Aboriginal leaders have accused two Cessnock councillors of stoking racial tensions after comments in a council meeting and at a First Nations advisory committee session on the Voice to Parliament.
The Newcastle Herald understands Mindaribba Local Aboriginal Land Council has lodged a code-of-conduct complaint with Cessnock City Council about Cr Olsen and fellow independent Jessica Jurd in relation to the council meeting in April and the Aboriginal advisory committee also has made a formal complaint.
Labor councillor Rosa Grine said Cr Olsen's comments at the April meeting about Indigenous people abusing council staff were "very, very offensive".
Cr Olsen rejected the claims and said he and Cr Jurd were the victims of a political "attack".
The controversy ignited on April 19 when Cr Olsen and Cr Jurd questioned the council's adoption of an updated Unreasonable Customer Conduct policy aligned with the NSW Ombudsman's latest advice on taking cultural factors into account when handling incidents of poor customer behaviour.
The revised policy says: "When customers behave in these ways (and where there are no cultural factors that could reasonably explain their behaviour), council considers their conduct to be 'unreasonable'."
Cr Jurd told the meeting that the issue was "similar to the Voice ... adding race to a policy".
Cr Olsen said the policy could be a green light for people from different cultures to abuse council staff, nominating Aboriginal and Lebanese people as examples of potential transgressors.
"[Are you] saying if an Aboriginal comes in and abuses someone over the staff, we're not going to act on it, or if it's someone who comes in and is Lebanese and abuses the staff, we're not going to act on it?" he asked a council director during the debate.
"We're going to say it's part of their culture?"
The director replied that Cr Olsen's interpretation was "totally incorrect" and the updated policy was "not about ignoring unreasonable behaviour" but about "making sure that everyone's cognisant of the fact there are different cultural backgrounds throughout all of our LGA and just to be aware of those in your dealings with all our residents and ratepayers".
Cr Olsen replied: "So, if a customer came in of a different race to being an Australian white citizen and was abusive to staff or spoke arrogantly to staff, that could be accepted because they might not be an Australian citizen? That's what we're saying."
Mayor Jay Suvaal told Cr Olsen the director was "not saying that" and the policy was about saying: "OK, not everyone has come from the same background and understands things the same way.
"It is not to say because of a culture you cannot take action against someone; it's saying that this may be something that could be considered," Cr Suvaal said.
Cr Olsen: "From that explanation, mayor, if I was to identify as Aboriginal, would I have consideration in the fact that how I speak in council that it offends people, would that make a difference?
"I think what we're doing with this policy is making it broad and open to staff copping abuse and not knowing what they should do and what they shouldn't do.
"Abuse is abuse, or I'll claim myself to be Aboriginal."
Cr Grine took offence to Cr Olsen's comments.
"There are a lot of cultural differences within our LGA. The fact that you want to represent Aboriginal people. You can't just do that," she said.
Cr John Moores told the meeting Cr Olsen was "running a fine line here".
"Way out of line as far as a concern on cultures ... you're just rambling on to what you want people to believe you're saying. Please stop this," he said.
"It doesn't matter what race it is or who it is, you can't go naming races. You cannot do this. We are all one."
Cr Olsen and Cr Jurd have revealed in the past week that they have Aboriginal ancestry.
"I don't play the Aboriginal card because I believe we are all equal and should all be treated equally," Cr Olsen wrote on Facebook.
He told the Newcastle Herald that he was the victim of an orchestrated political attempt to remove him from the council that had included five code-of-conduct censures in this term of government.
"I don't class what I said as being racist; I class it as being an open and honest opinion," he said.
"If people think I'm a racist, it's very hard to be a racist when you're Aboriginal yourself, unless I'm racist against my own group.
"I'm more Aboriginal than most people think. I've never been racist in my life. I never will be."
He said councillors might have been offended by his nomination of different racial groups during the debate and they were "entitled to their opinion".
"It wasn't meant to offend anyone in particular. It was meant to highlight the fact that anyone who's going to abuse our staff should be treated the same."
The dispute flared two weeks ago when Cr Olsen attended a briefing of the council's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory committee on the Voice to Parliament referendum.
Cr Grine and four other people who attended the meeting told the Herald that Cr Olsen had behaved aggressively, talked over the top of one speaker then "kicked his chair out" before storming out, yelling: "Shove it up your arse."
"Cr Olsen got quite loud and obnoxious and started speaking over [a speaker] ... he kicked his chair out and stood up in the meeting," one female Aboriginal community leader said.
"Everyone in the room felt like they were just under attack. He was getting louder and louder."
She said Cr Olsen's comments in the April council meeting were "outright racism".
"They were discussing a policy that had absolutely nothing to do with us as an Aboriginal community," she said.
"For him to say that he's a white Australian citizen, then talk about claiming to be an Aboriginal, that is so degrading for us as a community. It is so derogatory for us."
A male Aboriginal advisory committee member said Cr Olsen's behaviour at the Voice information session was "definitely" inappropriate.
"When people were disagreeing with him, he started getting a little bit aggro," he said.
"He became a bit abusive as well. If you're going to debate something, you don't yell at people and you don't swear at people.
"It sounded offensive when he was saying it. He seemed to come there with an agenda."
Cr Olsen, who does not support the council having a role in "pushing the Voice", said he had not yelled "shove it up your arse", but had said "this meeting is a load of crap."
He said Cr Grine, "an antagonist of me", had "brought in people whiter than me" to the meeting.
"When I went to speak, they all started yelling at me," he told the Herald.
"I told them the meeting was crap because it was all about pushing an agenda for the corporate Aboriginal, not for the true Aboriginal."
Cr Olsen described the criticisms of his behaviour and opinions as "a racist act against me".
The female Aboriginal community leader, who asked not to be named, said she and a colleague had been subject to recent racist abuse by members of the public.
"I've had a staff member leave because they cannot handle the racism in the community.
"They have been ... called dirty black c---ts. We've been spat at.
"I walked out of work the other day, and I'm pretty thick-skinned and I've seen a lot in my time, and two girls came around the corner in a white four-wheel-drive and the girl on the passenger side wound down the window and said, 'Ya f---ing black dog', and they kept driving.
"I was at Cessnock last week when somebody's gone past me and said 'Abo' and spat.
"This has all happened within a couple of days of that [council] meeting. People are concerned for our community's safety and wellbeing. We are vulnerable and we are coming under attack.
"The concern from my end and the concern from others is somebody's going to get hurt in this."
She said she had written to the mayor and the council's general manager about Cr Olsen's behaviour.
A Cessnock City Council spokesperson said the council had a "long-established practice of not commenting on individual complaints".
Asked whether he had asked Cr Jurd to step down as a newly named member of the advisory committee, Cr Suvaal said: "Following comments made and appointments by council at the April council meeting, some concerns were raised with me directly by members of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Committee and the local Aboriginal community. I then raised these concerns with councillors."
Cr Jurd wrote on Facebook after the advisory committee meeting that she had contacted police after another attendee at the meeting confronted her after it ended.
"They came out to me in the car park, an inch off my face screaming about how I was a disgusting person and this isn't over, I'll make sure of that. Thought she was going to punch me in the face," she wrote.
Cr Jurd backed Cr Olsen's version of events about the advisory committee meeting, where she said she had hoped to explain her views on the cultural policy and the Voice.
"At the moment it's quite a big thing, and you don't know who somebody is and their background just by looking at them," she said.
"That was more what I was trying to say: Let's not put these things in policies that don't need to be there."
Cr Jurd said three people had "started screaming" at Cr Olsen during the advisory committee meeting.
She said she had apologised to another committee member about comparing the cultural policy to the Voice but had declined to retract the comments because "how do you retract it, anyway?".
"She started screaming at me ... the tone of her voice was very agitated," Cr Jurd said.
"If I had known it was this much of an issue - I didn't realise - I wouldn't have gone. Look what it's caused, and I was just trying to sort it out and realistically apologise if I did offend her."
Asked whether she and Cr Olsen should have chosen their words more carefully during the council debate, Cr Jurd said: "Why? I never spoke mean. I never spoke out of turn. If you're offended, don't get me wrong, I get yelled and screamed at and told I'm an effing idiot by other councillors in there constantly.
"Just because I had an issue with the policy, why should I apologise? I'm the one being yelled and screamed at, nearly punched in the face, for speaking on how I feel about a policy which I think can be taken as quite offensive, and these people think they can say I'm the racist.
"It's my culture. I'm not speaking as anything other than that's my culture. How can I be racist to my own culture?
"I'm sorry if it offended anyone."
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