DEAR News Of The Area,

THIS year is the 75th Anniversay of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention), established by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948, ratified by members including Australia in 1949, and coming into effect in 1951.

Naturally enough most of the participating countries back then only saw the relevance of the convention to the Nazi treatment of the Jewish peoples, with our then Federal opposition leader Robert Menzies making the incredulous claim that genocide “could never happen here” and “hasten[ed] to say that persecution of that kind has never been tolerated in Australia”.

It is probably not surprising then that it took another 50 years before the Australian government actually saw the need to incorporate ‘genocide’ as a potential punishable offence into Australian criminal law.

That was partly because it was pointed out in the late 1980s that we possibly harboured some Nazi war criminals.

Perhaps more embarrassing was a report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1997 which found that the removal of Indigenous children from their families in the period between 1910 and 1970 had constituted genocide as defined in the Convention (HREOC 1997).

In 2002 the Federal Government finally incorporated the act of ‘genocide’ into criminal law, making sure it included provisions designed to reduce the possibility of any retrospective claim by victims.

One of the common arguments when inconvenient historical issues are discussed is that we cannot judge them by modern standards.

However, historical records show the genocide of the original Australians was called out by a handful of conscientious individuals at the time and they were conveniently ignored or ridiculed.

As a nation we have also been highly selective in our response to genocide around the globe and some would say have been less than upright in our dealings with refugees.

The current atrocities in Israel and Gaza have shown that ‘genocide’ is happening live – here and now in 2024, and yet sections of our community are still having ‘difficulty’ calling it for what it is.

There are historical reasons for this of course, apart from our discomfort with past inconsistencies.

We not only share strong political alliances with Israel but also military complicity.

US intelligence gathering at Australian bases such as Pine Gap will almost certainly be providing live data for Israel’s strategic bombing of Gaza.

Our Federal Government’s recent poor treatment of military war crimes ‘whistleblower’ David McBride also reveals a Government and establishment still unable to deal with ‘inconvenient’ truths.

Regards,
Dave WOOD,
Boambee East.