NTEU POLICY STATEMENT ON RACISM 
 
Australia has always been a culturally diverse and multinational continent.   

In the countless millennia prior to European colonisation, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people and their cultures spanned from what is now known as the South East Cape in Tasmania to the Cape York Peninsular in Far North Queensland and from Cape Bryon in New South Wales to Steep Point in Western Australia; incorporating all lands comprising mainland Australia. 

At many points since colonisation, Australia had invited many cultures to our shores and strived to ensure those cultural groups and peoples were welcomed and embraced as new Australian citizens. 
Concurrent to this, the scourge of racism, intolerance, xenophobia and hatred has raised its head impacting the positive agenda of multiculturalism and acceptance.  In more recent times this intolerance has found a renewed strength, backed by policies of differing Governments that are founded in fear and ignorance. 

Racism and intolerance in all their forms - intentional, tacit, casual, are deplorable and unacceptable in Australian society.  
NTEU is committed to campaign and educate to ensure intolerance based upon an outdated notion of race are subjugated.  

Therefore NTEU endorses the following policy statement
 
NTEU notes: 

• Racism is the exercise of power by an individual or an institution. 

• Racism is committed against another, involving the derogation of another person or community’s inherent humanity.
• Racism is grounded in the belief that human communities are constituted with distinctive and specific characteristics.
• The exercise of power can be an act of violence or neglect. 

• The exercise of power is dependent upon the aggressor’s perceived membership of a racial majority and upon an assumed cultural right or privilege.
• That racism is bound to Australia’s colonial past. The physical, legal and constitutional dispossession and violence committed against Australia’s First Peoples is a fundamental characteristic of Australian racism.
• Racism includes state acts that have legitimated and set communities against one another, particularly white communities against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, migrants, refugees and resident non-citizens. 

NTEU believes:

• That racism is bound to Australia’s colonial past. The physical, legal and constitutional dispossession and violence committed against Australia’s First Peoples is a fundamental characteristic of Australian racism.
• Racism includes state acts that have legitimated and set communities against one another, particularly white communities against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, migrants, refugees and resident non-citizens. 
• That racism today has evolved with society and that expressions of hate against individuals, groups and communities can be expressed in many varied forms.  Structural racism, harassment, vilification, threats of violence (including symbolic violence), as well as racism expressed through tacit or casual acts continue to infiltrated all sections of society, particularly the online environments. 
• Australian trade unions have a complicated presence in Australia’s racist history. Historically, the trade union movement has been inseparable from historic legislative and constitutional acts of discrimination and exclusion, while in recent times, the trade union movement has partnered with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and migrant communities and has been one of the most powerful social forces for international solidarity. 
• That racism is a blight on society and that without concerted ongoing action, racism and intolerance will continue to impact upon those who are or feel as though they are marginalised from wider society. 
  That a multicultural society is to be celebrated and that those who seek to use racism and intolerance to undermine the fabric of our shared community must be held to account. 

NTEU will:

• Maintain for perpetuity, a no-tolerance stance on racism and intolerance. 
• Partner with like-minded groups and organisations to form public alliances against racism and will actively encourage Universities to participate fully in this mission.
• Develop and implement an ongoing campaign to educate, empower and remove the stain of intolerance from Australian society.
• Advocate and take action to support the NTEU members and their right to oppose and fight racism in the workplace.