Wotton Paroled - Down With Political Gag Order!

On 19 July imprisoned Palm Island Aboriginal community leader, Lex Wotton, was released on parole after serving some two years of an outrageous six-year sentence. Lex was jailed over the November 2004 Palm Island protest that erupted in response to a coroner’s whitewash report into the brutal death of Mulrunji Doomadgee in the police lockup. The Queensland state Labor government aggressively targeted Wotton as a “ringleader” of the protest not least because he is an articulate and resolute Aboriginal man, not afraid of speaking out against racist injustice. Now they are trying to silence him by enforcing draconian parole conditions, including a ban on speaking to the media and addressing public meetings without prior approval. His parole period does not end until July 2014. Lex Wotton should never have spent a day in prison! Quash the conviction! Lift the political gag order now!

The severe parole conditions are based in part on archaic 19th century provisions of the Queensland criminal code. They include a vindictive ban on Wotton, a Baha’i, from gambling or being in places where gambling occurs. They are also a reminder of the punitive control orders placed on former “terror suspect” Jack Thomas in 2006. The Labor state premier, Anna Bligh, defended Wotton’s gag order blithely declaring that such conditions are common for prisoners on parole. This was belied by comments from Socialist Alliance (SA) member and long time Queensland Aboriginal activist, Sam Watson, who noted “In my 40 years’ experience dealing with the criminal justice system in this state, I have never encountered any other prisoner placed on similar conditions of parole” (Green Left Weekly, 24 July).

Wotton’s case demonstrates that workers and the oppressed face a system of capitalist injustice. Arrested in the wake of the 2004 protest, which saw the Palm Island police station and watch house razed by angry residents, Wotton had his home surrounded by more than 50 police with dogs as the state conducted terror raids across the island. When he refused to kneel before the cops he was tasered with 50,000 volts as his partner and children watched in horror. He was subsequently convicted by an all-white Townsville jury in a trial that saw key evidence disallowed and witnesses intimidated.

In stark contrast, the cop Chris Hurley, who admitted in court that he must have caused Mulrunji Doomadjee’s fatal injuries, was acquitted of manslaughter and later secretly awarded $100,000 for alleged losses in the fires. “Bravery” awards for cops stationed on the island at the time of the protest were also provocatively announced following Wotton’s conviction. With the police “investigation” into Mulrunji’s death widely recognised as a brazen cover up by the cops and their “union,” the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) felt the need to recently push for the police commissioner, Bob Atkinson, to take disciplinary action against the cops involved in order to restore a semblance of justice.

Falling into line behind this are the social-democratic left such as SA. Quoted in Green Left Weekly (7 July), SAer Sam Watson demanded “Atkinson should be sacked and a new administration put in place, with the integrity and courage to take on the power of the Police Union.” He went on to declare “There should be a standing Royal Commission to investigate cases of discrimination, and to bring criminal charges where appropriate.”

Royal commissions, along with state bodies such as the CMC, are designed to buttress “confidence” in the institutions of the capitalist state. The 1991 findings of the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody exonerated the police and prison screws involved in all 99 cases it investigated; its recommendations whitewash the racism endemic to the capitalist system. Yet the reformist left continues to futilely demand the implementation of these recommendations, for example in response to the heinous torture and death in 2008 of Aboriginal elder Ian Ward. Picked up for a driving offence, Ward literally cooked to death in the back of an unventilated prison van while being transported 360 km in searing heat to Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.

The brutal oppression of Aboriginal people is starkly demonstrated from Palm Island to Western Australia. The federal ALP government’s strengthening and extension of the police and military-enforced takeover of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory exposes the hypocrisy of Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations. The capitalist state is a repressive apparatus consisting at its core of the cops, army, courts and prison. It cannot be reformed but must be smashed through socialist revolution and replaced by a workers state. The cops, prison screws and security guards are in no way “workers in uniform,” as groups such as the Socialist Party claim, but part of the armed fist of the state that serves to defend the profits, property and rule of the capitalist class against the workers and oppressed. They should be expelled from the trade unions! We seek to mobilise the multiracial proletariat in a class-struggle fight for Aboriginal rights. It is in the direct interest of the organised working class to take up the fight in the defence of Lex Wotton against his continuing persecution.