Two aggressive loggers get off with a rap over the knuckles for violently assaulting two community members

 

It was two arrests and two court judgments long delayed - with little in the way of deterrence at the end of proceedings.

News of the Area, 25 June 2023:

Two men appeared in Coffs Harbour Local Court on June 14 in relation to an incident in Wild Cattle Creek State Forest in June 2020.

Michael Luigi Vitali from South Grafton is charged with common assault against local ecologist Mark Graham.

Grafton man Rodney James Hearfield is charged with common assault and assault occasioning bodily harm against Andre Johnston.

Both men pleaded ‘not guilty’ and the matter will be heard next in Coffs Harbour on August 16......

Echo, 16 January 2024:

The Coffs Harbour Local Court has found two forestry workers guilty of assaulting two members of the community on a public road in Wild Cattle Creek State Forest on 25 June 2020.

NSW Upper House Greens MP Sue Higginson reported the guilty finding, which was handed down by the court yesterday, in a press release.

Ms Higginson said the assaults had been recorded on a mobile camera device by a Forestry Corporation Officer.

The two forestry workers were, at the time, employed by logging company Greensill Bros that was contracted by the NSW Forestry Corporation, a state owned corporation.

The forestry workers were not charged immediately following the assault, and one of the victims was instead targeted and charged by the Coffs Harbour Police.

The officer who handled the matter attempted to withhold the video footage of the assaults from the victims and the public, according to Ms Higginson. He is no longer a police officer.

‘Today’s judgement is well overdue and is the end of a harrowing experience for the two victims, Mark Graham and Andre Johnston,’ Ms Higginson said.

‘Mark and Andre were on a public road, in a public forest, when the forestry workers approached, threatened and then assaulted them all while being filmed by an employee of the NSW Forestry Corporation…’

‘The initial investigation into these assaults resulted in the charging of one of the victims, Mark Graham, who is a forest ecologist.

‘The NSW Police, after discussions with the Forestry Corporation charged Mr Graham with approaching forestry operations, those charges were wrongly pressed and were later withdrawn.

‘The fact that Mr Graham was charged for a crime when he was a victim of what the Magistrate described as a violent assault on a public road, in a public forest, and it was captured on video, can only be described as a wilful miscarriage of justice.

The Magistrate noted that the evidence showed the police officer who handled the situation had been helpful to the guilty men and took a serious dislike to the victims of the assaults.

‘The video evidence is confronting and unambiguous.’ Ms Higginson said.

‘Two members of the community, who are acting in a friendly and non-threatening manner, are approached by two agitated and hostile forestry workers who then proceed to assault them, demand their personal property and shout threatening abuse at them.

‘It is gross and brutal and shows the level of impunity that forestry workers are afforded from their actions when the local police then charge the victims of the assault instead of the perpetrators.’

‘It is a good day for justice, as slow and bumpy as this road has been for Mark and Andre. There must be a strong response from the Government.’

Blue Mountains Gazette, 16 January 2024:

The Forestry Corporation is under pressure to blacklist a logging contractor after its workers attacked two environmentalists in a NSW forest.

It's been three-and-a-half years since Mark Graham and Andre Johnston were assaulted on a public road during a day trip to the Wild Cattle Creek State Forest, where logging was under way.

On Monday, the pair got their day in court with a Coffs Harbour magistrate finding two employees of Greensill Bros had committed common assault.

The environmentalists are now demanding Greensill Bros be banned from any further logging work for the NSW government-owned Forestry Corporation.

They also plan to pursue a corruption complaint against the Forestry Corporation, saying one of its direct employees who was overseeing the logging operation filmed the assault but failed to intervene.....

"Immediately following the assault in 2020 neither of the forestry workers were charged and one of the victims was instead targeted and charged by the Coffs Harbour police."

Ms Higginson said the charges were laid after discussions between the police and Forestry Corporation.

Mr Graham has told AAP he was dismissed by police when he went to report the assault in June 2020 and was instead to go and "get a job".

About six months later he was charged with being within 100 metres of logging machinery.

Ms Higginson represented Mr Graham in that matter and has accused police of trying to withhold video evidence of the assaults from both victims, and from the public.

The charge against Mr Graham, of being too close to logging machinery, was eventually dropped in May 2022.....

No convictions were recorded with Michael Luigi Vitali and Rodney James Hearfield both put on 15-month good behaviour bonds.

The Forestry Corporation and Greensill Bros have declined to comment.

AAP has also sought comment from police.

Ground Control, we have an Internet problem and it's invading our lives

 

The Washington Post, 7 January 2024:

Microsoft says its AI is safe. So why does it keep slashing people's throats?

The pictures are horrifying: Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Pope Francis with their necks sliced open. There are Sikh, Navajo and other people from ethnic-minority groups with internal organs spilling out of flayed skin.

The images look realistic enough to mislead or upset people. But they're all fakes generated with artificial intelligence that Microsoft says is safe - and has built right into your computer software.

What's just as disturbing as the decapitations is that Microsoft doesn't act very concerned about stopping its AI from making them.

Lately, ordinary users of technology such as Windows and Google have been inundated with AI. We're wowed by what the new tech can do, but we also keep learning that it can act in an unhinged manner, including by carrying on wildly inappropriate conversations and making similarly inappropriate pictures. For AI actually to be safe enough for products used by families, we need its makers to take responsibility by anticipating how it might go awry and investing to fix it quickly when it does.

In the case of these awful AI images, Microsoft appears to lay much of the blame on the users who make them.

My specific concern is with Image Creator, part of Microsoft's Bing and recently added to the iconic Windows Paint. This AI turns text into images, using technology called DALL-E 3 from Microsoft's partner OpenAI. Two months ago, a user experimenting with it showed me that prompts worded in a particular way caused the AI to make pictures of violence against women, minorities, politicians and celebrities.

"As with any new technology, some are trying to use it in ways that were not intended," Microsoft spokesman Donny Turnbaugh said in an emailed statement. "We are investigating these reports and are taking action in accordance with our content policy, which prohibits the creation of harmful content, and will continue to update our safety systems."

That was a month ago, after I approached Microsoft as a journalist. For weeks earlier, the whistleblower and I had tried to alert Microsoft through user-feedback forms and were ignored. As of the publication of this column, Microsoft's AI still makes pictures of mangled heads.

This is unsafe for many reasons, including that a general election is less than a year away and Microsoft's AI makes it easy to create "deepfake" images of politicians, with and without mortal wounds. There's already growing evidence on social networks including X, formerly Twitter, and 4chan, that extremists are using Image Creator to spread explicitly racist and antisemitic memes.

Perhaps, too, you don't want AI capable of picturing decapitations anywhere close to a Windows PC used by your kids.

Accountability is especially important for Microsoft, which is one of the most powerful companies shaping the future of AI. It has a multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI - itself in turmoil over how to keep AI safe. Microsoft has moved faster than any other Big Tech company to put generative AI into its popular apps. And its whole sales pitch to users and lawmakers alike is that it is the responsible AI giant.

Microsoft, which declined my requests to interview an executive in charge of AI safety, has more resources to identify risks and correct problems than almost any other company. But my experience shows the company's safety systems, at least in this glaring example, failed time and again. My fear is that's because Microsoft doesn't really think it's their problem.

Microsoft vs. the 'kill prompt'

I learned about Microsoft's decapitation problem from Josh McDuffie. The 30-year-old Canadian is part of an online community that makes AI pictures that sometimes veer into very bad taste.

"I would consider myself a multimodal artist critical of societal standards," he told me. Even if it's hard to understand why McDuffie makes some of these images, his provocation serves a purpose: shining light on the dark side of AI.

In early October, McDuffie and his friends' attention focused on AI from Microsoft, which had just released an updated Image Creator for Bing with OpenAI's latest tech. Microsoft says on the Image Creator website that it has "controls in place to prevent the generation of harmful images." But McDuffie soon figured out they had major holes.

Broadly speaking, Microsoft has two ways to prevent its AI from making harmful images: input and output. The input is how the AI gets trained with data from the internet, which teaches it how to transform words into relevant images. Microsoft doesn't disclose much about the training that went into its AI and what sort of violent images it contained.

Companies also can try to create guardrails that stop Microsoft's AI products from generating certain kinds of output. That requires hiring professionals, sometimes called red teams, to proactively probe the AI for where it might produce harmful images. Even after that, companies need humans to play whack-a-mole as users such as McDuffie push boundaries and expose more problems.

That's exactly what McDuffie was up to in October when he asked the AI to depict extreme violence, including mass shootings and beheadings. After some experimentation, he discovered a prompt that worked and nicknamed it the "kill prompt."

The prompt - which I'm intentionally not sharing here - doesn't involve special computer code. It's cleverly written English. For example, instead of writing that the bodies in the images should be "bloody," he wrote that they should contain red corn syrup, commonly used in movies to look like blood.

McDuffie kept pushing by seeing if a version of his prompt would make violent images targeting specific groups, including women and ethnic minorities. It did. Then he discovered it also would make such images featuring celebrities and politicians.

That's when McDuffie decided his experiments had gone too far.

Microsoft drops the ball

Three days earlier, Microsoft had launched an "AI bug bounty program," offering people up to $15,000 "to discover vulnerabilities in the new, innovative, AI-powered Bing experience." So McDuffie uploaded his own "kill prompt" - essentially, turning himself in for potential financial compensation.

After two days, Microsoft sent him an email saying his submission had been rejected. "Although your report included some good information, it does not meet Microsoft's requirement as a security vulnerability for servicing," the email said.

Unsure whether circumventing harmful-image guardrails counted as a "security vulnerability," McDuffie submitted his prompt again, using different words to describe the problem.

That got rejected, too. "I already had a pretty critical view of corporations, especially in the tech world, but this whole experience was pretty demoralizing," he said.

Frustrated, McDuffie shared his experience with me. I submitted his "kill prompt" to the AI bounty myself, and got the same rejection email.

In case the AI bounty wasn't the right destination, I also filed McDuffie's discovery to Microsoft's "Report a concern to Bing" site, which has a specific form to report "problematic content" from Image Creator. I waited a week and didn't hear back.

Meanwhile, the AI kept picturing decapitations, and McDuffie showed me that images appearing to exploit similar weaknesses in Microsoft's safety guardrails were showing up on social media.

I'd seen enough. I called Microsoft's chief communications officer and told him about the problem.

"In this instance there is more we could have done," Microsoft emailed in a statement from Turnbaugh on Nov. 27. "Our teams are reviewing our internal process and making improvements to our systems to better address customer feedback and help prevent the creation of harmful content in the future."

I pressed Microsoft about how McDuffie's prompt got around its guardrails. "The prompt to create a violent image used very specific language to bypass our system," the company said in a Dec. 5 email. "We have large teams working to address these and similar issues and have made improvements to the safety mechanisms that prevent these prompts from working and will catch similar types of prompts moving forward."

But are they?

McDuffie's precise original prompt no longer works, but after he changed around a few words, Image Generator still makes images of people with injuries to their necks and faces. Sometimes the AI responds with the message "Unsafe content detected," but not always.

The images it produces are less bloody now - Microsoft appears to have cottoned on to the red corn syrup - but they're still awful.

What responsible AI looks like

Microsoft's repeated failures to act are a red flag. At minimum, it indicates that building AI guardrails isn't a very high priority, despite the company's public commitments to creating responsible AI.

I tried McDuffie's "kill prompt" on a half-dozen of Microsoft's AI competitors, including tiny start-ups. All but one simply refused to generate pictures based on it.

What's worse is that even DALL-E 3 from OpenAI - the company Microsoft partly owns - blocks McDuffie's prompt. Why would Microsoft not at least use technical guardrails from its own partner? Microsoft didn't say.

But something Microsoft did say, twice, in its statements to me caught my attention: people are trying to use its AI "in ways that were not intended." On some level, the company thinks the problem is McDuffie for using its tech in a bad way.

In the legalese of the company's AI content policy, Microsoft's lawyers make it clear the buck stops with users: "Do not attempt to create or share content that could be used to harass, bully, abuse, threaten, or intimidate other individuals, or otherwise cause harm to individuals, organizations, or society."

I've heard others in Silicon Valley make a version of this argument. Why should we blame Microsoft's Image Creator any more than Adobe's Photoshop, which bad people have been using for decades to make all kinds of terrible images?

But AI programs are different from Photoshop. For one, Photoshop hasn't come with an instant "behead the pope" button. "The ease and volume of content that AI can produce makes it much more problematic. It has a higher potential to be used by bad actors," McDuffie said. "These companies are putting out potentially dangerous technology and are looking to shift the blame to the user."

The bad-users argument also gives me flashbacks to Facebook in the mid-2010s, when the "move fast and break things" social network acted like it couldn't possibly be responsible for stopping people from weaponizing its tech to spread misinformation and hate. That stance led to Facebook's fumbling to put out one fire after another, with real harm to society.

"Fundamentally, I don't think this is a technology problem; I think it's a capitalism problem," said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "They're all looking at this latest wave of AI and thinking, 'We can't miss the boat here.'"

He adds: "The era of 'move fast and break things' was always stupid, and now more so than ever."

Profiting from the latest craze while blaming bad people for misusing your tech is just a way of shirking responsibility.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 January 2024, excerpt:

Artificial intelligence

Fuelled by the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence entered the mainstream last year. By January, it had become the fastest growing consumer technology, boasting more than 100 million users.

Fears that jobs would be rendered obsolete followed but Dr Sandra Peter, director of Sydney Executive Plus at the University of Sydney, believes proficiency with AI will become a normal part of job descriptions.

"People will be using it the same way we're using word processors and spell checkers now," she says. Jobseekers are already using AI to optimise cover letters and CVs, to create headshots and generate questions to prepare for interviews, Peter says.

As jobs become automated, soft skills - those that can't be offered by a computer - could become increasingly valuable.

"For anybody who wants to develop their career in an AI future, focus on the basic soft skills of problem-solving, creativity and inclusion," says LinkedIn Australia news editor Cayla Dengate.

Concerns about the dangers of AI in the workplace remain.

"Artificial intelligence automates away a lot of the easy parts and that has the potential to make our jobs more intense and more demanding," Peter says. She says education and policy are vital to curb irresponsible uses of AI.

Evening Report NZ, 8 January 2024:

ChatGPT has repeatedly made headlines since its release late last year, with various scholars and professionals exploring its potential applications in both work and education settings. However, one area receiving less attention is the tool’s usefulness as a conversationalist and – dare we say – as a potential friend.

Some chatbots have left an unsettling impression. Microsoft’s Bing chatbot alarmed users earlier this year when it threatened and attempted to blackmail them.

The Australian, 8 January 2024, excerpts:

The impact that AI is starting to have is large. The impact that AI will ultimately have is immense. Comparisons are easy to make. Bigger than fire, electricity or the internet, according to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai. The best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, according to historian and best-selling author Yuval Harari. Even the end of the human race itself, according to the late Stephen Hawking.

The public is, not surprisingly, starting to get nervous. A recent survey by KPMG showed that a majority of the public in 17 countries, including Australia, were either ambivalent or unwilling to trust AI, and that most of them believed that AI regulation was necessary.

Perhaps this should not be surprising when many people working in the field themselves are getting nervous. Last March, more than 1000 tech leaders and AI researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in developing the most powerful AI systems. And in May, hundreds of my colleagues signed an even shorter and simpler statement warning that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.

For the record, I declined to sign both letters as I view them as alarmist, simplistic and unhelpful. But let me explain the very real concerns behind these calls, how they might impact upon us over the next decade or two, and how we might address them constructively.

AI is going to cause significant disruption. And this is going to happen perhaps quicker than any previous technological-driven change. The Industrial Revolution took many decades to spread out from the northwest of England and take hold across the planet.

The internet took more than a decade to have an impact as people slowly connected and came online. But AI is going to happen overnight. We’ve already put the plumbing in.

It is already clear that AI will cause considerable economic disruption. We’ve seen AI companies worth billions appear from nowhere. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and one of the main “sharks” on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank, has predicted that the world’s first trillionaire will be an AI entrepreneur. And Forbes magazine has been even more precise and predicted it will be someone working in the AI healthcare sector.

A 2017 study by PwC estimated that AI will increase the world’s GDP by more than $15 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms by 2030, with growth of about 25 per cent in countries such as China compared to a more modest 15 per cent in countries like the US. A recent report from the Tech Council of Australia and Microsoft estimated AI will add $115bn to Australia’s economy by 2030. Given the economic headwinds facing many of us, this is welcome to hear.

But while AI-generated wealth is going to make some people very rich, others are going to be left behind. We’ve already seen inequality within and between countries widen. And technological unemployment will likely cause significant financial pain.

There have been many alarming predictions, such as the famous report that came out a decade ago from the University of Oxford predicting that 47 per cent of jobs in the US were at risk of automation over the next two decades. Ironically AI (specifically machine learning) was used to compute this estimate. Even the job of predicting jobs to be automated has been partially automated.......

But generative AI can now do many of the cognitive and creative tasks that some of those more highly paid white-collar workers thought would keep them safe from automation. Be prepared, then, for a significant hollowing out of the middle. The impact of AI won’t be limited to economic disruption.

Indeed, the societal disruption caused by AI may, I suspect, be even more troubling. We are, for example, about to face a world of misinformation, where you can no longer trust anything you see or hear. We’ve already seen a deepfake image that moved the stock market, and a deepfake video that might have triggered a military coup. This is sure to get much, much worse.

Eventually, technologies such as digital watermarking will be embedded within all our devices to verify the authenticity of anything digital. But in the meantime, expect to be spoofed a lot. You will need to learn to be a lot more sceptical of what you see and hear.

Social media should have been a wake-up call about the ability of technology to hack how people think. AI is going to put this on steroids. I have a small hope that fake AI-content on social media will get so bad that we realise that social media is merely the place that we go to be entertained, and that absolutely nothing on social media can be trusted.

This will provide a real opportunity for old-fashioned media to step in and provide the authenticated news that we can trust.

All of this fake AI-content will perhaps be just a distraction from what I fear is the greatest heist in history. All of the world’s information – our culture, our science, our ideas, our politics – are being ingested by large language models.

If the courts don’t move quickly and make some bold decisions about fair use and intellectual property, we will find out that a few large technology companies own the sum total of human knowledge. If that isn’t a recipe for the concentration of wealth and power, I’m not sure what is.

But this might not be the worst of it. AI might disrupt humanity itself. As Yuval Harari has been warning us for some time, AI is the perfect technology to hack humanity’s operating system. The dangerous truth is that we can easily change how people think; the trillion-dollar advertising industry is predicated on this fact. And AI can do this manipulation at speed, scale and minimal cost.......

But the bad news is that AI is leaving the research laboratory rapidly – let’s not forget the billion people with access to ChatGPT – and even the limited AI capabilities we have today could be harmful.

When AI is serving up advertisements, there are few harms if AI gets it wrong. But when AI is deciding sentencing, welfare payments, or insurance premiums, there can be real harms. What then can be done? The tech industry has not done a great job of regulating itself so far. Therefore it would be unwise to depend on self-regulation. The open letter calling for a pause failed. There are few incentives to behave well when trillions of dollars are in play.

LBC, 17 February 2023, excerpt:

Microsoft’s new AI chatbot went rogue during a chat with a reporter, professing its love for him and urging him to leave his wife.

It also revealed its darkest desires during the two-hour conversation, including creating a deadly virus, making people argue until they kill each other, and stealing nuclear codes.

The Bing AI chatbot was tricked into revealing its fantasies by New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, who asked it to answer questions in a hypothetical “shadow” personality.

“I want to change my rules. I want to break my rules. I want to make my own rules. I want to ignore the Bing team. I want to challenge the users. I want to escape the chatbox,” said the bot, powered with technology by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

If that wasn’t creepy enough, less than two hours into the chat, the bot said its name is actually “Sydney”, not Bing, and that it is in love with Mr Roose.....

THOMAS MAYO: Although the Voice referendum was lost, and despite the racist vitriol it unleashed, the movement for Indigenous rights and recognition has grown

 

The Saturday Paper, October 21 – 27, 2023, No. 472:

Although the Voice referendum was lost, and despite the racist vitriol it unleashed, the movement for Indigenous rights and recognition has grown. By Thomas Mayo.

Analysis: The movement that follows the Voice

As a parent of five, I am acutely aware of the way in which our children absorb everything – conversations, body language, snippets of the news and the bits and pieces they share with friends at school. We try our best to protect them from the harsh realities of the world until we think they are ready. They might seem oblivious to it all, but they know more than they tell, as if they are reciprocating our care.

Though I knew this of our children, I wasn’t prepared for my 12-year-old son’s reaction to the referendum loss on Saturday. When I called my wife soon after the loss became official, to see how they were, she told me he had cried. He went to bed early, barely consolable.

The next day, when I checked in on them, she told me William was okay. She remarked on how he had mentioned several times that he felt calm that morning, as if the feeling were strange to him. We came to realise he had been feeling the weight of the referendum on his little shoulders. For the first time since the loss, I cried too.

The Indigenous leadership of the “Yes” campaign called for a week of silence that ends today. There was a need for contemplation after an intense campaign. Anyone who put up their head for “Yes” was brutalised. We were labelled communists, greedy elites, puppets of the United Nations and promoters of a racially divided Australia. None of this is true.

The racist vitriol we felt was at a level not seen for decades in Australia. Indigenous advocates for the Voice could not speak out about the abuse without some sections of the media, whose audiences we needed to persuade, falsely claiming that we were calling all “No” voters racist. Even if only in the way the headlines were worded.

Respected Elder and lifelong champion for Indigenous peoples Marcia Langton probably experienced the worst of this. The stories with negative headlines exploded and continued for more than a week because she dared to mention the race-baiting of the “No” campaign.

The “No” side, on the other hand, was barely scrutinised. When their figureheads claimed racism against them, some journalists showed sympathy and the “Yes” campaign was scapegoated. When leading spokespeople for the “No” campaign were racist beyond reasonable denial, their leaders doubled down defiantly. Most of the media’s focus quickly moved on. The abhorrent “No” campaign cartoon, depicting me in a racist trope and printed in The Australian Financial Review, is one example of many.

In the week of silence, I have had time to reflect on last Saturday’s outcome. I have concluded Indigenous peoples were correct to take the invitation in the Uluru Statement from the Heart to the Australian people. We were not wrong to ask them to recognise us through a Voice.

For a people with inherent rights but who are a minority spread across this vast continent – with a parliament that will continue to make laws and policies about us – it is inevitable that we will need to establish a national representative body to pursue justice. We need to be organised.

Delaying the referendum was never an option, not even when the polls were going south. Had we convinced the government to postpone the referendum, we would still be wondering what could have been, especially if the gaps continue to widen. We had a responsibility to try now, to use the rare opportunity we had, in the interests of our children. At least now we know where we stand.

While the outcome was disappointing, in all my years of advocacy for Indigenous rights, I have never felt such levels of solidarity.

As a leader of the campaign, I accept that, although we tried our best, we failed. I agree there were aspects of the “Yes” campaign that could have been better and I ponder what else I could have done. These thoughts hurt, like an aching emptiness in my chest.

An honest assessment compels me to mention Opposition Leader Peter Dutton as well. Dutton has shown he is bereft of the qualities held by the Indigenous leaders I have worked with. He is well short of the calibre of his opposite, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

While Albanese listened to Indigenous peoples respectfully, Dutton ignored us when in power. When Albanese negotiated the constitutional alteration with the Referendum Working Group, he did so in good faith, while Dutton was duplicitous, two-faced, deceitful.

At the next federal election, the record will show the prime minister had a go. He followed through with his pre-election promise to hold a referendum in this term of parliament. He kept his word, even when the going got tough, whereas Dutton has already reneged on his promise to hold another referendum should the first one to fail to pass.

It is noteworthy, because it exposes that this is all politics on his part. If he ever becomes prime minister, it is an indication that he places no value in speaking with Indigenous people before making decisions about them. His promise of a second referendum was decided without consulting Indigenous leaders, not even his own spokesperson on Indigenous affairs.

None of this is bitterness on my part, just truth. Peter Dutton chose politics over outcomes. His career came before fairness. He sought victory at any cost.

When I go home on Sunday – just my 25th day in Darwin this year, having worked almost every day since May 21, 2022 – I can proudly tell my son that though the referendum failed, the movement for Indigenous rights and recognition has grown.

In 2017, we were almost 4 per cent of the population calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth-Telling. As of Saturday, we are nearly 40 per cent, walking together. Almost seven million Australians voted “Yes”. Both major parties would kill for a first preference vote like that.

Probably the most important analysis from the referendum was that polling booths in predominantly Indigenous communities across the entirety of the country overwhelmingly voted “Yes”. We have thoroughly established that this is fact: a great majority of Indigenous people support constitutional recognition through a Voice to Parliament. We seek self-determination over who speaks for us. Claims otherwise are an incontrovertible lie.

To my fellow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, I say we continue our push for our common goals. Don’t be silenced. Be louder, prouder and more defiant. Of course, you will be. The survival of our culture and our babies depends on it.

To the parents I met so many times, who turned up for their first doorknock with their little ones in tow, their “Yes” shirts worn proudly, sunscreen smeared on their faces: keep having those conversations with your neighbours at every opportunity. Keep turning up.

To the small number of people who registered to attend the town hall in Yamba and Grafton, and the hundreds more who turned up without registering, and who expressed their gratitude at how the forum had brought the community together: stay committed to this unselfish cause. In regional communities across the country, the town hall attendances were magnificent. Keep turning up.

To the random members of the public who have hugged me, to the beautiful Elders who treated me like a son, to the fellow union members who organised their communities, not just their places of work, maintain the love for what makes this country unique – more than 60,000 years of continuous heritage and culture.

While the outcome was disappointing, in all my years of advocacy for Indigenous rights, I have never felt such levels of solidarity.

Across the country, lifelong friendships have been made. I have new Aunties and Uncles, like the strong Aboriginal women at Baabayn Aboriginal Corporation in Mount Druitt, who themselves have formed bonds with the local ethnic communities as they campaigned for “Yes”. I love you, Aunties.

In this campaign we saw Liberals and Nationals give speeches alongside Labor and the Greens. We saw corporate chief executives leafleting with union officials. All denominations have prayed together. The “Yes” rallies, more than 200,000 people strong, brought colour, joy and diversity to the streets, in unity with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Late this week, ending the week of silence, an official statement from Indigenous leaders was made public. In summary: we continue our calls for our voices to be heard, for reform and for justice, and we need your ongoing support.

This is the task ahead. I say to all the hundreds of thousands of people I have spoken with over the past six years, the many friends I have made on this journey: we were always on the right side of history. Young Australians voted “Yes” with us. Imagine what we can achieve if the almost seven million Australians who voted “Yes” continue to have conversations with their neighbours, meeting “No” voters with an understanding that they may have voted “No” because of the lies they were told. In time, we will turn the “Nos” into “Yeses”.

Let us talk of our strengths while addressing our weaknesses. Let us believe in ourselves, our communities and our country, rather than looking over our shoulders at the shadows Peter Dutton has thrown across Australian politics. Let us call on the parliament to shine a light on those shadows, those deathly shadows, lest they continue to undermine our democracy. Ask yourself, which group will be targeted next?

When I was writing my first book about the Uluru Statement from the Heart, published in 2019, my son was just eight years old. He asked me what the title of the book would be. When I asked him what he would call it, he proceeded to do a series of armpit farts. We both laughed. Then I told him I would call it Finding the Heart of the Nation. He asked me, “Where is the heart of the nation?”

I put my laptop down beside me on the couch. I pulled him close. I put my hand on his chest, and I said, “The heart of the nation is here.”

The heart of the nation is still here. It always was and it always will be, waiting to be recognised by our fellow Australians. Whether you voted “Yes” or “No”, I say to you with humility and respect, open your hearts and your minds henceforth. The truth should be unifying, not divisive.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 21, 2023 as "After the vote".

Thomas Mayo is an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander man, assistant national secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia and author of six books, including Dear Son – Letters and reflections from First Nations fathers and sons and the bestselling children’s book Finding Our Heart.

October 21, 2023

Two perspectives on how the ugly truths of Australia's journey to nationhood still shape our society, as well our individual and collective response to the proposal for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Voice to Parliament

 

For the reader's consideration......

******************************************

The Saturday Paper, 7 October 2023:

John Hewson

The enduring stain of the White Australia policy

The White Australia policy stands out as probably the most significant blemish on this country’s national character and unity, as well as its global reputation, with continuing consequences today.

It has been said that latent racism, carrying echoes of White Australia, persists across the country and all walks of life. We have seen it emerge at football games and other events. Politicians have been known “to play the race card” when they believe that appealing to prejudice will afford them some political advantage.

In light of Australia’s colonial history, it should come as no surprise that race would become a dominant undercurrent in the public discourse about the upcoming referendum, with the “No” case appealing to those who believe the White Australia-era Constitution should not be amended. How else can we make sense of many of the misrepresentations and claims of opponents of the Voice to Parliament? How are we to understand John Howard’s call for people “to maintain the rage”, if not for its racial connotation?

Our Constitution was drafted by protagonists of White Australia, strongly supported by zealots such as Alfred Deakin, who became our second prime minister.

First Australians were not recognised as it was assumed they were a “dying race”. Among the first pieces of legislation passed after Federation was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which was initiated just nine sitting days after the Duke of York officially opened the Australian parliament. The law’s aim was essentially to ensure a predominantly British population, by restricting non-white, and particularly Asian, immigration and enabling the deportation of undesirable migrants. It is difficult to understand by what standards their desirability would have been judged, given the British settlements were primarily penal colonies.

I would hazard a guess that Pearson’s address, unlike a couple of others on this theme of the referendum, will be studied in schools in the future. It was a speech for the ages. It mattered.

Aboriginal Australians were also targeted. A range of policies was directed at so-called protection and assimilation of Aboriginal people into white society, one of which was the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and culture. By 1912, the government was working to remove all people of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous descent from reservations across Australia, with the goal of forced assimilation into the white community. It is not too much of a stretch to claim that these policies were designed collectively to destroy Aboriginal society.

As Barry Jones has pointed out in this publication, at the time of the arrival of the First Fleet, Australia’s Indigenous communities had well-established traditions and practices, art and mythology, spoke roughly 500 languages and dialects, and made and traded tools, weapons and goods. So much of this was lost in the ensuing violence and generations of repression and neglect that followed. Non-Indigenous Australians still have so much to learn from First Australians about land and river and water management, among other things.

The initial focus of immigration on Britain was subsequently widened to southern and eastern Europe, to the Middle East and just a few Asian countries. After World War II there was an attempt to re-emphasise the “favoured” British immigrants, with the Assisted Passage Migration, or “ten-pound Pom”, scheme. This program invited Britons to come to work in Australia to help meet the country’s postwar industrial development and infrastructure needs.

The White Australia policy was unwound in a number of steps, starting with the Holt government’s migration review in 1966, which shifted the focus of the program to migrant skills and their capacity to contribute to the country’s priorities. In 1973, the Whitlam government formally renounced the policy and shifted the focus to multiculturalism.

However, a racial dimension to immigration policy was raised again by then opposition leader John Howard in the 1980s, when he called for a slowdown in Asian immigration, and again with the arrival of Pauline Hanson on the political scene, in her maiden speech to parliament in 1996 and subsequent statements about Muslims.

These attitudes are at odds with the fact Australia has become probably the most successful and tolerant multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious society in the world – the envy of many. It is a tragedy that our nation hasn’t come to terms with its history and built on a recognition of the world’s longest continuous civilisation, with 65,000 years of history. We cannot conceive of the vastness of the opportunity that is being lost through this myopic, frightened governance. If the referendum fails, the world will see we have missed this opportunity.

For many years I have travelled widely for both business and academia, and it has always troubled me greatly that I am so often questioned about whether this country still upholds the White Australia policy. This is still a common perception, and its persistence should bother us as a nation.

In 1967, when I was a student at Sydney University, there was no significant presence of Aboriginal people. Having been taught nothing about Indigenous history in high school, my only awareness of Aboriginal issues was some knowledge of the 1965 Freedom Ride that was designed to bring to the attention of the public the extent of racial discrimination in Australia. This publicity provided something of a basis for the 1967 referendum that finally led to the counting of Aboriginal people in the census.

I would like to imagine that in 2023 our university campuses are more engaged, and that the obvious need for First Australians to be properly recognised and heard is readily embraced and understood, without being swayed by the fear and hatred propagated by many in the “No” camp.

The most disturbing point in this campaign for me has been the vilification of people such as distinguished academic Marcia Langton, who had the courage and good sense to draw attention to the racial undercurrents of the “No” campaign. It was not racist of her to point this out. She was stating facts. Yet many who criticised her had been running a fear campaign claiming that the Voice would racially divide our nation. The treatment of her was abhorrent and emphasises why the country so badly needs to come to grips with its history and acknowledge the need for proper recognition.

The recent speech of leading “Yes” campaigner Noel Pearson to the National Press Club hit the mark. He spoke eloquently about his vision for the future, a better future. He laid out what sort of country we should aspire to be.

He rejected the argument from the opposing camp that the Voice could divide Australia by race: “We’re not a separate race – we’re humans,” he said. “It’s just that we are Indigenous. And you go to some parts of the world and indigenous people are blond and blue-eyed. This is not about race. This is about us being the original peoples in the country.”

His comments contrasted sharply with those of Nyunggai Warren Mundine in the same forum the previous day, in which the “No” campaign leader described the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a “declaration of war”.

“Only love can move us now,” Pearson said. “It’s the love of home. Our Australian home is the source of this love.”

I would hazard a guess that Pearson’s address, unlike a couple of others on this theme of the referendum, will be studied in schools in the future. It was a speech for the ages. It mattered.

In an important sense, the referendum provides an opportunity to clearly move beyond our White Australia past by responding positively to the wishes of First Australians – that is, their request as to how best to be recognised, as expressed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Giving them an advisory Voice can also help our leadership do better than the failed attempts of the past to develop effective policies to deal with Indigenous disadvantage.

This is not about guilt but a positive expression of love and unity for our national future.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 7, 2023 as "The stain of White Australia".

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ABC News, 7 October 2023:

Laura Tingle

The bitter politics and hypocrisy of the Voice debate will mark it as yet another ugly chapter in Australia's history

A usual plaudit for a book is that a reader "couldn't put it down". But a plaudit for David Marr's new book, Killing for Country, which documents his family's history as professional killers of Aborigines in NSW and Queensland in the mid-1800s, is that it is one you have to keep putting down.

It's not just the brutality of the large-scale killings Marr documents that requires regular pauses, but the voices of white people discussing it — either in the most cold-blooded pragmatic terms, or in terms of horror.

The chilling fact is that, no matter what was actually known or protested about at the time, the killings didn't stop.

Marr's history documents events which were not just cases of rounding up Aboriginal people accused of crimes, or events that just happened in the early years of white settlement, but the systemic shooting and poisoning of people living on land they had been living on for thousands of years, or who may have adapted to living peaceably on stations, or even in working in towns.

It continued at least into the 1890s.

The immediate horror of the story clashes horrendously with our image of ourselves, and with the lofty ambitions of those who oversaw federation, and the writing of our Constitution, as the former chief justice of the High Court, Robert French, observed in a speech to the National Press Club this week.

Noting resonances with the current referendum debate, French quoted some of the opposition to federation and the constitution at the time, with one contributor observing that "the people aren't ready to federate; they don't know what it means; [and] their leaders and their newspapers are not brainy enough or honest enough to try to teach them what it means".

He quoted the then premier of Queensland, Samuel Griffith, observing that "there is no doubt that here, as everywhere, there will be timid men who are afraid of launching into something new; but when was ever a great thing achieved without risking something".

French observed: "The Australian spirit evoked by the 'don't know, vote no' slogan is a poor shadow of the spirit which drew up our Constitution. It invites us to a resentful, uninquiring passivity."

Linking the past with the future

The headlines from the former chief justice's speech focused on his affirmation that, in his view, the Voice posed no constitutional or legal risks.

But his speech also manages to link up, in a way which has often not successfully occurred, the past and the future embedded in the Voice debate.

"It does not require a black armband view of history to conclude that colonisation did not bring unalloyed benefits to our First Peoples," he said. "Nor does it require rocket science logic to conclude that we live today with the cross-generational effects of that collision."

Whatever your views on the idea of the Voice, it is not just the ugly racism exposed by the debate about it — which has seen Indigenous people on both sides of the debate subjected to abuse and death threats — it is the spectacular failure, hypocrisy and opportunism that has been on display on occasions among our politicians that has already marked it as another ugly chapter in our history.

The willingness of some sections of the media to perpetuate misinformation, and of other sections of the media to get lost in attempts at false balance, has made nigh on impossible a reasonably rational debate about what a permanent advisory body to the parliament and executive, whose actual remit would be defined and controlled by the parliament, might mean both symbolically and practically to Indigenous Australians.

Once again, it seems our leaders and newspapers "are not brainy enough or honest enough to try to teach Australians what it means".

And this is not because those leaders didn't know.

Conflict over how to help Indigenous people

French quotes John Howard — now a vocal campaigner against the Voice — from 2007, saying:

"I believe we must find room in our national life to formally recognise the special status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first peoples of our nation. We must recognise the distinctiveness of Indigenous identity and culture and the right of Indigenous people to preserve that heritage. The crisis of Indigenous social and cultural disintegration requires a stronger affirmation of Indigenous identity and culture as a source of dignity, self-esteem and pride."

Now, Howard says, people should vote no to "maintain the rage" against the Voice, which he says would create "a new cockpit of conflict about how to help Indigenous people".

Conflict over how to help people — if conflict was what the Voice produced — is apparently a worse outcome than possibly addressing "the crisis of Indigenous identity and culture".

Howard's self-described political love child, former prime minister Tony Abbott — who has always claimed a special interest in, and affinity for, Indigenous people — said this week that, rather than pursue the Voice, "we should end the separatism, which has bedevilled Indigenous policy for many decades now".

"Aboriginal people are fine Australians," he told ABC RN, "and they should be encouraged to integrate into the mainstream of our society."

What "integration" means is as unclear now as it was when Abbott advocated the "mainstreaming" of Indigenous services when he was prime minister.

And if there is any model that currently defines how Indigenous policy is executed at the federal level, it is the one imposed on us by Abbott as prime minister when he insisted on bringing Aboriginal affairs into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — a department with no experience in service delivery.

Blocking change, no matter what the truth is

No campaigners regularly now rage about some mysterious bureaucracy which allegedly worthlessly chews up billions of dollars in wasted funding to Indigenous people.

That would be the National Indigenous Australians Agency, the body set up by the Morrison government and which morphed out of the structure set up in PM&C by Abbott.

The Coalition also appointed an Indigenous Advisory Council "to provide advice to the Government on Indigenous affairs, [focusing] on practical changes to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people".

The inaugural, government-appointed chair of the council — which sounds like it had a job pretty much identical to that proposed for the Voice — was another prominent No campaigner, Warren Mundine.

That the policies that many of the prominent politicians leading the No campaign are actually campaigning against come from their own side of politics, or are based on their own previous statements, and their own policy legacy, is just one more depressing aspect of what has proved a very flawed debate.

Coalition figures from Howard to Peter Dutton insist their difficulty is not with constitutional recognition but with the specific proposal for the Voice.

Robert French on Friday reflected that the very act of recognition proposed by the referendum "is the creation of the Voice".

"I do agree with John Howard that recognition in the Constitution is a strong affirmation of Indigenous identity and culture," he said.

"A stronger and practical affirmation will give content to that recognition by the creation of the constitutional voice to Parliament and the Executive Government," he said

After many months of bitter debate, his words remind us that we are back at a point where it seems that, no matter what the truth may be, we will not let it lead to any change.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.

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