Content warning: This piece contains mentions of Aboriginal deaths in custody, racism, and transphobia.
USyd Queer Action Collective, University of Sydney First Nations Students’ Collective, and Pride in Protest held a rally outside Surry Hills police station where Veronica Baxter was first denied bail 15 years ago on March 14, 2009. The rally was chaired by Lauren and Vieve, both members of USyd’s Queer Action Collective (QuAC).
The co-chairs began by addressing Baxter’s circumstance, where “Veronica’s home was raided by cops following information provided by an undercover cop for drug-related charges. She was denied bail right here at Surry Hills Police Station. And then she was sent to a male prison where she was denied hormone replacement therapy and died three days after Mardi Gras under suspicious circumstances.”
Wiradjuri and Wailwan activist, and SRC USyd’s First Nations Officer, Ethan Floyd was the first speaker for the event. Floyd began by noting that “Since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, at least 560 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody in police operations. We’re here to remember one of them, Veronica Baxter, who was in custody in 2009”.
“Deaths in custody are a result of the ongoing violence perpetrated by this colonial project and by the police. Governments on all levels are not just actively failing to take action, but are funding the institutions that kill us while refusing to hold a single individual or agency accountable.”
Floyd finally remarked, “This is a matter of life and death for our people. It’s also a sign of the intersectional struggle we share as queer folk and First Nations people. What we’ve been demanding for decades and will continue to demand is that the government implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission that the police and law enforcement across this country are defunded, disarmed, and dismantled in favour of community-minded restorative justice frameworks.”
Greens Inner West Councillor and queer activist Liz Atkins reflected on their time working on the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in their early career as an Attorney General’s officer in Canberra, “we were so excited by the fact there had been the Royal Commission and recommendations had been made, and here we are today with the national shame of not having implemented any of them.”
Atkins remarked on the transphobia experienced by Baxter which continues to persist today, “her death while in a men’s prison highlights the shameful discrimination against trans women in particular. Not just in our trans justice system, but more broadly. Overseas, transphobia is increasing its grip on government.”
The Minns Labor government has continued to delay its implementation of the Equality Bill, voting just last Wednesday for further review. Atkins adds that “The government can demonstrate its opposition to transphobia by implementing the Equality Bill in full, including birth certificate reform, comprehensive anti-discrimination reform, and ensuring the NSW Police implement the recommendations of the Sackar Special Commission.
“We need real transformational change, including a stop to over-policing of queer and First Nations people, and properly equipping and training police to de-escalate sensitive situations, rather than focusing on the use of force [and] weapons.”
The final speaker for the event was Wei Thai-Haynes, a member of both Pride in Protest and Sex Worker Action Collective. She similarly echoed, “It is because of the failure to implement the findings of the 1991 Royal Commission [in]to Black Deaths in Custody that over 560 Aboriginal men, children, sister girls, and brother boys have died at the hands of the police and prison system.
“It is because the recommendations have not been implemented that Veronica died in this fucking prison system. Veronica’s death is also another reminder of the transphobia that runs top to bottom in this country. It is another reminder of the intersection of sex worker, of drug user, of black, and of sister girl is not just an idea in the mind of someone, but it is a person in our community.”
Thai-Haynes criticised the media cycle which “takes the sensationalised murder of two white gay men in the eastern suburbs by a policeman for the media to take notice of the brutality that police exact on our community.
“Even more repugnant that in the same cycle, we watch the same media, the same police, and the same government tell us to our faces that we don’t get to decide the terms in which we celebrate our own fucking pride. And that the context of Jesse and Luke’s murders by Beau Lemarre was a crime of passion, an isolated incident, and not one of a larger pattern of evil enacted by the police and the state.”
In a statement to Honi, QuAC emphasised that the rally was a “call for the full disarming, defunding, and dismantling of all police; full decriminalisation of recreational drugs; full implementation of the recommendations from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody; Pass the Equality Bill Now.
“Just this week we have seen the Minns Labor government propose changes to bail laws that would remove more Indigenous children from their communities, and further delayed the equality bill. This delay is a continual denial of the right to self-ID and the protection of sex workers as workers on the anti-discrimination act, this delay allows the continued material discrimination of many queer people in housing, healthcare and in the so called “justice” system. Equality delayed is Equality denied, End Blak Deaths in Custody.
“Cases like Veronica Baxter’s demonstrate the interlinked nature of queer and Blak justice. There will be no queer justice if there is no Blak justice, and no Blak justice without queer justice. Both rely on the decolonisation of so called “Australia”.
“To this point, we extend our solidarity to Palestinians, who are facing a brutal colonisation at the hands of Israel aided by our own colonialist government.”
