarely look at the strengths or the capacities that people will bring to the table.

So, even within our institutions, yes, you have your affirmative action and tokenism hires in employment, but then what the companies fail to recognise is, yes, they have checked their representation box but they're not harnessing the strength and capacities that is coming with the person and the background with which they bring into it. I think tha