Phil ClearyJune 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.