"Really hard to watch": Project host blasts "racist" Australia
After watching a video from the new documentary called Incarceration Nation, the indigenous Project host slammed Australia for being a “racist country, adding, “we’ve just got to get better.”
Tony Armstrong said the video was "hard to watch" and Lisa Wilkinson agreed with him, saying it was "hard to watch, Tony, but really important to watch."
The documentary takes a confronting look into why so many indigenous Australians are locked behind bars, showing how the oppression of Aboriginal people started from the time of the early settlers and is still going on today.
“First Nations people are 3.3 percent of our total population, but 29 percent of male Australian prisoners are indigenous. Indigenous women account for just over a third. With more mothers than ever behind bars, a record number of children are being placed in child protection,” the documentary states.
One case in the documentary showed a child jailed for 90 days for stealing some coins from a car.
Other footage shows a 14-year-old boy, Dylan Voller, who's assaulted, hooded, and bound to a chair.
Inspector Jeff Regan – an indigenous policeman - is interviewed and recounts his days as a young policeman when he wasn’t allowed to share a fridge with his co-workers.
Explaining how he was talked to at the time, Inspector Regan said an officer told him: “‘You’re not putting it in our fridge’. I said ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You cook differently. You’re not putting your food in there. Go and get another fridge and clean it out and you can put your food in there.’ They make you feel subhuman.”
Project host Tony Armstrong gives his opinion
After the video, Project host Tony Armstrong weighed in on the issue, adding his opinion:
“That’s hard to watch. My heart is going a million miles an hour. There’s so many points to pick up on. We talk about incarceration rates - you’re not seeing white kids getting jailed for stealing a bottle of water.
“You’re trying to find a way to rehabilitate them, you’re asking what are the reasons why they ended up stealing that bottle of water? You’re not just throwing the long arm of the law at them.
”You saw the footage of the young fella, bound up like Guantanamo Bay. That’s not on. But that happens in our country. And we talk about a sense of truth telling, we talk about, you know, needing to accept where we’ve come from to be able to move forward. This country still can’t accept it’s a racist country. You still can’t accept it’s built off the back of slavery, it’s built off the back of dispossession, it’s built off the back of rape and pillage of indigenous people. It’s just – it’s really hard to watch and really hard to reconcile with. And we’ve just got to be better.”
Photo: Channel 10