Recording: Call it Out

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to today's event, Call It Out:  Telling the True Story of Racism in Australia.  I'm Larissa Behrendt.  I'm the Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Institute in the Research Unit, but I would like to start this forum with an acknowledgment of country.  I know that all of us are in different parts of Australia, so as I acknowledge that I'm on the land of the Gadigal people, I hope that that is an opportunity for you to reflect on the traditional owners on whose land you are on.  

This is a really important ceremony that we do, the Acknowledgment of Country, and particularly for an event like this, where we're looking at the impacts of colonisation on First Nations.  It's a very important part of setting the tone really to acknowledge that wherever we are, we're on unceded First Nations country and it's an opportunity for us to acknowledge the wisdom and knowledge systems that are on that land and to pay tribute to the generosity with which First Nations share that knowledge and that country with us.  It's a very appropriate thing.  So particularly for the Gadigal, where I've been very lucky to live and work, I acknowledge the Elders of the past and the Elders of the present.

So with that, it's my great honour to be MCing tonight.  I'm filling in for Robynne Quiggin, who was going to have a role at the beginning but is unfortunately unwell.  So I'm wearing the hat of stepping in with her as well as moderating the panel as well.

So just as a little bit of background, the Jumbunna Institute for Education and Research, in collaboration with the National Justice Project, developed Call it Out, an online register to record all forms and levels of racism and discrimination experienced by First Nations people.  It's been a very important part of our collaboration between the two institutions.  The Research Unit of Jumbunna and the National Justice Project have been involved in many cases for a very long time, starting with issues in the Northern Territory particularly around the intervention, and we've done a lot of work in the antidiscrimination, antiracism space and the criminal justice space.  So this in a way has been a wonderful project to come out of that work where there's a lot of synergy in our work for social justice.

It's my pleasure to be joined by my distinguished colleagues today who will discuss the interim report and look at what the data shows for that first six months of the register being in place.  

So I'm going to introduce the panel.  Chris Cunneen probably needs no introduction, but he is the Professor of Criminology at Jumbunna Research.  He has a national and international reputation as a leading criminologist, specialising in First Nations people and the law in juvenile justice, restorative justice, policing, prison issues and human rights.  It's a privilege to have him as a colleague and it's a privilege to have you here tonight.  Thank you and welcome, Chris.

Fiona Allison is a Research Fellow at Jumbunna Research whose focus is on improving First Nations civil and family law access to justice and justice reinvestment.  She is also data and research leader with Just Reinvest New South Wales, supporting Aboriginal communities to implement justice reinvestment.  So welcome, Fiona.  It's wonderful to have you here.

FIONA ALLISON:  Thank you, Larissa.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  And Lindon Coombes is Industry Professor and incoming Director of Research at the Jumbunna Institute.  He's a descendant of the Yuallaraay people of northwest New South Wales and has worked in indigenous affairs in a range of positions, including Director at PWC Indigenous Consulting, CEO of the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples and CEO of Tranby Aboriginal College in Glebe.  Welcome, Lindon.

PROF. LINDON COOMBES:  Thank you.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  So before we begin, I just want to go through a couple of pieces of housekeeping.  Today's event is being live captioned so to view the captions, click on the cc button in your Zoom control panel or click on the link in the chat to open in a separate window.  

If you have any questions during today's event, please type them into the Q&A box, which you can also find in your Zoom control panel, and you can upvote questions that others have asked, so do try to keep them relevant and on topic and we do have a moderator who will be sending questions to me.

I'd also like to acknowledge that today's discussion will touch on topics that are upsetting and can cause distress or be triggering.  If at any time you feel yourself becoming overwhelmed or distressed, please take a break from the webinar, speak to somebody you trust or contact one of the free 24 hour support services available, and we're just posting details on how to access those services in the chat box right now.

We know racism is an endemic problem in Australia that disproportionately impacts First Nations people.  However, the true extent of the impact remains largely unseen and unheard.  The Jumbunna Institute and the National Justice Project developed Call it Out as an independent Indigenous controlled platform that recalls all forms and levels of racism and discrimination experienced by First Nations peoples without the usual barriers of inhibiting reports of racism.

So I want to start off the discussion with you, Chris.  To start with, I wonder if you can tell us how the idea for creating Call it Out as an online register came about and then why you think, given all the work you do, that this is so important.

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Thanks, Larissa.  I think, as you mentioned, the true extents of racism is not known and that was a motivating factor in setting this up because we knew, and we know, there's a huge discrepancy around reports by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people about racism, a discrepancy between that and the sort of numbers that we get through antidiscrimination complaints and this has been proved already by Call it Out.  In the first six months we had more complaints than what most of the antidiscrimination bodies would get in a year.  So for us it's important really to highlight the prevalence of racism and it's far greater than what official data would indicate and part of the purpose of doing that is to make denial of the problem of racism much more difficult to sustain.

I think one of the other reasons that motivated us was that we really wanted to create a platform where the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people could be heard and where they could name and record their experiences of racism.  So that for us was really important.  

And just to give you an idea of a couple of comments in the register, one person wrote in that Call it Out wasn't necessarily going to provide justice, but it was a real catharsis for him   that was his word   in being able to write and tell his story.  And another woman spoke to us of being brought to tears as she described her experiences on the register.

There are more practical reasons, I think, for setting it up.  It's less complex, there's less barriers to using it than official mechanisms, it's more accessible than surveys of racism.  So one of the things that was again really important for us was to have something that was what we've referred to as a respondent generated initiative   in other words, it's driven by the people themselves who want to record what's happened to them   and it provides the opportunity to record a whole different range, if you like, of racism.  You can record institutional and systemic racism, interpersonal racism, which interpersonal is mostly what's collected through surveys, and racism in the media and online.  So it really allows the person themselves to decide what is racism and how it should be classified and to put it on the register.

I think most importantly of all in terms of setting it up, we wanted to provide again a platform or an avenue which was an ongoing testimony from those First Nations people who have experienced and suffered the effects of racism, and so all of this is contributing, I think, to the larger story about the extent and the nature of racism against First Nations people in this country.  And I just very briefly want to honour the stories and experiences that have been shared with us on the register by people who we know are brave just being able to express that in a public way on a register, so we thank them particularly.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Wonderful, thank you.  Fiona, I'll turn to you now.  Can you share some of the top insights from the Call it Out interim report with us?

FIONA ALLISON:  Yes, thanks, Larissa.  So, look, I'd encourage everyone to have a look at the report.  We won't be able to share masses of detail in the webinar today, but just some of the key themes that have come out of the reports that have been made to the register.  

Firstly, some of the more common types of racism identified include racist stereotyping, institutional racism, racism in the workplace, and racism in commercial places, and by that we're talking about ordinary things that people do, like going shopping for food or dealing with real estate agents to try to access housing.  

Sitting back and reading through the 267 reports that we've got sitting in the report that we're putting out today, I guess the sense, the overwhelming sense, is that racism is all around us, it's extremely prevalent.  As one woman said in the register, she had a very depressing feeling that she was surrounded by racists, both covert and more overt, and in the report we've summarised the scope of the report in the register as covering small private gatherings, racism arising in the street and in social media, in shops, cafes and buses, hospital beds and classrooms and in our institutions, our government institutions.  

Racism also has multiple layers to it, so it happens to people more than once.  The register has got reports of multiple incidents and ongoing racism was reported in 25% of cases.  So to give you an example of those layers, a person might report bullying in the workplace, racist bullying, and then try to go to their employer to get something about it and that employer fails them and they report that as another racist incident.  

And the other thing that came out strongly was that it affects all generations.  So in the reports that have been made, there's discussion of the effects of past racism on current generations of Indigenous people, but also there's a number of reports in there that speak to children and young people being targeted by racism.  So as an example of that, there's a report from a woman who is sitting outside with her children on what she calls a warm summer's night, as families do, and she's confronted by a group of people exiting a pub nearby that hurl racial abuse at her and damage her windscreen and what she reported was a deep feeling of sadness that she knew that that was the first experience of racism that her kids had had, but there would probably be many more, and another man reported that having experienced racism himself, he had the sense that his children would have, you know, a limited future because this would also be an issue for them moving forward.

Another common theme was aggression in racism.  So 34% of the reports spoke to various types of aggression, physical and verbal abuse, bullying, property damage, and so on.  To give you an example, and it is a little confronting, but there was a young man working in the Public Service that had made a complaint about a more senior colleague and in a meeting with other colleagues that senior colleague said that this young man should be hung and he reports, you know, continually having thoughts and images of him being hung.  

There's also a number of incidents reported about physical assaults.  So one is about an Aboriginal woman who is called a racially abusive name and she has her teeth knocked out by a neighbour and has long term health impacts related to that and assault by police is also a theme that comes up in the reports.

And the last thing I was just going to draw out of the incidents is institutional racism.  I think Chris said at the outset that when we see   often when we see surveys that are conducted with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people about racism, interpersonal racism is a really common issue, like the example I just gave about the woman who's assaulted on the street, but what we do know is that institutional racism is a major issue with significant impacts across all First Nations communities.  

So it was good to see   I won't say it's good to see, you know, stories of institutional racism, but it was good to see about 21% of the report speaking to that issue.  And within that there was a lot of comment about government institutions that includes child protection, education, and justice.  

Probably the reports that related to health really stood out because we've got   because there was a lot of them but also because we've got people presenting to health services with considerable vulnerability, they're looking for compassion and, you know, to be cared for and when that goes wrong because of racism, there's really significant health impacts.  

So a couple of examples of that that people can read in the report is there was a young Aboriginal girl in a hospital bed on a ward really struggling with hearing impairment and delirium and meanwhile a nurse reported that one of the other nurses was actively discouraging staff from admitting family into the ward to support her because they would be troublemakers just because they're Aboriginal people.  

And the other one was a parent's report of their son that passed away sadly just after discharge from hospital.  He had not received adequate care and the parent reported that that was because he was Aboriginal and he also had as a discharge address a corrective services address and the assumption was that that had some impact on the care that he received.

I would just say too in terms of institutional racism, when you look at the reports, you can see why it's difficult to pull out.  There's a report in there about child protection assessment frameworks as being inherently racist   they don't look like it, but in the way that they're implemented   and they end up having terrible outcomes for Aboriginal families in terms of child removal.  

And the other thing coming out of that point is that people don't need to be treated differently in order to be discriminated against.  So that lady, the lady who talked about the child protection assessment framework, was concerned that there wasn't enough recognition of culture and cultural rights in the development and implementation of that policy.

I'm just going to briefly run through too, because I'm sure people will be interested in it, what sort of responses people had to these issues.  So I know Chris is going to talk about people avoiding places and spaces in which racism occurs, which is a really big issue.  We asked people what their responses were and one of the more common ones recorded was that people were turning to family and friends, so in about a third of cases that's what they did, which is really important, it tells a really important story about the solidarity and support that people find in their communities and there's a suggestion in there for initiating a larger scale collective Me Too movement for everyone to come together and share their experiences of racism in order to combat it.

Calling out racism is happening and it was identified in the reports as a really important step to combatting this issue.  So we saw 10% of people indicating that they reported to police or an antidiscrimination body and 20% had either defended themselves or defended someone else who'd experienced racism.

So one thing I just wanted to point out is that although we had just over half of the reports coming from people who had directly experienced racism, we got lots of reports coming in from witnesses and family and relatives, but particularly witnesses of racism and it was, I suppose, heartening to see people stepping up and trying to call this issue out and actually take some action.  One example is a woman at a football match who heard a racist comment from a group of young guys behind her.  She called that out, so she called him out, and then a number of other people sitting in the crowd around her jumped in and also called this out.  One went to report this guy to staff and by the time they came back, he had voluntarily exited with his friends.  

But yeah, look, overall people are just really calling out for more justice, more accountability, more serious consequences, while also discussing the considerable difficulties they have in trying to call it out.

Another common theme was that, you know, people might call this issue out and face retaliation and sanctioning.  So the lady who had her windscreen smashed, she actually went to police and tried to report it and was threatened, harassed and then there's another account in there of an Aboriginal student, a young student, who ends up being suspended for retaliating when he's been repeatedly called an ape by another student.

And the final point I will make   I know it's a lot to absorb, but the last point I was going to make is that there's a really strong call in there for others to take responsibility.  There's a quote that we've got in the report from an Aboriginal woman who said it can't be up to mob to constantly defend our existence.  And in terms of that, the reports speak to the importance of educating the public about their legal and ethical responsibilities to be antiracist and also for more education about Aboriginal culture and history to combat the extensive racial stereotyping that sits within so many of the reports in the register.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Thank you.  Chris, I'll come back to you after that.  Obviously Fiona has covered a lot of ground, but from your perspective, what were the findings that you found surprising?

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Yes, I guess one of the things that came out which we perhaps weren't expecting really was firstly of the self reports, so this is people who had experienced racism directly themselves, two thirds of those reports were made by Aboriginal women and the remainder by men and so at one level there was probably little difference in the reports on the type of racism by gender, but there were a few significant ones that stand out.  So women were twice as likely to report racism in the workplace than men were and I guess to some extent that was unexpected.  Men tended to report racism more in commercial spaces, online and in police courts and prisons, so perhaps that's not unexpected, but the size of the number of women reporting racism in the workplace was.

I think the other area which perhaps is not surprising but really I think one of the most intense parts of the report that runs all the way through the report are the effects of racism on individuals and it just comes through again and again first of all the pain, the pain of racism, which comes out through anger, through disappointment, sorrow, humiliation, panic attacks, and that can be not only about the incident but by the way it was responded to which, you know, the lack of response or the type of response can exacerbate those pains.

Financial effects, given that there are a large proportion that were reported that were related to workplace racism.  You know, the financial effects of having to leave work, to give up your job, and certainly people reported that all of a sudden they're out of work and without money because of racism.

The effects on children, which Fiona has mentioned, you know, the first experiences of children seeing racism in terms of the abuse that's shouted at their parents, and so on, and also on relationships, the effect on relationships as well.  And all of these I think feed into that broader problem about the health impacts and the long term effects.  Suicide attempts, physical ailments, anxiety, depression, PTSD, all of these things, breakdowns, hospitalisations   people mentioned all of those as the effects or the outcomes of what they'd experienced.

Avoidance and exclusion was another effect, so people drop out of classes, they drop out of employment, they exclude themselves from shops in particular areas as a way of trying to deal with these longer term effects of racism.

I think two other areas really that came out in terms of the effects of it were the fact that racism was so blatant in many cases and this came up in a couple of reports from non Aboriginal witnesses or friends, sorry, of people that had experienced racism where, you know, it was obvious that the Aboriginal person that was there was being treated differently, treated racistly and the other person wasn't and it was very blatant, it was very open and there was no apology about it.

And I think the final point in terms of the effects really is prevalence.  I think, as Fiona has already mentioned, the prevalence is not surprising to Aboriginal people but it's certainly surprising when you see it all put together in a register like this.

A couple of other points that were perhaps not as expected was the corroboration of accounts of racism between those who witnessed racism, who were often non Aboriginal people, and the victims themselves and we saw that in workplace racism, where we had other people calling out racism as a witness, but the accounts largely corroborate the types of things that were happening in the other reports that were self reported.  And similarly in the health sector we had people witnessing and calling out racism by doctors and by nurses in terms of the way Aboriginal people were being treated.

I think the final point, which I think, you know, is a heartening point, is that of witnesses stepping up and doing something about it   not just in reporting to the register, but actually doing something about it at the time   and I think that goes to the heart of the point that has been made that confronting racism is a shared responsibility for all of us.  

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Thanks, Chris.  There's lots to contemplate in that.  

I want to bring you into the conversation now, Lindon.  We've heard a great overview of the many elements and the many manifestations and the many places that people have reported experiencing racism.  I wonder just from your perspective with the work that you've done, do you think that snapshot that's come through in the interim report gives an account of the scope of racism towards First Nations people.

PROF. LINDON COOMBES:  Yes, it's done a great job of giving an insight into those experiences, the different types and particularly the effects of that and as Chris said, providing an option for people who   you know, I think one of the other points is that people who report racism don't do it the first time it happens because there's a lot of gaslighting that can go on with reports of racism.  Generally black fellers just want to do their job, they just want to go to the footy, they just want to go to a restaurant like anyone else and not be harassed, but unfortunately they're consistently subjected to this horrible, horrible behaviour.

So I imagine it would be the same for the people who took the time and effort and emotional effort to recount those experiences and, you know, I remember my first experience of racism was at a Rugby League game, I experienced it consistently, at something I loved.  I loved going to watch my cousin play Rugby League, but it became a little bit of an ordeal for an 8 year old as I was at the time and hearing such venom against a family member and someone I loved.  

So, you know, picking up on those particular things and just sort of reading through that, that sort of gelled with me, particularly the one going to sport but, yeah, it's hard for a report to sort of encapsulate the full experience of racism, particularly just based on the six months, but this has done an excellent job.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Just following up on that, how can we ensure that First Nations peoples' voices and approaches lead any actions that we take to address the issues being uncovered through the Call it Out register?

PROF. LINDON COOMBES:  One of the consistent themes that I've come across in my work, in our work here at Jumbunna, when you go out and talk to communities, regardless of the issue, whether it's health education, housing, anything, it's not the first time that people have raised the issue and it's the same with racism.  So the key thing is to listen.  It's not that black fellers aren't saying this.  It's similar with violence and people pretend that Aboriginal people aren't calling out ranges of behaviour.  It's that there's no listening to it or it's deliberately misinterpreted because people find it all a bit too much for them perhaps personally, perhaps emotionally, perhaps intellectually.  

But my one thing would be to listen to Aboriginal people and to believe them.  You know, it's incredibly rare that an Indigenous person will put their hand up, share what is many times a very personal, very hurtful experience just for attention and make it up to try to prove the point.  And that's where this sort of gaslighting comes in, and we've seen that with our work, where Indigenous people may have raised issues over and over and over again, but until it was corroborated generally by a non Indigenous person, they weren't taken seriously, their claims were doubted, people would claim a lack of evidence, a lack of proof and, you know, things would be swept under the carpet.

So those are the two key things, to listen and to believe Indigenous people when they speak.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Chris, I'll come back to you now.  Obviously a lot of time and energy into the Call it Out register and we're asking people to share experiences that can often be traumatic.  What are you hoping the findings from the interim report will achieve in terms of any change and what do you see as kind of the next steps?

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Sorry, I'm always on mute when I'm about to talk, I realise.  

Look, you know, it is the first step and we see a kind of range of different areas I think where change might occur.  I mean, one of the things we want to do is get out to the community level and what we'd like to do is have a kind of mixture of advocacy, advocacy and assistance to people who have experienced racism, as well as encouraging people to fill in the Call it Out report.  I think we can have communication strategies, we can have promotion, we can have advertising, all of that is important, but I think an important part of it and one which we're really deeply committed to is to getting out at a community level and talking to people at a community level so that we can provide both support and advocacy, if that's required, as well as expanding the use of Call it Out.  

So I think as we build this, the kind of range of effects are multiple really, whether it's about antidiscrimination commissions improving the way they respond and work with Aboriginal people, whether it's about advocating for law reform, whether it's about advocating for other types of change.  So I think this is really just the beginning.  I mean, we've only been   we've only had the register up and running since March, the first six months, and we've been astounded really by the number of reports that we've got in with actually minimal amount of communication around Call it Out.  

So we're really hoping to build that and build this   I think as I said at the beginning   as a testimony.  I mean, yeah, there's all the policy areas that it can impact on, but for me personally I would really like to see this as a living testimony to what's happening and that's what we need to understand to go beyond it.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  What about you, Fiona?  What are you hoping with the work that you do that the register and the findings in the interim report might lead to?

FIONA ALLISON:  Well, hopefully the stories that are being called out by witnesses, by people experiencing racism in the register and also the accounts of people calling things out in person that we've got sitting in our report might encourage others to do the same given the difficulties that people face in doing it.  

I think also we hope it will be educative because one of the key themes that's come out is   as I said before, one of the strategies that people are putting forward to combat racism is to educate people about racism and its impacts and that might be particularly in relation to institutional racism, for example, which is still fairly misunderstood.  

Also, there's some really important first steps in thinking about how self determination fits into this space, something that Lindon has just been talking about, but we need to listen to the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in terms of how they think this issue should be responded to, and there's already some really good examples in there to be listened to, but we hope that there'll be more coming through as well given that we've only really just started.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Lindon, what do you hope can be triggered by a project like this that seeks to capture experiences and give a platform for people to talk about their experiences of racism?  What would you hope might be transformative about that and what transformations are you hoping might evolve?

PROF. LINDON COOMBES:  Yeah, I think it's education and awareness and, you know, even for someone like me who's had a lifetime of experience with it with my family and working in the area, even some of that sort of struck me at different times and often people don't understand initially until they see it, until they experience or it happens to them.  Similar with people's experience with police, you know, they may be fans of police but it takes one sort of bad interaction and they start to reconsider the role of police and the relationship they have with society.

So I would hope that people would be a bit more aware, that they would be educated a bit more to find ways that they are comfortable with intervening, firstly identifying it, knowing it when it happens and providing support to those who are affected, as we heard from that example earlier.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Chris, one thing that I was just wondering in listening to the range of experiences that have been captured and the point was made at the beginning of the seminar, but I wonder if you have any reflections on it and it's this, that when legal frameworks are set up, antidiscrimination laws, you know, workplace laws, et cetera, to combat racism, they're quite narrow and I wonder what your reflections are about that narrowness compared to what we're seeing in this interim report, in the scope.  I'd just be really interested to hear what your responses are or what your reflections are about the limitations of the legal mechanisms and response compared to what the problem is that you're mapping out with this project.

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Well, there's a yawning gap between the two and I think for us, you know, it kind of relates back to that point about community.  I mean, we've seen it over and over again, you know, policies and law reform are constructed in a way that is absent from the voice of community.  It's usually a bunch of white fellers dressed like I am sitting around a table, you know, talking about what needs to be done in relation to law reform or policy development and I think the lack of intersection or interaction between knowledge of what's happening in the community, knowledge of ways of confronting it, the problems of racism, and dealing with it   you know, it's that absence, if you like, which is a core problematic in relation to the policy/law reforms and development.  And then added to that you've got a problem where you might have what on paper looks like good policy, but it's not implemented in any way that's meaningful.  

So I guess that's my reflection and I think   and I'm sure Fiona is busting to say something about the importance of direct action, so I think she might have some reflections on this as well.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Sure.  Well, I was going to ask you that too about what you think individuals can do, so if Fiona is busting, I'll go to her first and come back to you on that one.  

Fiona, what can individuals do?  That is a question.  It is something that you mentioned is being picked up, that people aren't necessarily passive when they see racism, but what would your advice be to people?  

FIONA ALLISON:  Well, definitely to call it out on the register because we need to kind of pull this story together, this national story through the register on what's occurring and what responses are in relation to racism at the moment.

You've also got   there's some examples in the register of non Indigenous people modelling good behaviour in the workplace or in educational institutions or whatever and not necessarily calling out, but just kind of educating people in their spaces about good ways to   how to avoid being a racist, basically.  So yes.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  And Lindon, what's your reflection on   you talked a little bit about listening, but what are the other actions that individuals can take to combat racism?

PROF. LINDON COOMBES:  I think it's   yeah, a bit of individual reflection, and I know this is difficult for people who have sort of racist views and indeed express them, but one of the things I've learned and I'm still learning about in this area is that it's never just racism.  Within an organisation we've learned that.  When we look at instances of racism, it's never just racism.  There's something else going on.  

So when we did the Collingwood report, it was on the basis of Heritier Lumumba, who reported instances of racism, but he also said that there was homophobia, sexist jokes, an environment that just wasn't professional and my experience with people who are racist, it's never just the racism.  They're not a great person, you know, that looks after their family as healthy relationships, you know, is a good person except they're a little bit racist.  It just doesn't work that way.

And I've also sort of tried to think around how   we know that racism is a destructive force, that it manifests in so many ways and does so much damage, but in a way of trying to I guess, you know, take away its power a little bit and that was one of the things that I thought.  So, you know, if you're in the pub having drinks with your mates and they say something racist, to shoot them down a little bit, you know, in a constructive way and, you know, what else is going on, what is causing you to lash out at people who have done you no harm, that are just minding their own business existing, what's causing you to be that angry to people who've done nothing to you, and start sort of deconstructing that a little bit and then I think you find behind racism it's weakness and people can use their racism sort of as a front for that.

So as I say, I'm still learning about this, but those are some of my sort of observations around that.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Can I just ask you this, then.  Obviously one of the big national agenda items coming from the Uluru Statement from the Heart is about truth telling.  What is the role of calling out racism in relation to that?

PROF. LINDON COOMBES:  It's fundamental I think.  The reason that we need a truth telling process is because it's been contextualised, it's grounded in racism.  That's the whole point of this.  So we can't leave these discussions sort of unattended to.  I think if we go through a truth telling process and not be serious, you know, and open to difficult conversations   they are difficult   but that racism underlies so much of I guess where we are as a country.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Chris, I'll come back to you about any additional thoughts about what individuals can do in this space.

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  I think just, you know, in a nutshell call it out on the register if you have been someone who's experienced racism, but also I think, you know, the point that both Fiona and Lindon have made, you know, the importance of people who aren't necessarily directly experiencing racism, you know, to stand up and respond to what they see as racism, whether it's in their workplace, cultural activities, football, whatever it is.  I think that's the   you know, they're the most important things to do.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Fiona, just picking up on a couple of questions that have come through in the Q&A, first of all there was a question about whether the research picked up any particular information about the perpetrators of racism, was there anything that came out in relation to that?  It's probably a question for you too, Chris.

FIONA ALLISON:  Do you want to take that, Chris?  

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Well, you can.

FIONA ALLISON:  I know there was data that indicated that perpetrators were more likely to be female, but then we also had more reports from women, so   I don't know if that makes sense.  I don't think that does make sense, actually.  Chris, do you want to speak to the data stuff?

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Well, yes, the majority of perpetrators that were identified were women, but that could be a function of the fact that the majority of the self reports were also by women as well, self reports of racism.  

For this interim report, we didn't delve into the information around perpetrators, we wanted to focus more on people that experienced racism, but it's certainly something that we want to look at more in the annual report when we can delve into   we'll have more numbers to look at, I suppose, in terms of registrations and we can delve into it a bit deeper.  

So we're not sure at the moment whether the fact that the majority of perpetrators were women is actually directly related to the fact that it was a majority of women compared to men that were reporting racism.  

FIONA ALLISON:  Can I just jump in there too and say as I said before, there is quite a lot in there about institutional perpetrators and that there's a real need for much better consequences, much tougher consequences for institutions as well, setting aside the gendered issue.  

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  I was just going to say, one of the innovative responses that came in terms of what needs to be done was a suggestion that we should have a register of racist institutions, government or non government, so that they can be named and shamed.

FIONA ALLISON:  (Inaudible) as well so that people   the Aboriginal woman who was talking about that said she would boycott those organisations and institutions.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  There are a couple of questions too that go to communication and one was   and again, this is probably for Allison and Chris   one was how was information about the register sent out, how was   the fact that it existed, how was it disseminated, and what are your plans in terms of disseminating the information and research and data that's come out of the register so far?  

FIONA ALLISON:  Do you want to go to how we sent it out, Chris?  

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Or you can.  You go.

FIONA ALLISON:  Well, I think it was distributed to a network of contacts that we had.  And in terms of what's going to happen moving forward, we're keen to sort of take the register out on the road potentially, so to go out into community and take it out to improve accessibility to it moving forward so we can gather more reports on racism.
There's also some organisations that have approached us that are interested in working with us to take the register out into their institutions and workplaces and organisations to invite staff to enter reports on to the register, so that's another way that we might get it out.

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  And I just think in this context it's worth mentioning we had   we didn't have any specific funding, so all the resources   we had essentially no communication strategy because we had no resources for a communication strategy, and so part of how we develop it will depend on some sort of stream of funding so it can be developed and communicated better.  

And as we've said a few times, we're really committed to taking it to community, to communities, and one of the enhancement   well, there are a couple of enhancements that we'd like to make to the register.  One is to have it translated into a number of Aboriginal languages and also to make it more accessible for people with disabilities, but at the moment we don't have resources to do that.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Lindon, there's a question here that I'd like to pose to you and it's a really good one in that it talks about really at the heart of it how hard working in this space is   this is probably something that Chris and Fiona can talk to as well.  But the observation was made around this forum and also around the Call it Out register.  We of course got a lot of racist comments, there was a lot   you know, it has been not necessarily something when you do something like this that's very welcomed.  I wonder if you could reflect on the challenges of working in this space of antiracism and how as a manager of a research team you manage the fact that there actually is quite a bit of   there's quite a price to pay for working in this area.

PROF. LINDON COOMBES:  Yeah, there is.  We've had sort of direct experience of that with a number of our staff who have been targeted both physically and verbally and online and it's been a subject of recent discussions in here how we support each other, how we ensure that   you know, this is tough work, a lot of the team are Indigenous people, so the work that we do are a lot of the time things we have personal and family experience of, so that makes it very difficult.

One of the sadder parts of this is the predictability of that and working in this area for nearly 25 years you just know when you stick your head up and when you speak out around these issues that these sorts of comments and experiences are going to happen.  So we have started discussions here at Jumbunna, but it is a real issue given, I guess, that personal experience and then sort of copping that.  

And I've always wondered at the venom of this and why someone   you know, these people are irate.  They're irrational.  If they're not racist, if they think it's a non issue, their response is way out of whack.  So as I said before, I'm not a psychologist, but those people would have a lot of things going on, but the sad part is we can predict it and it can make us stronger.  You know, having shared those tough experiences, you know, do bond us and strengthen our resolve to keep at the work.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  There's quite a few questions that have come through that talk about that very tricky relationship between systemic racism and individual behaviour and obviously the register has to date picked up a little bit of   picked up both of those things.  

But I was just wondering, and perhaps it's a question for you, Chris, because you've worked in many instances, thinking of the work you've done in policing where it's systemic and then you've looked in other places where it's probably more individual, but what are your reflections on the challenges of how you address systemic as opposed to individual actions?

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Mmm, difficult question.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  I love giving you a hard question.  I give you all the easy ones.  You've got to have a hard one occasionally.  It is a very difficult topic, though, and it's not surprising people have been grappling with it, so your thoughts will be interesting.

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Yes.  Look, I think the initial problem, I suppose, you have is demonstrating how institutional racism works.  I mean, in some cases it's obvious, but in other cases it's not and I've worked with   you know, I'm thinking of corrective services as well as police, where they hide behind   I'm saying they hide behind, they obviously don't think they do, but they hide behind ideas about evidence based practice, you know, kind of scientific approaches to dealing with "offenders" in inverted commas and yet if you look at the tools that they use, it's quite evident that they discriminate against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  

I mean, there was a classic example   I won't say the name of the Police Service   but where they were using a tool, a risk based tool that had one of the factors to determine risk was whether the person was Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.  Now, that is embedding racism into an institutional framework and yet it was created under the kind of rubric of evidence based practice.  

So this is probably not answering the question, but I think it's the interrelationship then between individual decision making and I think the thing about systemic racism has always been that institutional racism or systemic racism doesn't depend on races at the individual operational level, if you like, to reproduce racism in terms of its effect on black or minority or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  So I think we have to understand how that works to be able to confront it.  

Can I just make one quick point too in answer to your earlier question that Lindon was talking about in terms of the impact of racism.  One thing we didn't mention was that a bit over 10% of all the entries or reports on the Call it Out register were by racists.  So we had over 300 reports and 32, I think, or 33 were actually racist entries where people were using the registry to spit all the venom that Lindon was talking about.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Just a couple of quick questions.  I'll make a comment.  There's a few people asking about how information can get out there, so hopefully there's a way to spread the word into those remote communities or into your networks, your public local libraries about the fact that the register exists, that would be great, and also spreading the news about the findings.  

There's a couple of questions too about whether there's any particular law reform that you hope might come from this, particularly given some of Chris's comments about the limitations and another question from one of our colleagues about whether or not there's a possibility that there could be antidiscrimination cases or other cases that come out of some of the complaints that have been made on the register.

FIONA ALLISON:  I can probably answer that, Larissa.  Just in terms of complaints, yeah, we have in mind that down the track there might be a way, and one of the difficulties of lodging complaints is when, for example, they need to be written complaints.  We're hoping that somewhere down the track there might be a way for reports that go into the register to funnel into the complaints mechanism, hopefully attached to some advocacy because that's also a really significant barrier to putting in complaints is actually having someone walk beside you while you do it.  And then   so what was the other question?

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  It was whether law reform   

FIONA ALLISON:  Yeah, the intent of the register is to gather a whole heap of evidence that can be used for those sorts of approaches or campaigns.  Whether or not we actually get involved in them is something we need to decide, but yeah, the idea is to gather evidence that could be fed into that sort of approach.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  I'm just mindful of the time, so I'm just going to quickly ask each of you if you have any final comments.  I'll start with you, Chris.

PROF. CHRIS CUNNEEN:  Look, no, only to say, just following on from what Fiona said, there was certainly some reports on the registry that could potentially involve future legal action if the person wished to follow up   if the person wanted to do that, and I think that's why one of the things that we wanted to definitely do was to enhance the register with a kind of automatic IT solution to this where the report would be automatically generated for a complaint body if the person wanted to take that route.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Any last comments or reflections from you, Fiona?

FIONA ALLISON:  Yeah, look, just that we know this is really just the tip of the iceberg, that I'm sure we could sit down with an iPad on the corner of the street in many places in Australia and we'd probably get 100% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people reporting racism, so just that our intention is to really get it out there as much as we can in future so we can give people the opportunity to have a say.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Great.  And Lindon, any last thoughts or reflections?

PROF. LINDON COOMBES:  Yeah, just obviously spread the word about the register, listen when like people talk and try to be a bit more aware of that experience and to be active if you see it or experience it.

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT OA:  Well, I'd just like to draw this conversation to a close echoing those words that I hope people will spread the word about the register and that they will hopefully disseminate the findings of the interim report.  And keep an eye out for the continual reporting against the findings of the register.

Chris Cunneen, Fiona Allison and Lindon Coombes, thank you so much for your insights sharing your work and your commitment to this space.  And I'd also like to thank everyone who's tuned in.  We had a really, really good turnout for this, which goes to show there are a lot of people that are incredibly interested in this space, are keen to hear what's going on, are listening, want to know more and keen to find out how to be agents of change.  So that's a really heartening thing.  

So on behalf of Jumbunna Research and our valued wonderful research partners, the National Justice Project, thank you all so much for being here and hope to see you next time we talk about the register.