This letter is open for signature by attendees at the Carumba Institute symposium on 23 & 24 January 2025 — you can do so using this form.

On 23 and 24 January, over 300 people (including all of us, the undersigned) came together in Brisbane for a national symposium on anti-racism, convened by Carumba Institute at the Queensland University of Technology.

The presenters and attendees at the conference were drawn from across the country. They included academics and scholars, nurses and social workers, lawyers and community organisers. The vast majority of presenters and attendees were First Nations people and from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds.

All of us came together with a commitment to thinking through, theorising and strategising against the impacts of settler colonialism both in Australia, and everywhere in the world.

We came together to acknowledge and reckon with the reality of our current political context.

That context includes the Queensland government’s recent decision to abandon the State’s Truth-Telling and Healing Inquiry, and to suspend human rights protections to introduce ‘adult crime, adult time’ laws, which the government freely admits will disproportionately impact First Nations young people.

It includes the Federal government’s decision, in the last sitting week of 2024, to rush through a suite of laws that will allow migrants and refugees to be exiled to third countries and jailed if they refuse to cooperate with their own deportation.

And it includes the unthinkable scale of devastation wrought by Israel’s 467-day genocidal war on Gaza.

Unconcerned by these realities, the Murdoch press has mounted a sustained and blatantly defamatory attack on the First Nations-led institute that hosted the symposium, as well as First Nations, Palestinian and Jewish presenters who spoke from their own expertise and experience.

The reporting has fuelled the vitriolic spread of online abuse and personal threats to key organisers and presenters.

The pernicious, opportunistic reporting on the symposium, as well as the torrent of online threats, have reinforced the need for the event in the first place.

Now more than ever, there must be spaces for people to come together to discuss different modes and forms of racism, without threat or intimidation by bad faith actors seeking to dictate the terms of academic freedom and debate.

Our academic institutions must step out from behind their anti-racist commitments on paper, and do more to defend and promote anti-racism and anti-colonialism as legitimate intellectual projects. That must start with resisting the threat to academic integrity posed by media scaremongering and interest-based lobbying.

We urge QUT, politicians and others receiving pressure to not only resist these attacks on the intellectual freedom and academic integrity of the presenters, Carumba Institute and QUT, but, further, to condemn the racist, reactionary and divisive campaign that produced them. Anything less will be a capitulation to the most corrosively anti-intellectual forces in Australian society, which will ultimately harm not only Carumba and QUT, but all of us.

Signed:

Professor Eddie Cubillo, University of Melbourne
Professor Ghassan Hage
Debbie Kilroy OAM, Sisters Inside
Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, CommonThreads
Associate Professor Crystal McKinnon, University of Melbourne
Professor Gregory Phillips, ABSTARR Consulting
Associate Professor Raglan Maddox, Australian National University
Associate Professor Liz Conor, La Trobe University
Dr Eugenia Flynn, RMIT University
Dr Elizabeth Strakosch, University of Melbourne
Dr Jordana Silverstein, University of Melbourne
Dr Zubaidah Mohamed Shaburdin, University of Melbourne
Dr Melinda Mann, Central Queensland University
Dr Alethea Beetson, Blak Social
Dr David Singh, Queensland University of Technology
Sanmati Verma, Human Rights Law Centre / United Workers Union
Josephine Langbien, Human Rights Law Centre
Kerry Klimm, AHPRA
Wajeehah Aayeshah, University of Melbourne
Anna Carlson, 4ZZZ
Rachana Rajan
Tarneen Onus Browne
Jade Robertson QUT student
Dr J Aramoana (Te Ohu Rata o Aotearoa)
Monique Hurley
Lee Stain, Inktricate Tattoo
Witt Gorrie, Flat Out Inc
Anna Wark
Kanesan Nathan
Priya Kunjan, RMIT University
Delaram Ansari, Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health
Amanda Morgan
Libby Porter, RMIT University
Dave Hartley
Dominique McKinnon
Zofia Wasiak, Sisters Inside
Sarah Schwartz, Jewish Council of Australia / University of Melbourne
Ruby Wharton, Sisters Inside Inc
Maggie Munn, Gunggari advocate
Kathryn Potter, Kamilaroi
Dr Ruth De Souza, Consultant and independent scholar
Jaynaya Dwyer, University of Melbourne
Jayne Christian – Barabirang Projects
Rachel Stringfellow, QUT University
Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, Macquarie University
Ayse Bayramoglu
Sara Saleh
Sangwon Lee
Anna Cerreto, Institute for Collaborative Race Research
Matt Chun
Nadine Chemali, Sisters Inside Inc
Neta-Rie Mabo, Sisters Inside Inc.
Charandev Singh
Sohini Mehta
Norfiza Mohd Zali, University of Melbourne
Pauline Huynh
Nellie Pollard-Wharton, The University of New South Wales
Sharnee Hegarty
Lorna Munro Wiradjuri Poet
Natalie Ironfield, The University of Melbourne
Brig Hunt, Sisters Inside Inc
Anton Schirripa