The COVID-19 pandemic and Delta Variant outbreak reveal that the Morrison and Berejiklian governments policy responses with regard to vulnerable populations appear to come from Australia's 18th Century colonial past rather than the 21st Century

 

The Guardian, 30 August 2021:

The federal government was warned 18 months ago of the urgent need to protect the Covid-hit town of Wilcannia, leaked correspondence seen by Guardian Australia shows, with an Aboriginal health service pleading for immediate help at the time to prevent an outbreak.

The Maari Ma Aboriginal health corporation wrote to the Indigenous Australians minister, Ken Wyatt, in March 2020, outlining “grave fears” for the far western New South Wales town if Covid were to spread to the vulnerable population there.

“Warnings from around the world are clear: the earlier we prepare and act, the better the outcomes will be. We cannot wait until the first case turns up in the community, or worse, the first hospital case presents,” the letter said.

“Basic mathematics says that by the time our first hospital patient presents, around 100 cases will already exist in the community, and this is based on best case modelling.”

The health service says its warnings appear to have been ignored, with no “tangible plan” put in place.

As of Monday, Wilcannia had recorded 69 coronavirus cases in a population of 720, the highest transmission rate in NSW.

A second letter from the health service, also seen by the Guardian, was sent last week to Scott Morrison, calling on him to take control of the “unfolding humanitarian crisis” in Wilcannia.

It said contrary to assurances by Gladys Berejiklian that the situation was under control, it was in fact “chaotic, and the mistakes and problems are mounting”.

“We do our work quietly, and try to fly under the radar of media and public attention as much as possible,” the letter to the prime minister said. “We cannot, however, sit quietly while the catastrophe in the Far West, and western NSW more broadly, continues to unfold.”

The second letter was copied to the NSW premier and the federal health minister, Greg Hunt..

The remote town of Wilcannia has been ravaged by the Covid outbreak in NSW.
Photograph: Chris Graham/New Matilda

.....Maari Ma has confirmed the contents of the letter, and that it was sent in March last year. Friday’s letter to the prime minister was also copied to several other state and federal politicians.

In that second letter, Maari Ma laid out its frustrations that its warnings to the federal government had been ignored. It said it had also written to Berejiklian last year.

“Disappointingly, no tangible plan was in place prior to this outbreak that could have been easily implemented. As a result, we’ve been playing catch up from day one,” it said.

“Our systems and services are ill-prepared, actions are too slow to be implemented, our responses have been sub standard, existing resources and expertise is not sufficient, new resources and expertise (for example the Army and Ausmat) are not being used to their full potential.”

Read the full article here.

March 2020 Maari Ma Health Aboriginal Corporation letter to the Australian Minister for Indigenous Australians & Liberal MP for Hasluck Ken Wyatt.

Maari Ma Health Aboriginal Corporation letter addressed to the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Hon Ken... by clarencegirl on Scribd

As of last Tuesday, it was reported that the predominately Aboriginal resident population of Wilcannia township in the Far West Local Health District had recorded 73 locally acquired COVID-19 cases in a population of 720, the highest transmission rate in NSW.

According to The Guardian on 31 August 2021:

The peak group representing all Aboriginal health services in NSW said both governments’ response to the Covid outbreak in the west of NSW “is becoming a joke”.

Aboriginal health groups met with the head of the federal government’s Covid vaccination program Lt Gen John Frewen on Monday afternoon to discuss a national Indigenous vaccine strategy, but the NSW Aboriginal health and medical research council was surprised there was not already a strategy in place.

Closer to home.......

In a media release on 31 August 2021, the Northern NSW Local Health District advised:

NSW Health is investigating whether there are any potential venues of concern in Northern NSW after a person tested positive to COVID-19 several days after visiting the Casino area.

This person is not a resident of Northern NSW Local Health District and is no longer in the area.

At this stage, NSW Health can confirm the case was infectious in the community on Saturday 21 August, and investigations are continuing.

NSW Health will announce any close contact locations if and when they are determined.

As a precautionary measure, a mobile testing clinic is being set up at Muli Muli Aboriginal community on Wednesday 1 September. People in this community are urged to come forward for testing if they have symptoms of COVID-19 or are concerned they may have come into contact with the case.

Is Scott Morrison's response to the National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces genuine? Or is it just busy work to hold the line until after the next federal election?

 “The Australian Government has agreed to (in full, in-principle, or in-part) or noted all 55 recommendations in the Report.” [Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, media release, 8 April 2021]

“are either agreed wholly in part or in principle, or noted where they are directed to governments or organisations other than the Australian government” [Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, quoted in Sky News online, 8 April 2021]

So after ignoring the National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces Final Report for over 12 months, what do Morrison’s weasel words in the quotes above indicate?

Scott Morrison & Co say they are proceeding to:

* order a survey every four years to provide data on sexual harassment;

* provide educational resources for young people of working age on workplace rights and sexual harassment;

* educate and train staff at the Fair Work Ombudsman, Fair Work Commission, Safe Work Australia, WHS regulators and workers’ compensation bodies concerning sexual harassment;

* lead a new collaboration by government, unions, employers and employer associations called Respect@Work aka the Workplace Sexual Harassment Council; and

* the Workplace Sexual Harassment Council is charged with:

a. providing high-level advice on development of guidelines and resources to ensure that all services providing information, advice and support in relation to sexual harassment can provide accurate information, make appropriate cross-referrals, and collect consistent data

b. after three years, considering the need for a centralised, accessible service to provide information and advice in relation to workplace sexual harassment;

* develop a Respect@Work website to provide the general public, employers and workers with free information; and

* Advise all state governments that they should ensure that relevant bodies responsible for developing training, programs and resources for judges, magistrates and tribunal members make available education on sexual harassment. 

Somehow in this 7-item list I don't see any immediate, hands-on, practical actions by the Morrison Government that will see the rates of sexual harassment, sexual assault, physical assault and/or murder by a partner or former partner, of women and girls in any state or territory decrease in the next few years.

I sincerely hope I am wrong.

 

Australia's violent far-right racism gets read into the parliamentary record in February 2021

 Labor MP for Scullin Andrew Giles in Australian Parliament, House of Representatives, Hansard, Statements by Members, 24 February 2021:

Mr GILES (Scullin) (13:50): A Neo-Nazi assaulting a woman with a homemade flamethrower—this isn't 1930s fascist Europe; this is happening in Australia in 2021. At a Gosnells shopping centre, near Perth, a man with a Nazi symbol on his forehead used a flamethrower to assault an innocent mother who was shopping with her daughter. The WA police said that, after blasting flames at them, the perpetrator said he was doing this because they were Indigenous. This attack is horrific. I hope that the mother and the daughter are doing okay and that they are getting all the support that they need and deserve.

Neo-Nazis are emerging as one of Australia's biggest security threats. ASIO's director-general, Mike Burgess, has said that cells of right-wing extremists are regularly gathering in Australia to salute the Nazi flag and disperse their hateful ideology. Yet this government's response to the threat has been inadequate, to say the very least. This rise of right-wing extremism, this rise of racism—these things are not happening in a vacuum. Not enough is being done to tackle racism and stamp out right-wing extremism. So I once more call on the Morrison government to finally establish a national antiracism strategy with a zero-tolerance approach to racism at its core.

Police identity kit photo of the alleged assailant:

STATE OF PLAY 2021: We live in dangerous times

Kentan Joshi, 17 January 2021:

In March 2019, an Australian white supremacist walked into a mosque, armed with a shotgun, and killed 51 people, including a two year old boy. The man who enacted those killings wanted to wipe out those he’d been told were replacing white people, and erasing white culture. The first thing on my mind when I saw that was this article published only a few months prior.

Though complaints were made to the Australian Press Council, no action was taken to remove the article or punish the media outlet. The reason this article prompted little outcry among the employees of News Corp is because white supremacy, racism and the deadly ideology of the ‘Great Replacement’ belief system are viewed as harmless thought experiments – rather than things that lead to children being murdered by Australians with shotguns.

I wrote, a few days after the Christchurch attack:

“Politics and media are each split into two factions: a large number of people who are explicitly racist, and a large number of people who refuse to accept that the other people could ever be explicitly racist. Together, they create an environment necessary, (though, on its own, insufficient) for the spawning of far-right terror and large-scale massacres”

People are already dying. Movements are coalescing. The broader media feedstock into this system hasn’t changed enough, certainly not in Australia. There are no more chances to fuck this up. Stubbornness means lives are lost. A tin ear means innocents suffer. There are no more chances, and there is no more time.

Bannon

in 2018, Australia’s national broadcaster aired a long interview between Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson and alt-right, Nazi-adjacent grifter Steve Bannon. Ferguson said she’d heard others call Bannon racist, and declared that “there’s no evidence that that’s what you are”. That’s the same Bannon who, prior to that interview, complained too many CEOs in Silicon Valley were Asian, and said of black Americans being murdered by police, “What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent”.

The problem with that interview is that it provided a stream of content for Youtube videos of Bannon ‘owning’ establishment media and gave him legitimacy on Australia’s most trusted media outlet. Bannon’s goal is not making a good argument – it’s prominence and platform. The format of an interview simply gives liars a free substrate in which to deploy their craft. But the criticism of that interview was not received well by Australia’s journalists…..

Much of this problem comes from the simple fact that Australia’s media landscape is mostly white, and therefore free to see racism as a cute thought experiment. Seeing footage of police officers begging white nationalists to spare their lives because they have children hasn’t really changed that.

How do we know it hasn’t changed? Charlottesville based activist Molly Conger received a long direct message on Twitter from (at the time) unspecified journalists seeking to “interview members of the far-right”; right after Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson announced her departure to the US along with Tony Jones, to cover the white nationalist terrorist attacks. After some wry jokes from Twitter folks, Conger confirmed that it was indeed Four Corners and Sarah Ferguson asking to interview white nationalist terrorists. In her original post she included her reply, pleading with the team not to provide a platform.

“Don’t lend them the legitimacy of your institution. Don’t publish their words uncritically. Don’t’ publish them at all unless you have a subject matter expert to dissect them and present them as the falsehood they are. This is life and death for us”.

That last sentence has a grave and terrifying reality to it, given Conger lives in Charlottesville. “I get so many death threats I can catalogue them by the gunmaker mentioned”, she wrote in 2019. Of course, it’s completely baffling why they wouldn’t ask for Conger’s perspective. More telling is that they expect her to happily pass on the contact details of people who explicitly want to kill her.

In fact, many American anti-racist activists now refuse to speak to journalists if those same journalists are giving a platform to white supremacists (in much the same way climate scientists had to deny comments if those stories also featured deniers).

A smattering of Australian journalists are tuned into the tactics of white supremacists, the alt-right and terror groups, and are figuring out new approaches to dealing with the rising terror threat of white supremacists…..

This comes at a time when these terror groups are beginning to ramp up in Australia: “Far-right violent extremism constitutes up to 40% of the Australian domestic spy agency’s counter-terrorism caseload, up from 10-15% before 2016″. A teenager from Albury in New South Wales was planning a “mass casualty attack” just prior to being arrested. Australia’s anti-terror regimes are failing to do much of anything about it. An inquiry will focus on social media, but has no mention of television, print or legacy digital media: Andrew Bolt is free to write about the white race is being wiped out by dirty ethnics, as much as he pleases.

These terror groups aren’t growing in the widespread air of suspicion and paranoia that surrounded Islamic terror in the 2000s. They’re free and unhindered. They have the support of sympathetic voices in police, political and media establishments, and they have the support of people who can’t process that they’re a direct threat to our safety. They have journalists hunting tirelessly to find ways to elevate their voices to larger audiences……

Journalists: please, don’t wait until a mass casualty attack in Australia before you decide to stop playing directly into the hands of white supremacists. There are no more chances. We are here now, and we are in danger.

Read full article here.

Perspectives on Prime Minister & Liberal MP for Cook's one-word change to the 36 year-old* Australian national anthem

Luke Person writing at Indigenous X on 1 January 2021:

Last night the Morrison government announced that they were changing the national anthem, to be more inclusive of Indigenous peoples and of migrants (the not white ones anyways), by changing a single word, ‘young’. It’s now ‘one’.

We are one and free.

We are One Nation.

Pauline must be stoked.

This, from the same political party who every Invasion Day assure us that Indigenous peoples aren’t interested in meaningless symbolic gestures like Australia no longer throwing a party on the anniversary of invasion, are now confident that Indigenous peoples will be so excited about this meaningless symbolic change that presumably we will no longer refuse to sing it at national sporting events.

Changing the anthem from ‘young’ to ‘one’ is not only problematic because it’s symbolic tokenism aimed at silencing dissent that completely misses the nature of the dissent in the first place, but it’s also problematic because it’s the same wrongly labelled ‘one’ as the one made famous by ‘One Nation’.

The original version of ‘we are one’ was a view of multiculturalism which tried to encourage white Australia away from its traditional view of a fair go meaning ‘if your skin ain’t fair, you gots to go’ and to accept instead the notion that we could be ‘one nation with many cultures’.

This was quickly co-opted by racist ideologues who replaced that sentiment with the assimilationist idea that one nation meant ‘one culture with many races’ and that was quickly cemented into the national consciousness by Pauline Hanson who seized the moment and took the name for her political party ‘One Nation’.

Despite One Nation tainting the concept of ‘one nation,’ both meanings have persisted in Australia without much national discourse or reflection on which one we should have, but it’s been pretty clear from a Liberal Party standpoint since the days of John Howard that they aren’t huge fans of the multiculturalism actually meaning multiple cultures.

They are generally more on the side of white/western supremacy, which many liberals have hinted at, and which Tony Abbott flat out stated on multiple occasions when he was PM.

Their views on Indigenous assimilation are much the same.

This can be seen by their political insistence that reconciliation can only be achieved by ‘closing the gap’ rather than by recognising Indigenous Rights as defined by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Having an ambiguous working definition of multiculturalism began as a contest between the two, which the nation should have chosen between by now. Instead, both definitions have been left unchallenged to ensure that politicians can conveniently dog whistle to both sides whenever they talk about us being the ‘most successful multicultural country on Earth’.

This change plays right into that blurring of the lines between the two definitions.

We are one. And we are free. And from all the lands on earth we come.

You’d have thought they would have just straight up changed the anthem to ‘I am Australian’ by the Seekers, but I guess it has too much brand association with QANTAS these days, and because you don’t want to be seen as caving in to the politically correct demands of the slightly left of centrists who were presumably campaigning for this change.

Yesterday, on the last day of 2020, IndigenousX published a powerful piece from Gregory Phillips called ‘Can We Breathe?’ talking staunchly about truth telling, and about Indigenous empowerment.

Today, on the first day of 2021, we are talking about the anthem, or at least we are meant to be.

Instead of continuing to explain why the new anthem is just as shit as the old one though, I’m going to remind people of what some of our Indigenous Rights are:

Article 3: Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

Article 4: Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.

Article 5: Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining their right to participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State.

Article 8.1: Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture.

That’s only four of them, there are 46.  Read them. There will be a test.

This is the test, and Australia is failing at it.

These are what needs to be informing our discussions around change.

Australia has worked hard for decades now to poison the well of Indigenous Rights discourse by reframing any such discussion as ‘Indigenous people want special treatment and free handouts’.

We need to move beyond the fear of being shown in this light and embrace the reality that being the Indigenous peoples of these lands and waters is special, and it brings with it special rights and responsibilities.

This is not us wanting something for nothing. This is us demanding our rights, and we have already paid far more than we should ever have had to for them.

You can sing that anthem backwards for all I care, it’ll still be shit.

— 2020 Hater (@pauldutton1968) January 1, 2021

Adjunct associate professor at the School of Psychology, University of Queensland, and proud Wiradjuri man, Joe Williams, writing in The Guardian on 1 January 2021:

I was made aware on Thursday by a friend of the incoming changes to the national anthem. My reply was an “eye roll” emoji with the words: “But we aren’t all one, we certainly aren’t treated as one; and many, sure as hell, aren’t free”.

I put out a tweet on Friday with my thoughts:

For we are one and free, is like a present from yr nerd uncle, who tries to be cool, but fails hard. I mean, is that line trying to convince us, or you? Cos’ we definitely aren’t treated as one, & many sure as hell aren’t free”

Prime minister Scott Morrison was quoted as saying the change “takes away nothing … but adds much”.

'We are one and free': Australia's national anthem to change in attempt to recognise Indigenous history

Is it supposed to hit the “warm and fuzzies”, taking away the notion of “us and them” by pretending that all people who live on this continent are one big happy family?

Let’s be brutally honest, we aren’t.

You all know the rates of incarceration when it comes to First Nations v non-Indigenous Australians, deaths in custody, the drastic health disparity and the difference in life expectancy between First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians. You know of the negative profiling when it comes to mainstream media between the two (if you don’t, it’s not hard to Google). Why on earth would anyone think that the changing of just one word would encourage First Nations people to feel as “ONE” with any Australian?

To me, changing just one word with the view of inclusion does very little for actual inclusion, and does next to nothing for the hope of uniting a nation......

The song I believe is a beautiful representation of a united, multicultural Australia is the one written by Judith Durham, Uncle Kutcha Edwards, Lou Bennett, Camilla Chance and Bill Hauritz. It’s time for a fresh start and to get a new song. And if we are genuine about this word “reconciliation”, we need to start a relationship before we try to heal one that never existed. 

Me in ⁦@canberratimes⁩

“Please excuse us if we don't view the anthem change as a "good start". Aus is further down the road to substantive change than that. We are in the middle of a very serious, complex reform agenda, entering its second decade”. https://t.co/L9GU7qWniH

— Prof Dr M Davis (@mdavisqlder) January 1, 2021

Well said, #JessicaSavage keeps her eye on the dodgy colonial ball ...

I like her page. Thanks for sharing this 👏🏽https://t.co/DkZ4LFrvY3

— Girrali 😎 (@Girrali) January 2, 2021

NOTE:

* Advance Australia Fair became the national anthem on 19 April 1984.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's QAnon friend may have less reading material theses days

 

In 2018 Reddit.com shut down the original QAnon subreddit, r/CBTS_stream and r/TheGreatAwakening along with the 17 other major QAnon subreddits for inciting violence and doxing, with the last significant QAnon subreddiit r/Pedogate banned in September 2020.

Also in September as part of a broader QAnon sweep begun in July Twitter Inc permanently removed Scott Morrison's personal friend, Tim Stewart aka BurnedSpy34 from the QAnon cluster of conspiracy spreaders, for "engaging in harmful activity".

Now Facebook has extended its measures to counter conspiracy, hate, violent and militarized groups by completely banning QAnon from its social media platform.

Facebook Inc, 6 October 2020:

An Update To How We Address Movements And Organisations Ties To Violence

On August 19, we announced a set of measures designed to disrupt the ability of QAnon and Militarized Social Movements to operate and organize on our platform. In the first month, we removed over 1,500 Pages and Groups for QAnon containing discussions of potential violence and over 6,500 Pages and Groups tied to more than 300 Militarized Social Movements. But we believe these efforts need to be strengthened when addressing QAnon.

Starting today, we will remove any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon, even if they contain no violent content. This is an update from the initial policy in August that removed Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts associated with QAnon when they discussed potential violence while imposing a series of restrictions to limit the reach of other Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts associated with the movement. Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts that represent an identified Militarized Social Movement are already prohibited. And we will continue to disable the profiles of admins who manage Pages and Groups removed for violating this policy, as we began doing in August.

We are starting to enforce this updated policy today and are removing content accordingly, but this work will take time and need to continue in the coming days and weeks. Our Dangerous Organizations Operations team will continue to enforce this policy and proactively detect content for removal instead of relying on user reports. These are specialists who study and respond to new evolutions in violating content from this movement and their internal detection has provided better leads in identifying new evolutions in violating content than sifting through user reports.

We’ve been vigilant in enforcing our policy and studying its impact on the platform but we’ve seen several issues that led to today’s update. For example, while we’ve removed QAnon content that celebrates and supports violence, we’ve seen other QAnon content tied to different forms of real world harm, including recent claims that the west coast wildfires were started by certain groups, which diverted attention of local officials from fighting the fires and protecting the public. Additionally, QAnon messaging changes very quickly and we see networks of supporters build an audience with one message and then quickly pivot to another. We aim to combat this more effectively with this update that strengthens and expands our enforcement against the conspiracy theory movement.

This is not the first update to this policy – we began directing people to credible child safety resources when they search for certain child safety hashtags last week – and we continue to work with external experts to address QAnon supporters using the issue of child safety to recruit and organize. We expect renewed attempts to evade our detection, both in behavior and content shared on our platform, so we will continue to study the impact of our efforts and be ready to update our policy and enforcement as necessary.

NSW Police and racism in the ranks

The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 August 2020:

Jane Williams was at work, half an hour’s drive from her home in Coraki on the North Coast of NSW, in April 2016 when she got a phone call to say the police had picked up her eight-year-old son for throwing rocks at a car with his cousins.

She raced home in a panic, to find no one knew her son’s whereabouts.

Police said he had been taken to his aunty’s place, but there was no sign of him. Her own house was empty.

Williams rushed to the police station to demand answers, only to be told the officer involved had been called to another job. The officer at the station made a phone call to get to the bottom of it.

"He got on the phone and I just knew from the expression,” Williams says.

The officer rushed outside and found the boy in the back of the police truck, where he’d been left unattended for up to two hours.

“I couldn't believe my eyes," Williams says. "My baby ... his cheeks were that red. It was painful to look at him like that."

With the assistance of Grafton lawyer Joe Fahey, the mother-of-two sued NSW Police for damages last year, resulting in an undisclosed settlement.

Months after the incident, according to court documents, the officer who’d picked up her son pulled her over while driving and asked: “You sure you haven’t got anybody in that boot Jane?”

She says the comment was intended to make her feel hurt, shame and embarrassment.

Four years on, Williams says her son is still distrustful of police.

The Black Lives Matter movement has put a spotlight on interactions between Indigenous Australians and the criminal justice system. In the first of a three-part series this month, the Herald examines how these interactions play out in the Northern Rivers of NSW, beginning with the relationship between Aboriginal people and police.

The investigation found allegations of police misconduct from former officers, while a Herald analysis of data obtained under freedom of information laws suggests the police force is struggling to retain Indigenous officers across regional NSW. Despite increasing recruit numbers there are more Indigenous officers leaving, too, which has stalled the proportion of Indigenous operational officers in regional areas at around 1 per cent - or 183 people in a statewide workforce of 17,111.

Fahey says he has handled “easily 30 or 40” cases where Aboriginal clients have successfully sued the police over the past four to five years, mainly for wrongful arrests and related assaults in the towns of Grafton, Coffs Harbour and Casino, with the odd case from Moree or Sydney…. 

A Herald analysis of police data found officers in northern NSW recorded using force, such as restraints and holds, more often than anywhere else in the state during random breath tests from 2014 to 2018. 

 In the same period, officers in the Coffs/Clarence district used force against people charged with offensive language 147 times over the five years - the fourth-highest occurrence in the state.... 

Read full article here.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 June 2020:

An Aboriginal teenager is suing the state of NSW, alleging that he was assaulted by police in an incident caught on video, which appears to show an officer striking the boy in the head as he was walking home at night in Casino last year.

A statement of claim filed in the Lismore district court described the alleged incident as "abhorrent and racist" and an "oppressive abuse of police powers"....

The Bundjalung teenager, then 17, claims he was walking home at around 12.30am last September in the Northern Rivers town of Casino when he was approached by three police officers.

The recording that emerged shortly after the incident shows police following him for about half a block and then surrounding him and questioning the teenager, who can be heard repeatedly saying "I'm going home."

One officer, who the boy's lawyers allege in the statement of claim to be Senior Constable Benjamin David Chivers, appears to shove the boy in the chest as he attempts to walk away.

Another officer puts their hand on the boy's arm and the boy appears to push his hand away.

The first officer then strikes the boy in the head, knocking his hat off. After police are alerted that the incident is being filmed, the first officer begins asking the boy, "Why'd you have a swing at him?", gesturing to his fellow officer.

The boy replies he didn't "take a swing".

The statement of claim alleges: "Police officers targeted an Aboriginal boy, for no reason whatsoever, and then proceeded to degrade and humiliate him in the most cynical way."

It accuses the officers of acting "in stark indifference" to their duties as guardians.

"The conduct complained of demonstrates a failure by the Richmond Local Area Command to properly train, discipline and educate its police officers to prevent them from racially vilifying young Aboriginal males in the Casino area," the statement says.....

https://youtu.be/R3n9DAIvF7o