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. The ramifications of the military alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and United States (AUKUS) will weigh heavily on First Nations Continue reading »
Indigenous affairs
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 Continue reading »
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. In contemporary Continue reading »
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. Most confronting for Marr is the realization that it was Continue reading »
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. Marcia Langton, for Continue reading »
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 Continue reading »
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. The only way people get to prison is to be sentenced there by a court. Ipso facto the courts are the problem, surely? Wrong. Continue reading »
How governments approach Indigenous governance is crucial to addressing the reform task set by the Productivity Commission’s recent report. The Productivity Commission’s recent review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap challenges Australian governments to fundamentally reconfigure how they engage with First Nations organisations. Modernising how government organisations approach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Continue reading »
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 Continue reading »
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 Continue reading »