Palm Island: Queensland DPP Clears Killer Cop

Mobilise Union Power to Defend Aboriginal People!

DECEMBER 19: “It’s 2006 and a police officer can still get away with killing an Aboriginal person.” These words by a former mayor of Palm Island typify the shock and outrage felt by many following the decision of Queensland Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Leanne Clare to clear Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley over the savage killing of Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee in the Palm Island lockup on 19 November 2004. This decision is a green light for yet more racist terror in capitalist White Australia.

Mulrunji was arrested by Hurley after he challenged an Aboriginal cop liaison officer over the arrest of a friend. An hour later, with his liver cleaved in two, and a ruptured spleen and portal vein, Mulrunji was dead. A swiftly-assembled whitewash coroner’s report sparked justified anger from the local Aboriginal community. Hundreds decided to march on the hated Palm Island police station and courthouse. These centres of racist state repression were subsequently torched. The response of Peter Beattie’s state Labor government was swift and brutal. In scenes reminiscent of imperialist-occupied Iraq, the Aboriginal community on Palm Island was terrorised by up to 80 Tactical Response Group cops in full battle armour. (See ASp No. 189, Summer 2004/05). Some 26 people were rounded up and shipped off to Townsville to await trial on charges including riot, serious assault and arson. Seven will appear in court in Brisbane on 5 March next year. Others have already served sentences or are in prison. We demand: Free the Palm Island Aboriginal militants! Drop the charges now!

A second coronial inquiry into Mulrunji’s death, which released its findings last September, reported that “Hurley hit Mulrunji whilst he was on the floor a number of times...” and concluded these actions “caused the fatal injuries.” The DPP dismissed these findings in her recent decision. Queensland Premier Beattie has stood by the DPP as has federal ALP Indigenous affairs spokesperson, Jenny Macklin. Meanwhile federal Indigenous affairs minister, Mal Brough, who oversees the Howard government’s deep oppression of Aborigines, called for a review of the decision “so people can have faith in the criminal justice system,” i.e., to refurbish its credentials.

Now the reformist Socialist Alliance are pushing a petition to the Queensland parliament which in part calls for “A Royal Commission into all events surrounding the death of Mulrinji” (Socialist Alliance website). Calls for government inquiries or Royal Commissions serve only to promote illusions in the racist capitalist state. This repressive apparatus—consisting at its core of the cops, courts and prisons—exists to defend the profits, property and rule of the tiny capitalist class. Such inquiries are used to whitewash the crimes of the state. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, established by the federal Hawke Labor government in 1987, endorsed the police and coroner verdicts in all 99 deaths it reviewed—not one cop was prosecuted. There is no justice in the capitalist courts!

The Spartacist League seeks to mobilise the social power of the integrated organised working class, independent of the capitalist state, to defend Aboriginal people against racist state terror and to consistently champion their rights. We stand for expelling the cops, as well as prison screws and security guards, from the trade unions. They are in no way “workers in uniform” but part of the hated apparatus of capitalist rule. We fight to forge a multiracial revolutionary workers party by struggling to split the working-class base of the ALP from the pro-capitalist leadership. Such a party will be built in political struggle against Laborite nationalism and reliance on the state and will fight within the unions to replace the social-democratic union misleaders with a class-struggle revolutionary leadership committed to the fight for international socialist revolution.

An end to police brutality, and equality and justice for Aborigines and all the oppressed, requires sweeping away the racist capitalist system. Victorious workers revolution will submit the criminals responsible for racist killings to revolutionary justice. We will not forget Mulrunji Doomadgee, one of a long list of Aborigines, including John Pat, Daniel Yock, Colleen Richman and TJ Hickey, killed at the hands of the capitalist state. Down with racist state terror! For union/minority/black mobilisations to defend Aboriginal people!