Flogging a moribund horse while the emperor is naked: Issues In proving institutional racial discrimination in state housing in Western Australia

Flogging a moribund horse while the emperor is naked: Issues In proving institutional racial discrimination in state housing in Western Australia Journal Article

Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law

• Author(s): Rosales-Castaneda, J.
• Published: 2003
• Volume: 10

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Abstract: This paper highlights the barriers that impede arriving to a solution by using the Western Australian Equal Opportunity Legal Forum, and suggests that "housing reconciliation" can only be achieved by both sides acknowledging the issues that each side ignore in their struggle to defend their positions. Admitting that "the emperor has no clothes on" is, in my view, the first step towards achieving "housing reconciliation". Our legal institutions work on the underlying assumption that the system works. This one-size-fits-all approach must be challenged. But questioning the functionality and adequacy of the legal system meets resistance. When hundreds of Aboriginal tenants lodge hundreds of complaints against Homeswest over several years, and from those hundreds only three cases end up being heard by the Tribunal, when in the history of the Act, of these three cases, only one has been successful, and when the one that has been successful only gets a shallow remedy, something is telling me that the system is not working for everyone, and that the "one-size-fits-all" approach is not achieving the Act's ultimate goal: the elimination of unlawful discrimination.

• Urls: http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v10n4/rosales104.html
• Keywords: Homeless