GIUSEPPE, ABDUL, BLUEY AND CURLY

Good to be back although I’m not over the dreaded lurgie which has hung around me for a week. From home I have been watching and reading about the understandably emotional debate about refugees and quotas and gangs and the murder of a Sudanese teenager at Noble Park railway station.

And let me say for starters –before the racist epithets start flying – I don’t care if a gang member’s name is Giuseppe, or Abdul, or Van Tho, or Zanzibar or Bluey and Curly.

After all, one of the most brutal gang wars in Melbourne was carried out by murderers with names like Mark and Jason (as in Moran) and Carl (as in Williams).

And when our communities are threatened by lawlessness it is up to the politicians to pass laws with muscle to curtail them and then support our Police with numbers and equipment to enforce those laws.

It’s not easy. Especially when some of the protagonists don’t speak English. An African refugee from Burundi is in jail on remand after biting a female officer on the face and the back of the head outside a Noble Park shop on Sunday. He has now been accused of biting a prison warden in jail.

Six months ago I raised the issue of Sudanese gangs after I read in The Age that  ‘In a bid to better connect Victoria Police with the culture and customs of more than 2000 Sudanese refugees who call Greater Dandenong home, two officers will spend the next three weeks in Southern Sudan doing concreting work.

I said at the time: Yep. That’ll fix things. That will show people like Hakeem Hakeem and Taban Gaby  and David Urbano   that it is un-Australian to rape and bash women. That is against our laws to drive with an alcohol level of .175 and crash into a school that cost a little boy part of his leg.

Hakeem was jailed for 24 years for a series of rapes and brutal assaults and false imprisonment. Gany had form for drink-driving and walked free until community outrage had his sentence reviewed and he got 21 months jail. Somehow he managed to get the funding for an unsuccessful challenge in the High Court.

Urbano faced seven charges including driving while disqualified. He blew .288 before crashing his vehicle into parked cars and running away. He was on the way to crèche to pick up his daughter at the time.

Cynically, I said: Don’t be surprised when the next reckless hoon is pulled over for driving while disqualified if he asks the kind policeman to ‘come home and help finish the porch’.

What the authorities should be doing is getting tougher on transgressors. Don’t give them driving licences until they fully understand our road laws. Confiscate their cars if they drive while disqualified. And hit them hard for drink-driving.

We have to abide by their laws and customs in their country. And you have to learn them quick smart. When I was in the Sudan Darren James, Paul Barber and I were confronted by gun-toting soldiers in the desert who didn’t want us to see how the Government had bulldozed a shanty-town and left the villagers homeless. They pointed their guns at us – prepared to use them--  and ordered us to leave. We left. At the airport on arrival officials, enforcing their no-alcohol policy, seized two sealed bottles of booze and poured them through a hole in the floor. It was a case of ‘When in Rome…..’

The Sudanese refugees have to realise ‘When in Melbourne…

The fact that they initially congregate in ethnic conclaves is not unusual. The Italians did it. So did Vietnamese refugees.

But it would be foolish to disregard a fear in this country. A fear that is enhanced when groups from another country behave as if they are still IN that other lawless country.

And signs like the ones we saw on a house in Tamworth earlier this year, when locals didn’t want any more refugees did little to help. That sign declared the area Little Sudan.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007