[Mowlana Vector]

AA,
The 'ugly'-side of Australia 4 U: (in case) U've not experienced … yet

Can't wait 2 come back home and de-learn the sacred manifesto of our Aussiefied (and Howardite)
fair go & the jingo politico fantasies of post-hansonism ... Insh'Allah




Click here 4 more

=====================================================
SEE ALSO:
ABC Radio: HREOC Report Lends A Voice To Arab & Muslim Australians

The Australian: Muslims 'Face Increased Racism'

SMH: Vilification Against Arabs & Muslims Increases

FURTHER READING

Racism Is Rising: Report

Report on Media, Islam & Race

Asians, Muslims & “Authentic Australians”: Neo-racism Down Under

Refugee Image Stirs Racism

Racism In Australia: Racist Attitudes & Experiences of Racism


The Anatomy of Anti-Arab Racism

The Racialisation of Crime

Open Season on Muslims In the Newest Phobia

Racism & Repression: NSW Labor Leads the Way

Muslims: The Terrorists & Rapists of Australia?

Media Demons

Cultural Racism, Allergy & Other Histories


'People In Power' Spur Racism

The Gulf In Australia - Racism, Arab & Muslim Australians

Waking Up To Racism

Why I've Changed My Mind On Victoria's Anti-Vilification Laws

Vilification Laws Encourages Quality Debate


Group Targets Racist Publications

Australians Can Lift Cultural Veil

Articles Of Faith

Finding A Place, Without Needing To Fit In

No Pity, Please: It's All My Choice


Racism No Way: Glossary

Violence Is A Human, Not An Islamic Trait

Will Wog Ever Mean Australian?

The Outsider's Australian Dream

Analysis: Media Reporting of The Gang-Rapes


Pedagogy For A Plural Society

Who Do You Intend Voting For In The Next Federal Election?

US, Australia and the Muslim Vote

Old Ways No Help To Australian Muslims Adrift In A Risky New World

Alienation That Foments Terror

Australian Muslims: How To Face Terrorism

Building Networks & Understanding Between Journalism students & Muslims

Imam's Visit Hailed A Success

[souLja]

welcome back. i'm really as to how u make your posts so well referenced...?
i mean i'd write some sorta script that parsed a literary piece and replaced words with a link tag to whatever it'd match in a lookup table of articles.. but manually? sheesh.

welcome back anyhow. i've missed your highly referenced articles.

[AM]

Ditto. Welcome back 4UEyez. Our trusted media watchdog has returned.

[GreenOz]

hey, i went to the launch today.....i saw Afroz there too 8)

it was cool, so were the arab sweets and I met and spoke to John Doyle from "Roy and HG" for 10 minutes. hehehehehe...i told him that when i met him that i didnt know his name but knew he was da funny guy on tv, how professional of me......but thats the way i wanted to say it even though he had his name on his name tag

Nice talks and presentations, especially by Omeima who helped facilitate the consultstions amongst the communities. I picked up 2 of those books.

All the community heavy weights were there from both the Aran and Muslim community.

Sh Taj was there too and so was Sh. Zaoud. When Sh. Taj came to sit, the seats were all full, and it was nice to see a Muslim in the front row get up ad offer it to him out of respect.

Peace 8)
Hanan

[Sista]

Welcome back 4 U !
I cant wait to see whats going be done with this research... so much hard work and effort was put in. May Allah reward Omeima for her work! Ameen.

[Sam]

Some of the emails attributed to FAIR were actually sent to IslamicSydney.com - but I'm not complaining It's an excellent report.

salaams
sam

[afroz]

Most of the references were from IslamicSydney.com

Oh yeah I was at the launch- great stuff. And hey, my Arabic in the CD sounds completely non-Arab, because probably Im the only one speaking proper Arabic!

Was Salaam
Afroz

[GreenOz]

hehehehe you sounded like an Indian speaking arabic

[afroz]

Yes, a fus'ha one at that.

None of the kibbe, ente, Hamze, shu, shakwe stuff. If that is what one calls Arabic, I suggest a wakeup pill.

Was Salaam
Afroz

[Sista]

Quote

None of the kibbe, ente, Hamze, shu, shakwe  stuff.

funny choice of words

[Mowlana Vector]

Dear all,
Thank you so much for all your kind and inspiring words. Very much appreciated
It’s great to be back, (still) virtually of course … hope to share some more digital stories with you all.

W’salaam

[La`Dee]

Yeah Welcome back brother!

we missed your posts.. but i didnt really miss that eye
its freaky lol jk-- its not that scary..

Salaam

[souLja]

a 'fun' game u could play is close one eye and try and blink at the same rate as the eye in 4UEyez's avatar... :wink:

[La`Dee]

i actually tried it now
its too hard...

[AM]

Ha ha, I tried it too, La'Dee! Loooosers!!

(NB: Kids, don't try this in internet cafes. You'd probably attract attention - for all the wrong reasons and from all the wrong people.)

[souLja]

its not that hard... once u start blinking in sync u dont see his eye blinking. it just stares back at u.

[La`Dee]

heheh looks like u been practising souLja

[souLja]

it honestly didnt take long. it all comes down to determination sis, DETERMINATION!

[La`Dee]

not at the word, but at the kind of determination

thats defenitely no miswak :wink:

[souLja]

Quote

thats defenitely no miswak

it most certainly is.

[La`Dee]

there there.. its okay really 8)

[Mowlana Vector]

Quote

Book Tells How Muslims Are Stereotyped



More Here ... 

[Anon1]

souLja, on Friday Jun 18 2004, 11:40 PM, said:

its not that hard... once u start blinking in sync u dont see his eye blinking. it just stares back at u.

bro, you are so kurang kerjaan (ask an indonesian bro or sis what that means)

[souLja]

chickenrice, on Friday Aug 6 2004, 09:54 AM, said:

bro, you are so kurang kerjaan

i have nothing better to do..?

[Anon1]

Yup... kurang kerjaan = nothing better to do or too much time on your hands. I mean really, blinking at the same pace as 4UEyez' avatar! Where do you come up with these ideas...cracked me up ranks right up with my old school-era habit of buttoning and unbuttoning my blazer to my school dress, while waiting for the bell to ring...

[souLja]

i just saw it as a challenge. it was as if it was staring at me and daring me to compete with it.. i could hear voices; "come on, souLja, show me what u got".

but u're right, i have too much time on my hands for the useless stuff and not enough for the stuff that really matters. even though multitask (honestly) alot, i need to get my priorities straight..

anyways, back to the topic at hand...

[Mowlana Vector]

The New 'Others': Media & Society Post-September 11
Media International Australia (Incorporating Culture & Policy: No. 109)
August 2003



ABSTRACTS
Lelia Green: The New 'Others': Media and Society Post-September 11
This issue of Media International Australia incorporating Culture & Policy is The New Others: media and society post-September 11, a date that now clearly has has enormous significance in all fields of social inquiry. In the Australian context it was part of an extraordinary sequence of events relating acts of terror to the creation of widespread fear of the new 'others', people of Muslim and Middle Eastern background. Media and Cultural Studies scholars explore some of the issues that confront us in this new political landscape.

John Frow: The Uses of Terror and the Limits of Cultural Studies
The plot of the event of September 11 - the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by terrorists - might have been written by Hollywood, or by Baudrillard. So fantasmatic, so familiar was the scenario that it fitted seamlessly into the manichaean agenda of the Pentagon hawks planning the next American war, and the next. Indeed, a perfectly plausible paranoid response reads this plot as a plot on the part of those who have most thoroughly benefited from it. How do we take fantasms seriously when they come true?

Tim Groves and William D. Routt: Thet Terrorist and the Collaborator
In a culture saturated with media images of terrorism, it is all too easy to conflate identities with representation. This article explores some of the sense made by terrorist figures such as master criminals, serial killers, bushrangers and the shuhada. It suggests the complexity of such cultural tropes by indicating some of the ways in which they are deployed and thought within the specific experiences of the authors. The piece takes the form of a free-flowing dialogue that disrupts the identities of the speakers.There is a sense in which terror is evoked directly in images: skyscrapers falling, the rubble of what was once a nightclub, explosions, bodies, the faces of grief - or, if these are not simple images of terror, they only require simple stories to become them. This piece takes the form of a free-flowing 'dialogue' in which the speakers - the terrorist and the collaborator - are not idenified.

Andrew Padgett and Beatrice Allen: Fear's Slave: The Mass Media and Islam After September 11
This paper will investigate the purpose of society's construction of 'others' through the gaze of the mass media. During times of crisis, the paper will argue, Western mass media are faced with an irreconcilable paradox: the simultaneous demand for, and denial of, a fear-inspiring other (the Soviet Union, Al Qaeda, etc.) This paradigm of otherness was overcome in the period post-Cold War and pre-9/11 as the US media was able to demonise 'others' at home - the war on drugs, for example. The question this paper will address, then, is: what are the motives driving the US mass media towards an other constructed along lines similar to the Soviet-era other? Who is to 'blame' for this phenomenon - the media, or the society in which these media operate?

Scott Poynting and Greg Noble: 'Dog-Whistle Journalism and Muslim Australians Since 2001'
'Dog-whistle politics' was much discussed around the 2001 federal election campaign in which the Howard government used the 'Tampa crisis' and September 11 to appeal successfully to popular xenophobia and insecurities. The notion involves sending a sharp message which, like a dog whistle inaudible to humans, calls clearly to those intended, and goes unheard by others. This article argues that this sort of ideological manoeuvre has been abetted by an analogous process in the tabloid press, in which ostensibly liberal, reasonable stories speak at the 'inaudible' level to those whose insecurity and ignorance leaves them susceptible to populist claims that their relaxed and comfortable past has been stolen away by cosmopolitan, 'politically correct' elites and the 'multicultural industry'. Three examples are analysed: the stories of the women's gym and the halal hamburgers in Western Sydney, and that of the Muslim man threatened with the sack from his Sydney North Shore professional job for praying in his lunch hour. Each was originally run as a 'good news story' or as sympathetic to Muslim protagonists, but provoked a backlash which generated extended 'news' and comment - much of it racist - and irresponsibly exacerbating community tensions.

Peter Manning: Arabic and Muslim People in Sydney's Daily Newspapers, Before and After September 11
This paper examines two years of articles/texts located around the concepts of 'Arab' and 'Muslim' within Sydney's two major daily newspapers. It finds peak issues which concentrate reporting of these concepts and it focuses on language used by journalists and the meanings they carry within the texts chosen around those peak issues. It argues that a consistency of view can be found in three peak issues - the Palestine/Israel conflict, Lebanese rape trials and the arrival of asylum seekers - and that this view is an antipodean development of a Western way of seeing the Orient defined by Edward Said as 'orientalism'.

Natascha Klocker and Kevin M. Dunn: Who's Diving the Asylum Debate?
Newspaper and government representations of asylum seekers The welfare and future of asylum seekers in Australia has been a very contentious contemporary issue. Findings based on content analysis of media releases in 2001 and 2002 reveal the unrelentingly negative way in which the federal government portrayed asylum seekers. While the government's negative tenor was constant during the study period, the specific terms of reference altered, from 'threat' through 'other', to 'illegality' and to 'burden'. The negative construction of asylum seekers was clearly mutable. Analysis of newspaper reporting during the same period indicates that the media largely adopted the negativity and specific references of the government. The media dependence upon government statements and spokespersons in part explains this relation. The findings generally support the 'propaganda model' that holds a pessimistic view of the news media's critical abilities. However, the media departed somewhat slightly from the government's unchanging stance following some key events and revelations. Clearly, there is scope for disrupting the flow of negative constructions from government to media, and ultimately to audiences.

Kate Slattery: Drowning Not Waving: The 'Children Overboard' Event and Australia's Fear of the 'Other'
The last few years have been an awakening time for the people, communities and governments of the global village. Escalating problems in the Middle East, global economic uncertainty and an increase in asylum seekers, refugees and migration worldwide have reignited tensions involving boundaries and borders, both geographical and cognitive. One event which highlighted these tensions in Australia, and which was given much media coverage, was the 'children overboard' event in October 2001. Utilising a selection of print news coverage of the event, this paper explores how the 'children overboard' event demarcated national identities and spaces through the construction and representation of 'good' Australian citizens and 'bad' asylum seeker 'others'. Specifically referring to 'children overboard' as an 'event', I seek to highlight the constructed and representational nature of 'children overboard' as a media story and political tool, one which promoted a continuing threat of 'others' to the nation in order to gain support for government policy and legitimize national security, and in so doing creating a model of Australian citizenship and identity based upon fear.

Alison Saxton: 'I certainly Don't Want People Like that Here': The Discursive Construction of 'Asylum Seekers'
In October 2001, it was alleged that asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard in order to manipulate the Australian Navy to pick them up and take them to Australian territory. In response to this incident, Prime Minister John Howard announced on radio 3LO: 'I certainly don't want people like that here.' (Mares, 2002: 135) A discursive approach is adopted in this paper to examine how asylum seekers have been constructed to be 'people like that' in the print media. The analysis demonstrates that asylum seekers have been represented as illegal, non-genuine, and threatening in these texts. These representations were employed within nationalist discourse to legitimate the government's actions and public opinion concerning asylum seekers and to manage the delicate issue of national identity. The discursive management of the collective identity of asylum seekers by the dominant culture to construct a specific social reality is discussed and illustrated.

Tanja Dreher: Speaking Up and Talking Back: News Media Interventions in Sydney's 'Othered' Communities
Since August 2001, Arab and Muslim communities in Sydney's western suburbs have been caught up in a spiral of signification that linked 'gang' activity in the area to the standoff over asylum seekers aboard the MV Tampa, a federal election campaign fought on the theme of 'border protection' and global news reporting of 9.11 and the 'war on terror'. Many people who live and work in the Bankstown area responded to this intense news media scrutiny by developing community-based media interventions that aimed to shift the mainstream news agenda. Through media skills training, forums, events, and cultural production, Arab and Muslim Australians in the Bankstown area positioned themselves as the subjects rather than the objects of news. This paper analyses news interventions strategies in terms of media power and the politics of representation. I argue that the activities of those working with racialised communities suggest valuable models for the wider process of improving the reporting of cultural differences in multicultural Australia.

Peter Bishop: Lost @ Woomera: Re-Reading Mainstream & Alternative Media
This paper focuses on aspects of the media engagement with demonstrations at the Woomera Detention Centre during Easter 2002. A broad range of interests and affiliations were represented within the 1,000-2,000 protestors, several hundred of whom attacked the fences allowing numerous detainees to escape. In an era of on-line activism the Easter 2002 demonstration at Woomera showed the continuing significance of the embodied occupation of public space by protestors. It echoed an upsurge in public demonstration, from Seattle to more recent worldwide marches against war in Iraq. In addition to receiving extensive mainstream media coverage both in Australia and overseas, a whole series of 'alternative' forms of media were mobilised around the demonstration. Through a study of some mainstream and alternative media, this paper suggests that casting them as oppositional, one as reactionary towards asylum seekers from Islamic cultures and the other as emancipatory, is too simplistic. While mainstream media is the subject of searching critiques of its representational and agenda-setting power, similar critical evaluations are few for alternative media. It suggests that such a dichotomy has serious consequences for the understanding and operation both of emancipatory struggles and of the media. Giroux has called for a politics of educated hope (2002) and this paper suggests that critique should be accompanied by an active search for moments of contradiction and possibility.

Guy Redden: Read the whole thing: Journalism, Weblogs and the Re-Mediation of the War In Iraq
This paper examines a particular form of online activity-weblogging, and how it has allowed for specific new forms of popular political communication in the context of the Second Gulf War. After describing the basics of weblogging, the paper discusses Western media coverage of the war and then shows how 'warbloggers' positioned themselves vis-à-vis media coverage and propaganda, creating commentaries that frequently combined media and political criticism. While bloggers of every political hue offered a range of perspectives and personal styles, some general tendencies are evident in warblogging discourse. The piece ends by questioning the significance of warblogging in terms of its potential contribution to democratic communication.

Barbara Bloch: 'David vs Goliath': Australian Jewish Perceptions of Media Bias in Reporting the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
This article seeks to show how the notion of 'media bias' has functioned in much Jewish discomfort and anger with how the second, or Al Aqsa, intifada has been represented by mainstream Australian and global media. My objective is not to demonstrate that this reporting in general favours one side of this conflict over the other, nor that there is an unproblematic position of balance which could be attained. Rather, I utilise the concept of media frames to problematise responses by Jewish and other audiences regarding Palestinians being represented by the media sympathetically as the 'underdog', and accusations of media bias against Israel. I examine the work that the metaphor 'David versus Goliath' has accomplished over the longer period of the Arab-Israeli conflict and how it has framed the conflict for both media and audiences. Finally, I draw on Judith Butler's writing on 'explanation and exoneration' in relation to what could be spoken of, and heard, by Americans in the September 11 attacks, to suggest that a similar discourse exists in relation to how Israeli and Palestinian violence can be spoken of from the perspective of Israel. I argue that the accusations of media bias against Israel circulate around a sense that the Israeli and Jewish narrative has been to some extent decentred by sections of the international media and other bodies.

Book Reviews
Anti-Discrimination Board of New South Wales, Race for the Headlines: Racism and Media Discourse
Appadurai, Arjun (ed.), Globalization
Bodroghkozy, Aniko, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion
Jacobs, Jason, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama
Cottle, Simon (ed.) News, Public Relations and Power
Crane, Diana, Kawashima, Nobuko and Kawasaki, Ken'ichi (eds), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy and Globalization
Gasher, Mike, Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia
Gray, Clive, The Politics of the Arts in Britain
Griffen-Foley, Bridget, Party Games: Australian Politicians and the Media from War to Dismissal
Hjort, Mette and MacKenzie, Scott (eds), Cinema and Nation
Ivison, Duncan, Postcolonial Liberalism
Jacobs, Jason, Body Trauma: The New Hospital Dramas
Lipkin, Steven N., Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice
Mackay, Hugh, Media Mania: Why Our Fear of Modern Media is Misplaced
Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media
Meredyth, Denise and Minson, Jeffrey (eds), Citizenship and Cultural Policy
Neale, Steve (ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood
Phillips, Gail and Lindgren, Mia, The Australian Broadcast Journalism Manual
Scraton, Phil (ed.), Beyond September 11, An Anthology of Dissent
Zelizer, Barbie and Allan, Stuart (eds), Journalism after September 11
================================================

SEE ALSO

The Long Road To Fair Coverage

News Overboard: The Tabloid Media, Race Politics, and Islam

George Munster Forum: Reporting Race

Reporting Detention Centres: Was Journalism Censored ?

Reporting Australia’s Asylum Seeker “Crisis”

Reporting the 'War on Terror': Did September 11 Dull Journalists' Critical Fculties ?

Is Australia An Intelligence & Media Colony?

Book Tells How Muslims Are Stereotyped

Borderphobias: the Politics of Insecurity Post-9/11

Race For the Headlines: Racism & Media Discourse


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I'm Not Racist But ...

Religio-Racial Profiling, Anti-Muslim Style

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[Mowlana Vector]

Geneva v Canberra


The world is watching ...
Les Malezer lobbied for Aboriginal
rights at the UN in Geneva.
(Photo: Paul Harris)

The UN has again attacked the Howard Government's record on race. But this time the politicians are shutting up and news of the verdict isn't getting out. David Marr reports.

Les Malezer, having spent years in Switzerland, was not surprised by the Arctic weather Geneva turned on for the Australian delegations a few weeks ago. The sky was flawlessly blue but the city lay under sheets of ice.

A Gubbi Gubbi man in his early 50s, Malezer knows his way around the town and, more to the point, the lakeside palaces where United Nations human rights committees do their work. "The key to being effective is being here," he says. "Nothing happens in Geneva unless you lobby it all the way through."

The former head of the Queensland Department of Aboriginal Affairs has been a familiar, bearded figure lobbying committees in Geneva for a decade, but these days his kind are looking like an endangered species. Malezer is just hanging on.

His job late last month was to guide around the frozen city half a dozen Australians flying in to lobby the UN's Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. They came with briefs from more than 30 non-government organisations (NGOs): legal services, human rights groups, refugee advocates, disability groups and ethnic councils.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission sent its own man to the hearings. It was to be ATSIC's last hurrah on the international stage before its abolition last week.

Australia was facing the committee's scrutiny for the first time in five years. The event went unreported back home and the verdict - handed down on March 12 - was the subject of only a few, scattered reports in the press. Australia was rebuked for its treatment of migrants, Muslims, asylum seekers, refugees and Aborigines. In the eyes of the Geneva committee, the list of this country's failures on the human rights front has only grown longer since the Howard Government came to office.

The Government these days deeply resents this scrutiny, but is locked into it by treaty. The committee's verdict last time round, in 2000, produced one of the great dummy spits of the Howard years, with the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, roaring: "We won't cop it any longer. We are a democratically elected government in one of the most liberal and democratic countries you will find on Earth. And if a United Nations committee wants to play domestic politics here in Australia, then it will end up with a bloody nose."

Ministers called the committee's work insulting, unbalanced, tendentious, ill prepared, poorly argued, blatantly political and partisan. In late 2000 they demanded the committee change its ways - to give, in particular, less weight in future to criticism by NGOs and pay more attention to "the considered reports submitted by the Government".

The UN was unimpressed - and that's the Geneva problem in a nutshell: what works in Canberra doesn't work in in this town. The Howard Government message carries no particular clout. The power of jobs and patronage, so persuasive back home, has no impact in Geneva. Only diplomacy has a chance and it hadn't worked miracles.

The Australian bureaucrats flying into Geneva knew that five years of lobbying had left the ground rules essentially unchanged. That meant the NGOs would lobby committee members in the days leading up to the official hearings in the first couple of days of March. There was a lot of ground to cover. This was Australia's first appearance before the committee since Tampa, the "Pacific solution", the growth of the mandatory detention system, the "mainstreaming" of services to Aborigines, cutbacks to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the dismantling of ATSIC, new security laws affecting Australian Muslims, the invention of temporary protection visas and - despite some improvements - the continuing intractable problems of Aboriginal Australia.

There are still vivid memories in Geneva of the performance before the committee in 2000 of the former immigration minister Philip Ruddock. This time the Australian team at the official hearings in the Palais Wilson was led by the ambassador to the UN, Mike Smith - and his brief was not conciliatory.

After an upbeat recital of initiatives to combat racism in Australia, he turned on the 18 committee members, describing their work last time as "cursory" and "unreasonable". He accused them of largely ignoring the progress being made in Australia while displaying "an unquestioning acceptance" of the Government's critics.

Perhaps anticipating another unhappy outcome, Australia had decided to put in the boot. It was not a good omen. The room was tense. Regis de Gouttes of France, headphones clamped to his ears, declared the ambassador "exceptionally rude" and Jose Lindgren Alves of Brazil told Smith: "As a veteran diplomat, this statement, with its language describing programs and attacks on NGOs, reminds me of the sort of statement from communist bloc countries and Latin American dictatorships that Australia used to condemn."

Where things went wrong

Australia's troubles began when the first American was elected to the UN committee in 1998. Gay McDougall grew up in segregated Georgia, graduated from Yale Law School and served as an independent electoral commissioner in the first post-apartheid elections in South Africa. On a then rather dozy committee, McDougall was smart. Australia made the mistake of lobbying - successfully - for her to become the

designated expert - or "country rapporteur" - for Australia.

She arrived as the fight to save native title switched from Canberra to Geneva. With John Howard's post-Wik rollback now law, advocates for native title were looking for leverage in the many human rights conventions Australia had signed over the years. At this point ATSIC began to fund a program of international advocacy. Malezer was ATSIC's very active man in Geneva.

McDougall had an ace up her sleeve. At an Aspen Institute seminar one summer, she had met Ron Castan, QC, senior counsel in the Mabo case and a key adviser on the original Native Title Act. Few knew that complex legislation better or were more committed to saving it than Castan. McDougall told the Herald: "I got the idea that I should ring him up to help me understand in more detail what had happened to the law. He and other members of his law firm were very helpful."

In August 1998, the committee issued Australia with an "urgent action" notice - the first issued to a Western nation. Formal hearings in Geneva the following March found a risk of "acute impairment" to native title rights. The committee declared Australia in breach of its obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This was another first: the first breach finding made against a Western nation.

The former human rights commissioner Mick Dodson remarked sourly: "We're in the same company as Bosnia, Uganda and Ecuador."

Canberra took Geneva's verdict very badly. Within 24 hours, the finding was denounced by Howard, Downer and the then attorney-general Daryl Williams, who declared the result "an insult to Australia and all Australians".

McDougall had planned to lead a team of three committee members to Australia "to get a better feel for the issues we were discussing". The Government refused to issue the necessary invitation. McDougall said: "It was a surprise to us all."

The UN is not used to countries behaving like this. "We expect states to be diplomatic, polite, understanding and willing to explain," McDougall told the Herald. "They do not show the level of annoyance and seeming insult that we got from the Australians. We were all taken aback."

More than once, she heard Australians argue that her committee was treating their country as if it were a backward nation not a democratic state. "But we all expected Western democratic states to be the most co-operative and welcoming, the most supportive of the committee system. And that was not the case."

More than political outrage and hurt pride lay behind Canberra's response. The US and Western Europe have constitutions that explicitly protect human rights. Such absolutes shape the politics of most Western nations. But not Australia. Here, politics decide just about everything. The sort of rights Geneva talks about - and Australia signed up to under Labor governments - are just part of the political mix back home. They're not decisive. Howard put it this way: "Australian laws are made by Australian parliaments elected by the Australian people, not by UN committees."

The forlorn hope of persuading McDougall and her colleagues to this pragmatic Australian point of view seems to have impelled Ruddock - as minister for multicultural affairs and reconciliation - to lead the delegation to Geneva in 2000. Extraordinary efforts were made to woo the committee members. Lobbying was intense and respectful. But then came Ruddock's performance at the Palais Wilson hearings - the stuff of legends.

Witnesses talk of him draped over the table, bantering with the committee, joking, giving patronising answers to complex questions. Malezer found it embarrassing. The Herald correspondent Simon Mann reported "audible groans" from the public gallery. McDougall told the Herald she had not seen the like of Ruddock's performance in Geneva before or since. "I think he underestimated the committee," she said. "He learnt some things, I think."

Ruddock's big pitch was that Canberra should not be held responsible for racially discriminatory policies of the states and territories - policies such as mandatory sentencing. It's an argument that's never appealed to the committee. McDougall reminded him states' rights were a big issue where she comes from: "We fought a bloody civil war ... over whether states were free to engage in the abhorrent practice of slavery." Ruddock interjected: "I think I would have fought for that, too." McDougall said she hoped the Australian minister "would have been on the same side as me".

The committee's "concluding observations" were pithy and cold. Diplomatic niceties were absent. Praise was scant. The committee found fault with Australia for having no constitutional protection against racial discrimination; for failing to restore native title rights; for the faltering reconciliation process; for the survival of mandatory sentencing in Western Australia and the Northern Territory; for the failure to compensate and apologise to the stolen generation; for proposals that might have an "adverse effect" on ATSIC and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission; for the high rate of imprisonment of indigenous Australians; and for the detention of asylum seekers.

The committee acknowledged "the efforts being made to increase spending on health, housing, employment and education programs for indigenous Australians" but remained "seriously concerned about the extent of the dramatic inequality still experienced by an indigenous population that represents only 2.1 per cent of the total population of a highly developed industrialised state".

It was a big story for a time, driven by Canberra's rage. Geneva delivered little for indigenous Australians, but a lot of people heard about that committee. "We were not ignored," McDougall said. "We got an active response from Australian NGOs, the media, the Parliament and from the Government. The Government response spoke of a sensitivity to the question of whether they were doing right, and to the sting of international scrutiny."

The 2005 round

By the time Australia found itself facing the committee again this year, changes in Geneva were playing to its advantage. For a start, McDougall was gone. She had not been renominated by the Bush Administration when her four-year term expired in 2002. McDougall is now executive director of the Washington advocacy group Global Rights.

Les Malezer was still standing, but the apparatus of Australian indigenous lobbying to the UN built up since the late 1970s was falling apart around him. The resources put into Geneva have always been controversial in the internecine world of black politics. Geoff Clark's ATSIC funded these efforts generously. For several years there was a permanent office in Geneva - "humble but effective", says Malezer - but this closed at the end of 2003 as the money began to dry up.

By this month, all four indigenous organisations with official accreditation to the UN were in deep trouble. ATSIC was weeks away from abolition; the NSW Aboriginal Lands Council was under administration; the NAILSS (the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Legal Services Secretariat) was broke and Malezer's FAIRA (the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action) was virtually an empty shell. Malezer won't say how he's surviving financially in Geneva. Colleagues speculate he's drawing on his own savings.

Also absent from the hearings in 2005 was the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. The Government has slashed its funding. Legislation curtailing its freedom of action is expected back in Parliament after July. Tom Calma's bad back kept the social justice commissioner from making the flight over, but it seems also the commission thought this was no time to be taking the Government to task for its failings - in public - in the world capital of human rights.

The committee that assembled this month was also much changed. The old timers had all but disappeared since Australia was last examined. The communists are down to one: China. This was a committee of mostly new faces - a younger, reinvigorated collection of human rights experts from Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Asia.

On March 12 they again gave Australia the thumbs-down. Their language was far more diplomatic this time. Half a dozen positive findings were followed by a list of 19 "concerns and recommendations". Many had been raised before, in 2000. ATSIC, native title, the stolen generation, reconciliation, constitutional protection from racial discrimination, mandatory sentencing, the over-representation of Aborigines in prisons and the fate of HREOC may be dead issues in politics back home, but they're still alive in Geneva.

The list of fresh concerns raised by the committee in 2005 include the impact of temporary protection visas, the plight of stateless long-term detainees, the treatment of asylum seekers by the media, the shortcomings of the Racial Discrimination Act, the impact of counter-terrorism legislation that "may have an indirect discriminatory effect against Arab and Muslim Australians".

Dead silence

Canberra has learnt one lesson superbly. Instead of raging and complaining about Geneva's intrusion into Australia's domestic affairs, it's much better to shut up. The effort ministers put into denigrating the committee system the last time round only gave the issue more oxygen. After the latest verdict a little more than a fortnight ago, there was no thunder from Howard, Downer or Ruddock. Not even a press release. Silence effectively killed the story.

After some prodding, the offices of Downer and Ruddock told the Herald that the committee's findings were being carefully considered. The Attorney-General's spokeswoman said Ruddock welcomed the committee's "new constructive dialogue" and placed "particular importance in the fact that the committee has not found Australia in breach" of its obligations. The committee's concerns would "not be rejected without careful assessment".

A spokesman for the Foreign Minister said: "These UN committees need to work in a more effective and credible way. We have been pushing very hard for reform of the committee system. We're pleased with the momentum that has built up for reform and will continue to push for reform."

The strange silence surrounding the latest verdict - it didn't help that ATSIC was no longer about to co-ordinate the press campaign - means there's little political downside for a government choosing to ignore Geneva.

Yet the race discrimination convention Australia signed up to in 1966 and turned into domestic law in 1975, is still the benchmark for all Australians arguing human rights. It's at the heart of all the rhetoric. The shame of seeing our own failings exposed by the committee was supposed to drive change. It's not working out that way. These days Australia's perceived shortcomings are causing more angst in Geneva than they do back home.

"They're glass on the floor," one official told the Herald. "You tip-toe down the corridors knowing you're being watched." And activists such as Les Malezer are walking the same corridors, spreading the word that the Australian Government "is an oppressor of rights. Other governments see this and I make sure they see it."

Read The full text of the committee's observations Here

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