This article was first published by NITV in Australia.
A group of Gamilaroi families are lodging a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission, following an alleged racial profiling incident at a local pool last year.
13 complainants allege they were unfairly targeted by staff at Inverell Aquatic Centre as well as local police in March 2025 when they were forced to leave the facility.
Pool management claimed at the time this was a necessary response to ‘antisocial behaviour’.
Cell phone footage taken at the time shows groups of Aboriginal children and families standing together outside the pool. Police can also been seen inside the centre.
Alleging a breach of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the families involved say Aboriginal people were targeted.
Local father Thomas Davis says the fallout from the incident has continued in the year since it occurred.
“It’s a little town Inverell, and there’s not much to do other than the town pool, which is a good thing to do, take the kids,” the Gamilaroi man told NITV.
“But we don’t do that after the incident. We haven’t been back.”
The AHRC complaint alleges that, despite a few interactions with staff that day, the families involved were not warned they would be removed and were not informed that police had been called.
“All of a sudden, one of the complainants was approached by the police and told that if they didn’t leave, that they’d be arrested for trespassing,” said Lucy Schroeder, a National Justice Project solicitor representing the families.
“It wasn’t just one person who was asked to leave. It was wasn’t even just one family. It was children, parents, an Elder, all asked to leave the pool.
“Every single one of the people who were asked to leave were Aboriginal.”
Davis’s 10-year-old son was at the centre that day, and was one those forced to leave by police.
He says weekly school visits to the pool for sport have also been disrupted for his son and other children involved.
“They don’t attend those, and ... on the weekends, wanting to go to the pool with their friends, they come and ask.
“But you don’t really want them to go back down there and open themselves back up to being treated like that again.”
The Inverell Aquatic Centre is managed by Belgravia Leisure, a company with ties to venues across Australia and New Zealand.
In response to the incident last year, the organisation defended the actions of their staff, saying several young patrons were escorted from the premises by police for “antisocial behaviour”.
“Whilst at the venue, police identified two other adult patrons also displaying anti-social behaviour. Both adults were also escorted from the premises,” they said in a statement.
“We want to be clear that at no stage were any patrons asked to leave unless they were directly involved in anti-social behaviour.”
Davis said the company’s defence “blows my mind a little bit”.
“They mentioned that it was anti-social behaviour, doing bombs and things like that in the pool,” he said.
“But then on the Inverell Shire Council page, they had the mayor opening up the Aquatic Center down there doing a bomb into the pool.
“So it may be just a promo video, but if you make rules, you got to stick to it. You can’t just pick and choose who follows them and who doesn’t.”
Schroeder says she and the families have high hopes for the initial conciliation phase of the AHRC complaint.
“What our clients have said consistently, over and over, more than anything else, is that they don’t want any other family to have to go through what they’ve been through,” she told NITV.
“So we’re really looking at things that are more substantive ... It might be the pool and the police committing to doing cultural safety training.
“We’d also be hopeful that there’d be apologies and other steps to make this right for the families that were affected.”
In response to allegations raised at the time of the incident, Belgravia Leisure rejected any suggestion of discriminating against their patrons.
“We have a zero-tolerance policy for anti-social, discriminatory, or abusive behaviour,” they said.
“Our commitment to inclusivity is demonstrated through our support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities nationwide via various initiatives, programs and services.”
Thomas Davis has spent a year working with legal professionals to progress the complaint. He says he’s pleased the AHRC process is finally getting started, and their complaint will be investigated.
He hopes to raise awareness of Indigenous experiences of racism with the complaint.
“A lot of people are worried about speaking out about this sort of thing because of backlash,” he said.
“Hopefully, this will encourage a lot of other people to speak out about things.
“A lot of people in town thought it was just going to be a quick little mention and going to be forgotten about and swept under the rug.
“This shows that it [isn’t] just going to be swept under the rug, and these things can’t happen, and they will be called out.”
By Dan Butler of NITV.
