Amala Groom | Comfortable Submission | 2014 | paper, bronze, wood, ink | dimensions variable
image courtesy of Amala Groom and Blak Douglas
Comfortable Submission was made for a joint exhibition with Blak Douglas called Lawful & Permissible, presented at Damien Minton Gallery, as a creative response to a proposed draft Freedom of Speech (repeal of s. 18c) Bill 2014.
The following text was current at the time of writing in 2014.
To background, The Racial Discrimination Act (Cth) 1975 (herein RDA) is the domestic implementation of the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The RDA is federal legislation, which in its current form provides protection from racial discrimination. Then federal Attorney General George Brandis had been pushing for an amendment to the RDA to allow for what he calls ‘freedom of speech’. Because Australia has no bill of rights, there is no actual freedom of speech here; there is only an implied freedom.
It’s a play on words this bill, it is social manipulation of the state to pass a racist amendment that will effectively allow for hate speech to be lawful and permissible, hence the title of the show. The whole force behind the proposed bill is to repeal Section 18c of the RDA. Section 18c provides protection from racial vilification, which is proven to offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate. The proposed bill is in direct response to a decision made in favour of the nine Aboriginal plaintiffs in the Eatock v Bolt case of 2011.
Essentially, conservative journalist Andrew Bolt wrote some articles in The Australian saying that a bunch of Aboriginal people only identified as being Aboriginal for professional gain.
In the past, Groom has authored and co-authored numerous legislative submissions and reviews and does not take anything away from people that do. A lot of effort into writing these submissions, Groom’s approach to this exhibition was to highlight the process of the public’s ability to participate in what is a participatory democracy. There was an overwhelming number of public submissions into the proposed bill that came from all sectors of the community, over 5500 of them with some of the submissions representing over 200,000 people each.
Groom took the concept of the state shelving submissions one step further and, in conversation with a friend a few months before the show, said ‘Why write submissions when the state just wipes their arse with them?’.
Comfortable Submission was Groom’s submission to the proposed bill. It’s on toilet paper, so when the Attorney General’s department wipes their arse with it, at least it will be comfortable.
