Courier-Mail 30th January 1999
By Fran Metcalf
Queensland needs state racial vilification laws to protect students who suffer racial taunts in school yards, Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Karen Walters said yesterday.
Ms Walters said the commission has awarded a Au$40,000 year long tender to a group of high profile educators from the University of Queensland to study ways to stamp out racism in schools.
The need for such an investigation became clear after the commission was forced to turn away about 20 students in the past two years who were seeking protection or compensation from school-yard racism.
"It has frustrated me as Commissioner to see student-on-student racism in educational settings and have to tell them there is nothing we can do," Ms Walters said. "We also get quite a lot of oral reports about school-yard bullying that involves racial overtones."
She said current discrimination laws did not cover student-on-student racism and federal racial vilification legislation was inadequate.
"There is no body in this state any more that can act as a recipient for such complaints so they have to go through the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission in Sydney and HREOC are not enforceable she said.
State racial vilification laws would make it an offence to harass, taunt or subject another person to racism and the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal would be able to make enforceable rulings.
The university taskforce is comprised of Aboriginal, Asian and feminist educators as well as researchers from other fields.
Taskforce members and the deputy director of the UQ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Studies Unit Jackie Huggins said schools provided and idealm opportunity to target racial attitudes and behaviour.
"Children cannot escape the schooling process and if we strike at a very early age when children are forming their attitudes and behaviours, we have an opportunity to make them think about their actions and behaviours," she said.
Ms Huggins said the rise of One Nation had increased racism.
"Some of my people have said that they have never known it to be as bad and solutions need to be found now," she said.
Ms Huggins said some of her friends had been forced to withdraw their children from school because of racist bullying.
She said working on the taskforce with the Asian educators such as Professor Kam Louie, who is director of UQ's Asian studies unit, would help reinforce the magnitude of the problem of racism in society.
Taskforce chair and head of UQ's graduate school of education Professor Allan Luke said the aim of the study was to identify successful anti-racism strategies and policies already in place in some Queensland schools and to disperse them more widely.
He said the ultimate solution lay in changing the culture of schools and ensuring multiculturalism was an integral part of education from early childhood.