Launch of How to Live Together by Charles Rojzman

10th April 2000 - Co.As.It
Official Launch

When I look through this book and see the headings and sub-headings it reads like a hand-book for a chair of an ethnic affairs commission or perhaps more appropriately for a chair of a community relations commission, which we expect to be later this year. I say this because there is a lot which is immediately familiar to me. In fact at this very moment we are grappling with the issue of conflict between youths of non-English speaking background and police in Sydney’s western suburbs. And that is the very stuff of this book.

What we’re doing to tackle this matter is to work through community leaders and local police commanders to find solutions to the problems that exist in those areas.

In a general sense we do already have a framework in place which we initiated a few years ago for this type of challenge. We call it the PACT program – a program which aims to put police and community leaders together to learn how to solve the problems together. We call it a training programme because learning to live together is something we must all do, and do together.

Charles Rojzman has taken this process to a very high level and has written it all down as a step by step, how-to-do-it, manual.

Up till now, what we have done here in New South Wales is to work largely by gut feeling and experience. Each successive issue in the community relations field has taught us more. The gulf war crisis in the early Nineties threatened to create great disharmony in this society, because of perceptions that Arabic-speaking or Muslim Australians would automatically support Sadam Hussein.

When we realised the potential for disharmony and set about confronting the prejudice that was beginning to surface, we had no existing pattern to follow. We simply knew that people with wisdom from all the relevant parts of the society needed to be talking, and talking regularly. So we put together in a working group public servants from the premier’s department and the education system, representatives from Arabic speaking and Muslim communities, and the police.

It is this kind of process that Dr Rojzman has become expert in.

He tells us in the introduction to the book that it was his realisation that inside us all lives a monster – a monster of hatred and racism that challenges us to control it.

His weapon to fight that monster is social therapy.

I like this idea of social therapy. Once I heard this term and started to think about it I realised we already have the small beginnings of “social therapy” in our PACT programme. Recently I attended the launch of a video which grew our of a PACT group in the southern suburbs of Sydney. I saw it in the company of the police minister and several of the most senior police officers in this state and we all had the same positive reaction. The video was not a high powered training tool. It was a simple 20 minute collection of the thoughts and views of kids, cops, shop-keepers and people in the street from various backgrounds. What was most interesting about it was that all the participants were talking about what they wanted from the others and the title of the video summed up what they all wanted of each other – A Little Respect.

If we look at this video in the light of Dr Rojzman’s methods it is a very important first step.

He has perfected his social therapy techniques in Paris – for centuries a city of ideas and innovation, but lately a city with challenges they can barely tackle, as the languages, cultures and religions of the former French colonies come back to demand a piece of the spoils.

When he describes in the book the kinds of problems he is frequently asked to resolve they sound very familiar to us, if thankfully, no where near as serious.

But if his methods of social therapy are able to resolve some of the intractable problems that exist in the Paris suburbs then his advice should be extremely effective in dealing with our far less serious social challenges.

Just recently, we in the Ethnic Affairs Commission had to deal another small issue which very much like Dr Rojzman's work in the suburbs of Paris. It involved members of communities who were not long ago at war and living in the same apartment block in Sydney. A few people on each side seem intent on continuing the hatred from the homelands.

We are employing some of his techniques to encourage the people themselves to find the solutions so they can discover How to Live Together.

When we have all absorbed the wisdom in this book we will all be able to achieve that goal and that particularly problem will be all that easier for us face.

I would like to give you an idea of the kind of situations to which Dr Rojzman's ideas have been applied. Let me read the words of a young boy of middle eastern background quoted in the book.

He says; “Boys and cops are fighting, having confrontations. Lots of cops have killed boys. Since then boys say that the cops don’t like Arabs or young people around here. And now they want to show them just how mutual the feeling is. Plus, when a cop hits a boy, the media wait for this reaction. Young people do react, they need to stand up for the identity of their neighbourhood and then because of all these raw deals you get a chain reaction.”

Sadly this scene sound familiar to us. So how does he advise us to approach this sort of situation.

His method revolves around not just giving people responsibility for their problems but also giving them the tools to find solutions.

His process is to awaken and open people to their own fears and prejudices, to get them to work together on themselves, before trying to solve the problems of the neighbourhood.

Bureaucrats and managers, teachers and parents, teenagers and police need first to understand each others fears and prejudices before they begin together to find solution to community problems. His real life examples of this process make fascinating reading.

And now at the beginning of this millennium, no law, no decision, no action can stop the spreading of diversity throughout the planet. No nation can remain mono-ethnic, no race can remain pure. We are all sharing our genes and our cultures. We are making a wonderful new world but there are dangers that cannot be ignored. If we can all begin to think a little like Dr Rojzman those threats will disappear before our eyes.

I myself am greatly looking forward to the opportunity of studying the work closely and seeing where we can put his ideas into practice in New South Wales.

I therefore have great pleasure in launching this wonderful book How to Live together.