He was appalled that all the alleged conspirators were Greeks. He said that reputation bore above all else and that it was not possible for so many to be risking their reputations, to be diminishing the legacy they fought long and hard for their children.

He was right.

But for a long while Australia was sold a different story, one that there was a clandestine mass culture of deceit and welfare fraud connived by Greeks. All of a sudden the hard working sacrificing Greek migrant fathers and grandfathers were welfare cheats.

Australians, like most western societies, have been conditioned to chase down the pennies of the alleged welfare cheats while turning the proverbial blind eye to the avoidance of tax paying by the top end of town.

The vast majority of Greek migrants, like the majority of migrants, remain hard-working. However April 1978 saw Greek migrants indicted as dole bludgers, stealing from the Commonwealth.

In 1976, the federal police tipped off by discredited individuals salaciously bought into gossip that Greek migrants were defrauding their fellow taxpayers. On the whiff of allegations alone the investigating police turned gossip into a widespread scandal. Racism bit hard. Migrants went from being those people who were taking jobs from White Australians to thieving bastards. White prejudice smacked around the nation’s institutions but also the Malcolm Fraser led government. The Coalition went wild on the scandal, and alongside the police racialised the scandal – to the Greeks. A little of what Gough Whitlam’s government had begun in the multicultural journey with Al Grassby at the head was undermined.

Australian governments go hard on alleged welfare cheats and publicly shame despite often without evidence. Of course it’s always been staunch defence of the big end of town corporate tax evaders.

The investigating police would years later be the subject of scathing criticism from judiciaries over the so-called scandal, but the damage had been done – lives were ruined, one individual suicided, a small number had been railroaded with convictions and the nation had soaked up a generation’s worth of mudslinging at Greek migrants.

In 1976, the Sydney office of the then Department of Social Security was told of an alleged conspiracy where medical practitioners of Greek heritage were assisting elderly Greek workers to fraudulently secure ‘invalid’ pensions. The Commonwealth Police (COMPOL) was called in.

COMPOL was told by now discredited informers that μεσάζοντες – intermediaries – introduced the migrant workers looking for an early retirement to the doctors. It was also suspected that some of the intermediaries were also paid coaches for Greek migrants in how to obtain sickness and disability pensions, in how to describe symptoms and in how to appear. The notoriety of the μεσάζοντες grew into an alleged shadowy Greek underworld. They became known as Kolpo – κόλπο.

On the basis of an informant in September 1977, the acting Commissioner of the Commonwealth Police informed the Director-General of the Department of Social Security of an alleged longstanding fraud perpetrated by Greek migrants against the Department of Social Security. Eight doctors were implicated and it was believed that at least 500 Greeks were involved. Three million dollars a year were being defrauded by the Greeks it was alleged.

The acting Commissioner argued that with the testimony of the informant who would be paid a reward of $30,000 that the alleged perpetrators could be brought to justice.

Search warrants were issued on the doctors’ medical practices. A huge list of pensioners was compiled.

The government was coming after the former workers with the full force of the law, with the intent to jail and not with fines alone. The argument was the public purse had been stolen from.

Detective Chief Inspector Don Thomas led the raids on the pensioners on that April dawn. More than 160 homes were raided and five medical practices.
The raids made the media fast and maxed national coverage because COMPOL had invited to the raids the Sydney broadsheet, The Sun.
181 Greeks were arrested. So much for multicultural Australia; all of a sudden they were not Australians but Greeks. Many were charged with defrauding the Commonwealth. Many could not speak English.

Two days later, 83 pensioners, the first lot, appeared in Sydney’s Central Court. The public diminution, humiliation, disparaging and racism was underway full-blown. COMPOL boasted that this was the biggest breakthrough in the nation’s history on catching out welfare cheats. COMPOL carried on that there may arise a thousand more arrests and the extradition of around 300 Greeks from Greece.

In the 1950s there was a time when my father, a young migrant worker, shovelled asbestos onto the back of trucks. Who knows what impact on his health as he struggled, physically debilitated, during his 70s till he passed at 84 years.

There was an air of the Kafkaesque as police raided the homes of pensioners, with the elderly no longer just fathers and grandfathers but all of a sudden criminal suspects taken away to appear in court days later. In one swoop with the nation’s media pouring over every charge being Greek became a liability.
One elderly Greek who was still receiving psychiatric care at the time of his sudden arrest soon after took his life.

So what were the rudimentary injustices by the Commonwealth Government, the Department of Social Security at the time? The Director-General issued a directive for the suspension of pension payments without the pensioners having a chance to defend themselves. The grim reality was that many families were left with no income. Many endured financial hardship and some became homeless. It is little known by most Australians that one-third of Australia’s homeless are migrants. More than one quarter of Australia’s suicides are migrants. The impropriety brash-laden scandalous conduct by the government, by Social Security, by COMPOL led to mortgages lost, tenancies terminated, families losing their homes.

One of the doctors that the discredited informant had claimed was corrupt was tested by an undercover police officer of Greek heritage. He visited the doctor seeking favour from the doctor to secure a disability pension. The doctor refused to assist but this did not make COMPOL stop and think. COMPOL had the testimony of an informant! It’s as if Vyshinsky’s Law. It was as if the soon to be discredited informant who had approached COMPOL in 1977 could say anything – he had been granted ‘indemnity’.

Mass arrests and a conspiracy prosecution made the police and government appear champions, but at what cost? It is said that lies do not live forever but for the affected Greek migrants, their generation was outlived by the lie and its impacts.

COMPOL had hoped that after the mass arrests of the 181, that some would testify against the doctors. Those pensioners would be indemnified. But the reality is the pensioners did not know what was happening to them let alone of a conspiracy.

Many of the elderly were charged because they were pensioners with a surname of Greek origin who had visited one of the doctors.

Eventually the Department of Social Security realised that they had been caught up in COMPOL’s initial excitement that they had penetrated some mass conspiracy on welfare fraud. The Department slowly began to disassociate itself from the prosecutions. Having a Greek surname was not all of sudden incriminating, and would not be for the judicial process.

The prosecution’s case rested predominately on the testimony of a single informant. The informant’s testimony was ineffectual when tested by the judicial process. There would be a second Crown witness but her disconnected testimony that could not be corroborated came to an overdue end when the Crown itself prematurely ended her testimony to the court.

The medical practitioners were committed to trial but this was challenged in the Federal Court and in 1985 the committals were successfully appealed.
Of the April Fool’s day dawn raids and arrests of 181 elderly Greeks only four were convicted of ‘defrauding’ the Commonwealth. Three of them, debilitated by illness, pleaded guilty, were convicted and placed on good behaviour bonds.

Thirty-three were convicted on minor irregularities. Eight were fined and twenty-five dished good behaviour bonds.

One medical practitioner would be convicted and dealt a prison sentence.

After the defeat of the Coalition government in 1983, the Minister of Social Security, Don Grimes and the Attorney-General, Gareth Evans, announced an inquiry into the raids and for compensation to be determined for those unjustly prosecuted. On April 30 1986, the Mitchell Inquiry recommended compensation payments totalling over $6 million.

The thereabouts $3 million that had been alleged was being stolen each year by welfare cheats who were Greek migrants finished up costing the Commonwealth $100 million.

Long after our bones our soaked into the earth, there may come the day when racism and classism may be wrongs only known by a distant past.

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•  16 October 2016 | Aboriginal suicide at crisis levels and the nation should weep
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•  16 October 2013 | The Australian Aboriginal suicide epidemic

Gerry Georgatos

Recently, I travelled to two island communities that had recorded their first suicides. These First Nations islander communities had been sheltered from the internet and social media platforms where bullying and mobbing play out in pronounced ways. In the middle of last year both islands were connected to the internet. Before this they had never had a recorded suicide attempt.

We must demand that bullying is tackled, and all other factors that culminate in suicide are radically challenged but with a salt-of-the-earth approach, with the spreading of love. This does not mean we dish out more expectation to families. They are already doing everything they can. It is a slap in the face to suggest that they need to talk openly. They do talk but they need support, outreach services, pathways that improve their lot and that resource them and tool them up to assist their loved ones.

‘Child suicide rates are the highest they have ever been.’

In at least one in four child suicides we have been able to identify bullying as an underlying narrative

The death of a child is always heartbreaking but when it is by suicide it is as devastating as it gets, with long-term negative psychosocial effects for those left behind. There is a whole different level of anguish and grief. Grimly, deaths of children by suicide are increasing, but they can be dramatically reduced. Each year, I support hundreds of suicide-affected families. I have supported families who have lost a child as young as nine to suicide and with attempted suicides of children as young as six. I often reflect that there should be no words for what should be unimaginable.

Only in a third of child suicides did the child tell someone that they were contemplating suicide. However, in at least one in four child suicides we have been able to identify bullying as an underlying narrative or as the abominable tipping point.

The tragedy of 14-year-old Dolly Everett should have galvanised the nation to respond not only to suicides that culminated from bullying but also to child suicides, period. In the weeks before and after Dolly’s death there were other children lost to suicide. We must come together to tell their stories too, and talk about the ways forward.

Tragically, the child suicide toll discriminates. Proportionally, suicide takes more Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children than it does non-Aboriginal children. Suicide also takes more migrant children from non-English cultural backgrounds. I work in trauma recovery with suicide-affected families; Aboriginal, migrant, everyone. At least one quarter of these children would still be with us had it not been for bullying and relentless psychological and emotional abuse.

Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander suicides comprise 6% of Australia’s total suicides, but shockingly, 80% of child suicides aged 12 and below are of Aboriginal children. Thirty per cent of the child suicides to age 17 are comprised of Aboriginal children. I have often said “the nation should weep”at this harrowing tragedy, which is more than just a national shame – a national disgrace, an abomination, a damning condemnation of who we remain as a nation.

In general, the socioeconomically poorer someone is the more vulnerable they are to bullying, aberrant behaviour and to suicidal ideation. Forty per cent of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders live below the poverty line and my research has found that nearly 100% of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander suicides are of people who lived below the poverty line. The suicides of Aboriginal people living above the poverty line are negligible and less than non-Aboriginal Australians living above the poverty line.

Newly arrived migrants from language-diverse backgrounds are also at significant risk. The majority are impoverished and face economic stressors and a divide borne of incidental isolation and inequalities. I remember a young mother, newly arrived, living in public housing with two children, the youngest not yet two, ending her life. Her family devastated. Her eldest child, seven, was subsequently at risk. To reduce the threat of the “unimaginable” we supported relentlessly. People need people.

There are no words possible to any family after the loss of their child. I remember each child’s funeral that I have attended. I remember the funeral of a 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, 12-year-olds. I remember one community, three children buried in five days, three graves in a row, the youngest a 15-year-old girl. In two of the tragic losses bullying was the tipping point, although neither confided in anyone about suicidal ideation.

Child suicides are no longer rare. Child suicide rates are the highest they have ever been. More than 40,000 children aged 12 to 17 years are known to make a suicide attempt. One quarter of 16-year-old females self-harm.

Bullying has to be taken on. The stories have to be told so as to galvanise tailor-made education, to stop bullying, to educate protective factors into victims, to educate perpetrators.

Education campaigns must be national and reach every layer of society. They cannot be predominantly within the school because the majority of Aboriginal child suicides have been of children who did not attend school.

As a nation, our governments and institutions should be doing everything possible for a civil and courteous society, for loving narratives, for outreach support, for technology primed to the betterment of its users and unable to be misused to the detriment.

• Crisis support services can be reached 24 hours a day: Lifeline 13 11 14; Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467; Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800; MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78; Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636

• Gerry Georgatos is a suicide prevention researcher and restorative justice and prison reform expert with the Institute of Social Justice and Human Rights. He is also the national coordinator of the National Indigenous Critical Response Service and the National Migrant Youth Support Service.