IN the latest edition of the “Winnunga News”, the newsletter of the Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health and Community Services, its CEO Julie Tongs commented on a recent case in which the ACT Court of Appeal found that four Aboriginal children, who had been removed more than five years ago from their mother by the ACT Care and Protection Services and placed in foster care, had been wrongfully removed and ordered that the children be returned to their mother’s care.

In commenting on the case and the almost certain damage that the children and family will have suffered as a result of their forced separation and the restriction of access by the mother to her children to one day a year for each of the last five years, Julie Tongs said: “I am often forced to wonder about what mainstream, non-Aboriginal Canberra thinks about the levels of disadvantage and poverty endured by their Aboriginal neighbours and fellow residents.

The response of the Canberra community to the wrongful removal of these young Aboriginal children has disturbed me greatly.

What I have found most alarming is that there has, in fact, been no response. The lack of a response from anyone suggests to me that Canberra has digested this tragic incident as just another case of a poor Aboriginal family being forced to endure what Aboriginal families have endured because of their race for the last 200 years.

If you don’t agree with me, I challenge you to tell me you genuinely believe that if this had been a case involving the wrongful removal of non-Aboriginal children from a white, middle-class mother and the banning of that mother from access to her children for five years, that the response of the Canberra community, after a judicial finding that the removal was unlawful, would have been no different.

Julie Tongs is, of course, correct. With the notable exception of a comprehensive report of the case in the “Sunday Canberra Times” this scandalous case has not rated a mention or elicited a flicker of concern in either the broader community, within community sector organisations, or the ACT government.

The mother did receive generous pro bono support from the Canberra legal profession including from the Canberra Women’s Legal Service, barristers Philip Walker SC and James Haddock and the ACT Legal Aid Commission. One bright spot in a sea of unconcern.

I have, like Julie Tongs, pondered our mainly silent, complacent and accepting response to the plight of battlers, the poor and marginalised within our midst and have concluded there is, in Canberra, a corporate or institutional form of the Stockholm Syndrome. I have named it the Canberra Syndrome.

I recently raised this theory at a seminar on the new ACT Affordable Housing strategy at which I made a presentation alongside Prof Peter Phibbs, of the University of Sydney, who is one of Australia’s leading researchers on affordable housing.

I have looked closely at the strategy and I think it is deeply deficient. I doubt it will achieve anything of substance and in particular will have little if any impact on the affordability of detached housing. Prof Phibbs also expressed serious reservations about the new strategy.

However, when the strategy was released it was warmly welcomed by community and business organisations including from the planning, housing and business sectors.

At the time, I could not understand why these organisations felt the need to toady, as they did, to the minister and government. Hence my musing that, like the poor bank customers in Stockholm, these organisations have also been taken hostage, in this case metaphorically, by the ACT government, and fearing retribution and the loss of their annual grants or access to government have succumbed to the Canberra Syndrome and chosen silence and subservience over openness and honesty.

My fears were reinforced in the last week when I read the report of the ACT inspector of correctional services, Mr Neil McAllister, into the care and management of remandees at the Alexander Maconochie Centre.

I cannot recall having read a more excoriating report by a statutory officer about an ACT government operation. The report contains 39 formal findings. In just the first six findings the inspector suggests that a range of laws, including the Corrections Management Act and the Human Rights Act are being routinely breached by the government. In Finding 5 he posits that the current induction regime “may increase… the risk of suicide” by AMC detainees.

Findings 28 to 33 blast the treatment of female detainees, a majority of whom are Aboriginal. For example, the inspector reports that the treatment of female detainees in the AMC “exposes women with histories of domestic and family violence or sexual assault to the possibility of re-traumatisation.”

As far as I am aware, these dramatic findings have not resulted in any community based organisation taking the issues up publicly or with the government. Best not to risk upsetting the minister or the government, I guess. Which is, after all, one of the defining characteristics of the Canberra Syndrome.