It is not surprising that so many of us believed that after the Voice Referendum 2023 Indigenous people would be recognised in the Australian Constitution and their voices valued. (more…)
Category: Indigenous affairs
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History’s wound, still open wide
Australia, land of Altjira, of oceans wild and skies untamed,
Where stories of the Jukurrpa are told in songlines proclaimed. (more…) -
Indigenous cultures show other worlds are possible
‘I think the natives held privately that in taking such pains to make things grow where already things grew of their own accord I was maybe a little mad…. As for myself, there were times when…. it came to me with considerable force that perhaps in this private opinion there was a deal of truth…’ – Jack McLaren, ‘My Crowded Solitude’, 1926.
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Northern militarisation overlooking Indigenous rights: Prof Henry Reynolds, History, University of Tasmania
Indigenous Australians have extensive land rights across Northern Australia where large scale militarisation is being undertaken, raising questions about processes of consultation and underlying Indigenous rights endorsed by Australia under international treaty arrangements. (more…)
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The military Americanisation of Northern Australia
The headline in the Weekend Australian said it all: NT Bases Key to American War Plans. Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, the Chair of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Australian, after a ten day visit to Australia that our geography offered key advantages to the US “as it sought to deter Chinese aggression”. Indeed, the north would become “the central base of operations in the Indo-Pacific to counter the threat.’ Defence Minister Marles added his voice to the crusade explaining that after AUSMIN talks in the US last week that America’s military was now “operating in Australia across land, sea, air, cyber and space”. This all followed the commitment earlier in the year to spend $18 billion in the coming decade on upgrading defence bases across the north. (more…)
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The campaign to persuade: the “Voice” among Chinese Australians
We live in an era of communicative abundance and post-truth politics, where networked digital platforms shape nearly every aspect of our daily lives, from information and communication to economic and social transactions. Digital platforms have transformed truth-claiming and fact-checking into an emotionally driven process, blurring the boundaries between information and misinformation, as well as opinion and news. (more…)
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On fairness, our futures seem grim under Albo
Has the ALP read the Voice referendum loss as indicating limited voter support for First Nations rights, with an election soon? (more…)
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Political capitulation, moral failure
Anthony Albanese’s recent visit to the Gama Festival will certainly be memorable but not in ways that he will necessarily appreciate. It displayed, in a manner for all to see, his government’s final renunciation of the Uluru Statement From The Heart of 2017 and the attendant process of reconciliation. (more…)
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There’s no escaping the wrongs done to Indigenous people
Patricia Karvelas’s article reflecting on the Labor government’s ‘timid’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘realistic’ change of course in pursuit of bipartisanship on Indigenous affairs made for uber-depressing reading (ABC News, online, ‘Timidity reigns as Anthony Albanese backs away from Makarrata at Garma Festival’, 5th August). It confirmed that the institutional racism prosecuted by the No campaign, is alive and well. In the Trumpian era to say such things is to create victims who cry out: ‘how dare you call me a racist?!’ (more…)
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Uncle Robbie Thorpe progresses Aboriginal genocide case in Victorian Supreme court
Krauatungalung elder Uncle Robbie Thorpe stood at the bar in the Victorian Supreme Court self-represented last Friday to challenge the Magistrates’ Court of Victoria and the state attorney general, regarding the lower court’s registrar having refused to accept a charge sheet he’d tried to submit. (more…)
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It’s the Voice of ‘Rural Nullius’ on a Jim Crow Country Hour
With just a few more stories farmers in the south of Israel would have been granted as much air time as all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations in Australia put together.
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Eyes to see
It’s easy to turn a blind eye when the victims are Other, but what if the victims are us? What does it mean to ‘face away from what it means to be human’? (more…)
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Last chance for the War Memorial
The Frontier Wars were fought in every part of the vast Australian continent from the 1790’s to the 1920’s. How could they be overlooked in local or even in global history? The ownership and control of a continental landmass was at stake. First Nations’ warriors bled and died on, and for, their own country. Why would we want to overlook them? (more…)
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The real truth telling
If anybody in Australia is interested in real “Truth Telling” then look no further than the continued operation of Don Dale Juvenile Detention Centre in Darwin, NT. Don Dale has, and continues to provide, the real truth for all to see as regards the disaster that is race relations in Australia and how distant the prospect is of ever achieving Reconciliation. Forget ‘Dreamtime at the G’, NAIDOC and Reconciliation Weeks, Sorry and Apology Days, Welcome to Countrys and Paying our Respect to Traditional Owners Past and Present. (more…)
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Canberra bureaucrats commissioning NT houses unfit for purpose
Labor’s $4 billion for Indigenous housing in the Northern Territory is set for failure unless it incorporates Aboriginal expertise. (more…)
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Nova Peris’ apologism for colonialism and genocide
In repeating blatant Zionist propaganda to justify her support for Israel, Nova Peris erroneously and harmfully conflates Jewish identity with support for the Zionist project in Palestine, which in effect depicts all Jews as complicit in Israel’s criminality. Her abject apologism also betrays all indigenous peoples’ struggles against colonial oppression. (more…)
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The liberation of Kanaky: resisting France’s brutal colonial overlordships in the Pacific
“Only the struggle counts … death is nothing.” Eloi Machoro – ‘the Che Guevara of the Pacific’ – shortly before he was gunned down by a French sniper on 12 January 1985. (more…)
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Another road for “Made in Australia”
In spruiking their coming “Future Made in Australia” policies PM Albanese and Treasurer Chalmers have singled out for a possible government “helping hand” projects designed to promote our role in their hoped-for future renewable, green economy. But if government “helping hands” are thinkable they could be applied in other areas as well. One area crying out for attention is in establishing and supporting employment-creating projects and businesses in the Northern Territory. (more…)
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Australian politicians lock more people up, for longer
Criminal justice is an area of public policy where the disconnect between evidence based solutions and political responses is depressingly wide. And it is getting worse as both the ALP and the conservative parties respond to what is fast becoming saturation media about, in particular, family or domestic violence and youth crime.
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Terra nullius 2.0 – what AUKUS means for First Nations peoples
Australia will essentially become America’s military launch-pad into Asia. However, Ben Abbatangelo writes, little has been said or written about the drastic and disproportionate impacts it will have on First Nations communities in Australia. (more…)
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The Voice and Australia’s democracy crisis
The dire state of truth in Australia’s civic space crystallised in 2023. We had seen the waning influence of News Corp’s impact on our elections and assumed it meant that enough of us were becoming inoculated against the propaganda. The defeat of the notoriously mendacious Coalition government might have signalled a ceasefire, a moment for the “conservative” parties to rediscover their integrity. We had underestimated, however, the strategising of vested interests. (more…)
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The crimson thread of racism festers in the darker interstices of Australian culture
In 1890 Henry Parkes spoke of “The crimson thread of kinship running through us all.” He believed this “crimson thread” – evocative of blood – united all white people in the Australian colonies and bound them to Britain. The federation he was advocating for Australia was to be exclusively white and eternally British. (more…)
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After the (failed) referendum dust settles
David Marr’s recent book, Killing for Country, confronts the reality of the dispossession of Aboriginal lands in Queensland by the Native Police Force. It is a recounting of wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter of “natives” in order to settle the land that never was Terra Nullius. (more…)
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Australia’s First Nations still looking over the 1788 chasm
More than four months after a crushing defeat in the Voice referendum, and soon after the Closing the Gap report confirmed that there was almost no progress in improving Aboriginal lives last year, Aboriginal players in the yes case are moving towards an inquest into how their case went so terribly wrong. (more…)
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Is China repeating Australia’s mistake on Indigenous Affairs?
The South China Morning Post recently published an illuminating article on China’s policy towards ethnic minorities, with a particular focus on Inner Mongolia that has strived hardest to assimilate its Mongols with the rest of the Chinese population to promote a single national identity. But does China’s policy reflect the assimilation policies towards First Nations that Australia adopted in the 1930s and has now come to regret?
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Indigenous incarceration
More than a quarter of Canberra’s daily average prison population is Indigenous but only 2 per cent of people in the ACT identify as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person. (more…)
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Closing the Gap: Governments must modernise their approach to Indigenous corporations
How governments approach Indigenous governance is crucial to addressing the reform task set by the Productivity Commission’s recent report. (more…)
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How labelling is concealing common ground on climate, COVID and indigenous issues
You’re either a climate realist or you’re a climate sceptic. You’re either pro COVID vaccines or you’re a vaccine sceptic. You either voted ‘no’ in the recent ‘indigenous voice to parliament’ or ‘yes’. On too many issues, the labels that Australians are using are confrontational. Australians are being led to see just two camps and no common ground. (more…)
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The social contract and The Voice
Now that the dust has begun to settle, we can look at the referendum result with a little more clarity. Those of us who supported the Voice saw with some dismay how the initial widespread support in favour of a yes vote began to wither away. yet we should not be fooled by the headlines that the referendum result was a resounding defeat – it was far from that. (more…)
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Under the facade of journalism
How News Corp used fear, manipulation and division to campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. (more…)