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 in sydney is on the land of the gadigal people of the urination land that was never seeded 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 um 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 to 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 center 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 that i just 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 indigenous professor arlene morton robinson argues that race is the organizing grammar of australian society australian racism is built on stolen land and as professor morton robinson explains quote 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 space everyone else who has arrived here since white colonization 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 um 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 lyndon coons who is one of our panelists today and we're very excited to have here with us co-authored the report alongside distinguished professor larissa berent 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 that 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 color 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 behavior learn from it and then change their actions and how do we translate these actions to change the racist defensiveness that characterizes 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 panelists it's now my pleasure to hand over to professor tim supomasan who will be moderating today's discussion and q a for those and i can't believe there's anyone out there who doesn't know him but for those who don't know him tim is director cultural strategy and professor of practice at the university of sydney he's a political theorist and human rights act advocate and he was of course australia's race discrimination commissioner from 2013 to 2018. he's been he's 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 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 urination acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to their orders past present and emerging as verdi 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 panelists to you and joining us is lyndon coombs who is industry professor at the jumbana 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 lyndon also joining us is antoinette latuf who's 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 she's currently writing her first book titled how to lose friends and influence white people which we published in early 2022. antoinette welcome and finally we've got joining us dr valentine mercuria who is engagement facilitator in the office of engagement at the 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 panelists 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 and i might begin with you lyndon can you tell us what you understand institutional and systemic racism to involve and and how do you see it in the work that you do at uts yeah thanks tim i'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners on which i'm coming to you from today the ghetto people the urination um we sort of a collingwood report um and 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 in a system and one of the examples um 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 they missed a video session they knew the penalties for that and what would happen and the process by which they would make 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 um how to adequately identify and be aware 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 um those good people and that good intent can come to nothing and actually do harm thanks lynn and we might come back to that issue around intent and and impact later in our discussion valentine can i can i turn to you now how do you understand institutional and systemic racism and how you encounter in the work that you do um i think i'd like to start with um well first acknowledging the traditional owners of the land and paying respect to elders past and present and look into 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 that she said i did not realize that i was african until i left africa and 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 and after my many academic pursuits and working with different organizations it wasn't until i moved to ohio when i realized that racism was real it was something but um like clinton says it's subtle it's covert you can't put a finger to it and which then makes it more difficult to deal with because 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 and so we have racism as the subtle and very covert forms of discrimination initially or primarily around your skin color things that you can't quite do much about but then also around ethnic and ethnicity backgrounds and i usually say the line crosses over to as soon as your skin color 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 um it's it's it's a it's 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 organizations will put these policies in place merely as talking achievements of so you have you're talking african-american you're talking person of a particular race and ethnicity so the organization cannot claim that you know for all purposes and intense 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 and 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 and and we'll come back to that question of how we put a finger on racism and identified when it's so subtle and elusive angeline can i bring you in how do you understand institutional and systemic racism and how do you encounter in the work that you do as a journalist um i'd like to also begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet the radical people of the eora nation i guess today when i talk 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 what is it if you give a go you get a go and that this idea that if you're hard-working no matter what minority uh 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 and so when our systems and the dictators of power don't look like the rest of australia for me that system shows that we're not an equal country where everybody has a fair go um and it counters that theory that oh well if you just put your head down and work really hard that model my minority myth that you'll get ahead because for example we've had chinese australian migration since the 1850s um but where are they in terms of in politics and power and so institutionally we don't 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 and so when we want that to be addressed be it through policy be it through who has a voice in our media who's at the decision-making table the people who are at that decision-making table continue to be that same look the same 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 um systemic racism thank you antoinette and to our panelists for kicking us off there uh linda i might bring you back in here just building off antoinette's point about representation and that as a symptom of systemic racism uh was was this consistent with the findings that un professor larissa berent uh had with your review of the collingwood football club uh i mean can you talk us through how and you've really touched on some of this how the systemic dimensions of racism manifested within that club i mean 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 so one of the the issues and probably the the instigator of that process was herodia lumumba who has had a long running um 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 um a lot of it was around um the valentine talked about you know how vague and covert and subtle these things are and one of heridia's complaints was that he was called a racist nickname and that players thought it was okay because he he thought it was okay and it was a coping mechanism that a lot of people do at different times to fit in and you know sometimes it's just easier and and when we started that process that that particular issue was contested people said no we never heard that um and some people said yes and since the report that is now a verifiable fact and so one of the issues that uh sort of came back with around the defensiveness around that um the failure to be proactive um to meet these issues when they come up because they they are complex and uncomfortable um we end 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 you know the thing landing on your doorstep or finding out about it in the papers and the other thing that we sort of picked up on and because i'm quite into my sports is that globally we see lots of players of color dominate so whether that be basketball in the us um nfl whole range of sports indigenous players here there's no matriculation into coaching they're quite absent and that's globally not something just for collingwood or the afl and so that's to me um is a real indicator that something's not right here that when you look at those percentages great players doing great things you know great minds within their their respective sports but somehow they're they're not making the mark um in the coaching ranks or the administration of the game um and so that's another particular issue we sort of picked up on but as i say you know collingwood was just a little sort of microcosm in a greater ecosystem um and hopefully we'll be doing really good things to address that lyndon watching the coverage of your report and their responses to it i was struck by just how many of the issues you diagnosed in that report may well apply to organizations outside the afl and outside sport as well reflecting on the the response do you expect other organizations to conduct similar exercises to what collingwood did or do you think the experience with collingwood might deter other organizations from having searching examinations of their cultures and leadership on race yeah a bit of both um i know that the afl has distributed that report to every afl team and i'm pretty sure they would have been on to that prior and nrl clubs and others i 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've taken part of that report some of the recommendations and have distributed that out to community clubs and that was one of the proudest things that that has sort of come from this but what i would say and what i have said is a bit of a warning is that when i was saying before these these complex and uncomfortable conversations if you're a ceo or you're a senior leader in an organization 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 and so i would you know 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 um when an issue happened under my watch and i didn't address it i think if i can just add there linda that seems like a really rational and responsible strategy let's deal with the problem um rather than it become even more problematic and the front page of a newspaper but i would suggest um that people don't want a mirror held close to them and they prefer to um in my experience what i've seen in the media they prefer to sweep it under under the rug and hope it goes away that these uncomfortable conversations are just too uncomfortable a to have it in the first place and then b to actually do something about it yeah i would say to that it is a sort of natural human response so if your friend is accused of something your immediate response is to defend them because you know them as a good person and the the culture within a footy club you know these guys going to you know physical contests they're very tightly trained really hard they have a connection to each other and and they're immediate and one of the parts of that culture is that you put in for each other out for each other and so it is a difficult thing to have the wherewithal understand the issue um to have you know the the work the courage um to stand up and if your mates doing something wrong um this is part of the discussion we're having around what's going on in our federal parliament as well with um treatment of women if he makes doing something wrong you've got to have the integrity uh to stand up and do something about that i mean antoinette can i just follow on from that and ask you i mean i'm struck by how in other countries media exposure of racism can provoke on systemic responses from organizations and leaders but yet we've had series after series of racism controversies in australia and it feels to me as though media exposure doesn't necessarily guarantee that uh response um you work in the media do you how do you how do you make sense of this i mean do you think it has something to do with how australian media might be reporting or commenting on racism itself yeah i mean i can't probably speak directly to the coverage of collingwood i didn't monitor it too closely but there has been some interesting research done um on australian media when it comes to opinion pieces either in across the digital platforms but also editorials delivered on television it looked at who was delivering these editorials and based on different cultural groups that was indigenous people uh asian australians um and indigenous asians and muslims and whether or not the coverage was divisive and racially inflammatory and i've got the figures here and 75 when so it's 315 news items are analyzed and 75 were negative when they were talking about muslim australians 55 percent were negative when they were talking about chinese and 47 were negative when i was 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 the european background so those who tend to be more inflammatory towards minorities are overwhelmingly anglo-australians so i think the makeup of our media and how hard we'd interrogate um racism i think there's there's certainly a direct correlation our report so media diversity australia last year repeat um looked into who tells our stories if it was the first time we got a snapshot of tv presenters journalists and all on-air talent that's only half of we've got i guess we captured half of the picture and that was um how does that reflect our to the how does that compare to the australian population and how's 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 i guess dabbles in is what's the impact on coverage how does this impact how hard we interrogate things how much we stir and provoke things and arguably some outlets look as though you know fear and division is their business model um and so creating a culture of understanding and cohesion isn't going to get them the clicks um so i think this there's definitely more scope for research to look at what's the link between who it is that tells our stories and the impact on the the stories that are told um and how that may fuel or counter racism and i think lyndon you mentioned what we're seeing in canberra this week what i noticed was some really uh amazing strong um female journalists who are interrogating the issue who are 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 been um wouldn't have had as many senior female editorial voices and those questions and that interrogation wouldn't have been as hard um and so i think you know i'm hopeful when i see what's playing out in canberra that if we work on having a more representative media that's 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 actually trying to have nuanced conversations um and and promote social cohesion and change thank you antoinette i might bring you in here valentine antoinette mentioned um and and lyndon's mentioned too the current groundswell of public criticism around sexual harassment and violence and and we saw the the marches around the country this week during the past year or so valentine we've seen a global movement around anti-racism uh inspired by the black lives matter movement if you look at what's happened in australia in the past a few weeks around sexual harassment and violence and the shift we appear to have had in some of the public conversation about the issue and do you think a similar shift has occurred in australia around racism as a result of black lives matter i mean you you work with students you will have a sense of what many of our communities in western city might be feeling here do you detect a similar shift going on as a result of social movements and protests around race yeah 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 you know the inherent racial divide in the u.s and of course with america leading the way in so many shapes and forms it actually brought to the surface what has been surfacing undercover for decades you know since martin luther's king's speeches and efforts and rosa parks here we are decades later and still having the sort of racial device that racial divide that actually became quite explicit and i think that was an explicit part of racism that we can deal we can actually see and talk about and it was actually also very um it was very interesting to see young people mobilize and actually be passionate about taking part or trying to recognize or be part of this movement that happened in the first place and again it wasn't exclusive to um you know youth of different backgrounds but just a whole general collection of youth that were actually addressing the sort of passion and the tensions that they feel around the whole racial issue and having an opportunity to put a name to something that again has probably been a gut feeling for the most part but then also there was on the other flip side to it there was um the issue about the hyper sensationalization of this divide as well as the polarization so black lives matter became a movement that's between black and white so the dichotomies of colors in that scale so anything else that ranged in between felt like it was you know there was no no race left behind in it so you find that people of other earth is minority groups or those who do not identify as black or white dropped and there was a gap that happened um in between that where we found that um 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 colors 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 become really entrenched in how we describe people and the language that we use and in watching one of the media presentations in the u.s where a crime had been committed by a person of hispanic descent was described as brown but you could see the person covering that news had difficulty describing this person as brown and resorted to calling the person you know of hispanic background and yet when it comes to any other crimes it's a black person who commute committed it or a white person has done x y and z so i think 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 colors and one of the things that then became difficult to do was to look at a situation that's been sent hypersensitized from the american context into australian context and you know the the thinking behind australia as a quote unquote egalitarian system operating on the same principles of meritocracy which you know as like antoinette mentioned you know just work hard and you'll succeed and we know very well it doesn't work that way right but it seemed that it opened up um a sort of 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 the issue in terms of mobilizing 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've 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 passed and unfortunately present but then it also calls to mind the question are we just putting a band-aid on this issue you know just yes we've had about it and yes we're doing these things institutionally but what about the depths of what happening in these institutions and how are we addressing those and who's getting left behind simply because they are not identified in the issue itself um valentin you raised some really interesting points in terms of those who were left behind so something that i noted amongst um some middle eastern communities of western sydney um was that i guess a lack of empathy towards um the black lives matter movement which i found a little bit surprising um perhaps a separation from it all because they were unsure where they were placed in it they were neither black nor white um decided to it was perhaps easier if they just um started posting all lives matter um and you know and separating themselves from being a minority and of course there's there's a pecking order right you know i refer to it as the hierarchy of hate um and in terms of um racism um bad health you know bad 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 um and then migrants and refugees somewhere in between and as you pointed out whether it depends how dark your skin is whether you have an accent all of those things place you somewhere in between and what i was really i guess fascinated by and sometimes a little disheartened by was those in the middle you know like myself who are brown or olive um who didn't want to identify or didn't want to sympathize with those who are worse off than them that you know we came here and after a couple of generations we got our [ __ ] together um sorry captions crew um but you know and so should everybody else or just this being so uncomfortable with that with that language that they decided to just go with go with you know go with denying the issues the very real injustices towards black people and i use that for that term broadly um and i found that really yeah a little bit disheartening reflections any quick reflections on that valentine yeah i think um it's it's almost the principle of divide and conquer where the issue itself ends up dividing um you know different people in the way that they identify and what then unfortunately happens is the reinforcement of the same racial issues and i think like what you're mentioning um there was almost a need to actually focus on the issue of the impact that this sort of thing has on those or on people who have you know have already been marginalized for the most part and people who have experienced difficulty as a result and i think there's almost um to an extent a lack of feeling or a lack of empathy as to what that could possibly be or if there was the empathy it almost seemed like distant because it's not representing who you are or what you're classified as or what you're labeled at and i think in many ways as society yes we do want to label things so that we can be able to deal with them better and i think one of the um issues and particularly looking at it also from the spectrum of university and community engagement i think beyond just recognizing the you know racism and it's you know 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 shortchanged or been shortchanged 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 higher than employment but then what then the companies fail to recognize is yes they've checked their representation box but they're not harnessing the strength and capacities that's coming with the person and the background with which they bring into it and i think that's where when we do have these conversations about racism there's almost that niggling question as to are we really being authentic about this or are we also checking a box as to having discussed it and then put a bandit across it and one or two check um checkbox policies and life goes on that we're trying and we'll do better next time so i think there's a real need for particularly the dignity element to be part of the conversation about any of the isms that we talk about in the first place because representation is one thing but then dignity that comes with that representation seems to be a part that we fail to check the box as we move along okay so thank you valentine we've got lots of questions coming through and a mindful of time so i want to make sure that we put our questions or your questions to our panel there's a question here from c anderson about what is known about the effectiveness of different incentives to address racism in organizations so for example should it be financial incentives or social incentives or should it be about regulation and legislation another question from menaka cook i hope i pronounced that correctly who responds to antoinette's point here about working hard to get ahead um but marcus says this doesn't explain the biased people of color and the ignoring and overlooking we experience should we call it out or do we need a long and intense period of education through schools and institutions or will we have to wait three generations to get parity so pause for a moment take that of questions and throw to the panel um what do we think about the best way to address racism in organizations and do we think it's going to take a number of generations and do we need to do this through schools and education i think i would say that appointing a bunch of brown and black people into your organization alone isn't going to address racism so as we said you can tick certain boxes that's one thing you can appoint you can have affirmative action which you know i think is is important but unless you have really inclusive safe supportive environments these people are not going to thrive so again i can i can mainly speak um from a media lens and what we've seen um even you know at the abc in previous years where they would recruit a whole bunch of juniors and they would be indigenous and they would be indian and they would be asian and then two years within two years they're out the door um because there's um there's daily microaggressions there's overt and covert discriminations and it's an enormous amount of pressure to just pop people into a hostile environment or environment that's really not inclusive and go hey guys you're just going to fix you know decades of years of our problems thank you for showing up um you know the the bet they have less bandwidth to fail more pressure on them and it's just unfair um so i don't think appointments alone are the answer um i guess yeah i don't have the answer just to say that hiring more diverse people alone is not you know dealing with racist is how you manage racism not hiring you know a brown accountant is not going to solve your institution's problem with racism lyndon valentine thoughts on these questions yeah um [Music] we let off in our recommendations to collingwood with values we know looking at the culture of organizations we know that certain behaviours are rewarded not necessarily explicitly but in terms of promotion and the way things are and so we talked about that because culture and value is very big part of the footy team they talk about it a lot about what motivates them and so that was our very first sort of headline of recommendations is this is about your values and that from here on in collingwood has the opportunity as does every organization to know explicitly that they do not stand for racism that is in the past they own that they own that pass we spoke about truth telling as well but this is about genuine values of the organization giving people the opportunity to do that and to reward it in terms of being part of that culture so that you know to adequately address all of these things it's a full court press it's education it's values it's a whole range of things which we tried to touch on in our recommendations but um yeah the the awareness and education piece um is obviously vital valentine your your thoughts on these questions and we did have another question come through asking how does systemic racism occur in the education sector that you may have thoughts on too okay um thank you for that so i think the solution has to take into account a variety of approaches and strategies so incentives on the one hand much as you may put them in yes they will be able to achieve particular outcomes but i think without the sort of safe space around our working environments or the environments that we find ourselves in all we're doing is just um muting the actual voice of what people actually want to deal with um under the whole you know hidden behind all the discourse and i think what i've found is um in general like sometimes you'll have some policies or other strategies to address um you know including affirmative action and quotas and that sort of thing and when you get a person come in specifically on those sorts of programs they carry racial baggage where they're supposed to then automatically represent their entire race and um oh and to you if the person's personality is not one that um speaks well of the whole race and so then you get reinforcement of stereotypes as a result of an encounter and experience with a person so that in and of itself does not check the list however i think safe spaces need to be considered a bit more closely because i think when we start putting in some of the policies a lot of them end up being very punitive where people then don't know if they're being racist or if they're not by asking a particular question and then all that does is just give a pseudo sense of non-racial environment but in reality i still have my questions about someone of another race but i can't ask them because i might be branded racist and then suffer the repercussions so there's a false sense of security around some of these um incentives but i think the creation of safe spaces where people can genuinely ask and you know get to know people because i think a lot of times we also look at it just purely as a system without really looking at the individuals and making so the sort of culture that allows for this inquisitiveness in a safe environment where people can express themselves and still ask questions around that and i think there's also the sense of hypersensitivity from those who have experienced racism repeatedly so that there's a defensiveness around anything that they encounter so it has to be looked at from both perspectives of those who've experiences and those who've been perpetrating it in some shape or form in relation to education there's a whole lot that education can do but i think to an extent schooling can only do so much you can only breathe things down people's throats for so long before you realize that you left them a long time ago because they either don't believe in what you're saying or they become very um defensive about what they've been told about their predecessors and that sort of thing so i think there's a way that the education system needs to navigate the the space as a neutral space where then there's the building blocks where people of different traces can then have that open discussion about what racism means i think also one of the other things that um has a big role and one of my colleagues beverly miles had um a really good project that she ran as students as partners and this is something that we're seeing increasingly um here at western sydney university is the this the resource that we have in the students the capacity that we have in them and what they bring to the table and making sure that that's embedded in this learning environment so it's not just the one way this is what you're going to learn and then leave your lived experiences outside of the classroom so being able to tailor and explicitly look at reshaping curriculum where then these representations have a voice and a space in them and i'm just the last one i remember one of my lecturers gave us an assignment where we had it was one of the cultural classes and we had to interview somebody who was different from us and we had to define that difference but embedding that as an assessment made us go out of our converse comfort zones and get to know that other person and so i think it's small steps that will then lead to big strides but we still have a long way to go but there's also a lot that's happening underway so it's always our breath of pressure so we've got time for just one more rapid round of questions before a handover to leanne smith um i might just take three more from the list of questions in the q a i've got a question here from uh madeleine yan how do we tackle racism within people of color or amongst people of color another question from menika cook about whether we need to see changes forced onto organizations to have a different leadership that isn't uh quote white pale male and stale touched on that already a question from wendy flannery about whether we need to start a campaign to reject uh white australia policy ideas which still seem to unconsciously or subconsciously influence public attitudes and matt panay has a question how we get the majority in australian society to engage with ideas of white fragility white privilege and unconscious biases and met their notes i struggle even to engage my progressive friends and colleagues in such conversations as they become uncomfortable um i've got a tough task for our panelists i'm just going to throw each of you in turn to give um perhaps a quick final thought and you may want to address one of those questions if you can but antoinette i see you there waiting to go so i'm like yeah i think the racism the racism amongst people of color towards uh other minorities is a really interesting one because there is you know anti-black anti-asian anti-arab there are various forms of racism and i think until people really get educated and understand that there is a hierarchy of inequality um and that yes you may have experienced racism when you came over in the 70s as an italian or a croatian but that is a different experience to what indigenous australians understand so i think unless we really reconcile and understand the injustices first nations people face i don't think we can really comprehend or understand how other races where other racism sits relative to that that's kind of the st the starting point and what we haven't addressed um and which continues to plague our country um the other thing i think there needs to be more accountability if we want to talk you know there's that right right fragility and some of those words you mentioned um a problem with our media um and some of the regulators should people be found to be racially inflammatory and then roll out that oh but that's just freedom of speech i can't say what i say all these you know all these really fred you know all these really delicate socks um won't allow me my freedom of speech um and i think what happens routinely in our media is individuals and outlets are racially inflammatory they are divisive and there's very little in terms of what our regulators can do they're truthless tigers um you know alan jones was found to have helped incite the cronulla riots he just went on to have a higher rating show and then a program on sky news there's very little in the terms of repercussions for those who are racist in their commentary in our media they just seem to get promoted in a wider audience and anything that tries to counter that is apparently encroaching on their freedom of speech and so i think they can be the opinion centers and those who australians um and and and currently our framework doesn't hold them accountable thanks angela now lyndon a quick final thought from you uh final thought i'll just go back to the education one because i was um involved in a review of aboriginal education over around 50 years ago here in new south wales and we did a tour of uh schools in western new south wales my family is from up there warren and the over writing narrative was that aboriginal kids and aboriginal families were the problem they weren't coming to school and when they came to school they were problematic and my favorite question asking girls and some teachers there was why would an aboriginal kid want to come to your school and i'd always sort of stop them they they never thought about it this way like what are you doing as a school and you can apply this thing to organizations not how can we get but why would a person of color an indigenous person a young indigenous cadet want to work for you you make the business case to kids to come to your school you make the business case for kids to come to your footy club or to your organization and just that you know that tweaking people's thinking we were talking about um you know even progressive friends and talking about them just a little reversal in terms of how they might think about that can sometimes help thanks lyndon and a quick final thought from you valentine before i pass on to liam um i think one of the things um that would probably open up a kind of worms and probably still throughout history will remain unanswered is this um labeling so that we may be able to deal with so when we do speak about trace we speak of white people and people of color as if white were not a color and then when it comes to the description of you know black people or white people for that matter it's as if they're not part of an ancestry or a lineage they're just purely colors in that shape or form and i think for as long as we continue to have that sort of rhetoric that we accept and we perpetrate in terms of this division along color lines then it's going to be a perennial problem that we're going to have for the rest of the life because i think what that does when you do have the black and white dichotomy and having missed out on all the other shades of colors in between we don't address the issues of interracial differences and i think one of the things that needs to be at the forefront of our discussions is the judge or we are all equal but some are more equal than others but unfortunately whether we like it or not each person has their own inherent dignity and i think the sooner we recognize that the better and the easier it will become to deal with issues whether on an individual level or an institutional level because everybody has that right to that dignity and so one of the things that i've been um working on in one of the documentary series is what i call hashtag more than a color because then it becomes easier for you to deal with me when you realize that i'm more than a color and therefore i welcome you to deal with me as a person and not as a color that makes conversation interesting or just um inflammatory for that matter depending thank you valentine and thank you lyndon and antoinette there i'm sorry we weren't able to get to more questions in the q a we've only just scratched the surface but i want to thank our panelists for uh taking us through so definitely around many questions and many issues there my pleasure now to hand over to leanne smith director of the whitlam institute within western sydney university who will conclude this afternoon's event thank you tim um and a huge thank you to our fantastic panelists lyndon antoinette and valentin for bringing your expertise and your experience to this very frank and challenging discussion it's clearly not over thanks to to the superb staff at uts center for social justice and inclusion as well as the culture strategy team at the university of sydney and our own staff at the whitlam institute for setting the event up and bringing it to you all virtually it's so great to collaborate across universities on a topic like this look it's been over 45 years since the whitlam government ratified the international convention on the elimination of racial discrimination and enacted the 1975 racial discrimination act the question remains and i think clearly came out from this conversation how far have we come since 1975 and what does this say about the role and the effectiveness of legislation in terms of catalyzing and embedding social structural and institutional change what i think it says following from some of antoinette's comments is that you can legislate as much as you want but without political courage and leaders across all sectors who consistently model these non-discriminatory behaviors as well as accountability frameworks to hold leaders to account those commitments will simply remain words on paper no matter how far hard we're fighting at the working level and the final thing i'd say uh to wrap up today's discussion is that it's not an unimportant thing that australia's failure to demonstrate progress in eliminating systemic racial discrimination is becoming the dominant narrative about who we are as a people and as a nation internationally from issues of indigenous self-determination to racism in sport as we've discussed today treatment of international students and how we treat refugees and asylum seekers australia's reputation has fallen from being a principled middle power walking the talk of its international human rights commitments and reaping the foreign policy rewards of that stance today our genuine commitment to human rights is often doubted and our diplomatic positions on what's happening in other countries sometimes is perceived as hypocritical this affects both australia's credibility and our legitimacy in how we're perceived in our own region and across the globe and in multilateral forum so sometimes i think it pays to remember who we are and where we've come from and so i wanted to leave you with the words of of goff whitlam when he was addressing the house of representatives on the 24th of may in 1973 when he was making the case for why australia should ratify the convention for the elimination of racial discrimination and forgive me some of the language is aged but i think that the the intent is still clear he said one of the crucial ways in which we must improve our global reputation is to apply our aspirations for equality at home to our relations with the peoples of the world as a whole just as we have embarked on a determined campaign to restore australian aboriginals to their rightful place in australian society sound familiar so we have an obligation to remove methodically from australia's laws and practices all racially discriminatory provisions and from international activities any hint or suggestion that we favor policies decrees or resolutions that seek to differentiate between peoples on the basis of the color of their skin as an island nation of predominantly european inhabitants situated on the edge of asia we cannot afford the stigma of racialism so for me this remains true today so i would encourage everyone here today to keep the conversation going thank you again to all of you for joining us and i hope you have a great day bye from us