Adelaide Public Forum, Monitoring the Federal Government Action in the Northern Territory
Part of Cultural Heritage, Social Justice and Ethical Globalisation - A World Archaeological Congress Symposium
This discussion panel gives people in South Australia an opportunity to learn directly from the Northern Territory Aboriginal women who are affected by the intervention.
Symposium Dates: 28th & 29th September 2007
Opening: 9.00am, 28th September, including Kaurna dancers
Public Forum: 11am-12.30pm, Friday, 28th September, 2007
Venue: Hetzel Lecture Theatre, Institute Building. State Library of SA, North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia.
Convener: Claire Smith, President, World Archaeological Congress, Dept of Archaeology, Flinders University
Speakers: Northern Territory Aboriginal women, Rachel Willika, Eileen Cummings, Olga Havnen, and Raelene Rosas.
Women for Wik Statement
The Federal Action in the Northern Territory could provide a unique opportunity to improve conditions in Aboriginal communities, but there is also a real possibility that it may make things worse. As currently planned, it will undermine key aspects of Aboriginal societies - country, kin and culture. Moreover, by using a top-down approach, it has the potential to work against self-government and, in some instances, contravene human rights. This will not improve the lives of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory.
Accordingly, we call on both Federal and Territory governments to recognise the importance of Indigenous identity and develop an environment of mutual respect through cross-cultural awareness, communication and engagement. Like the many Australians who walked the Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of reconciliation, we believe our generation can ensure a fair go for Indigenous citizens.
Prominent women
Prominent women supporting us monitoring the Federal Action in the Northern Territory include Lady Deane, Tamie Fraser, Lowitja O'Donoghue, Justice Elizabeth Evatt, Helen Caldicott, Anne Deveson, Kate Grenville, Gabi Hollows, Faith Bandler, Anita Heiss, Margaret Fulton, Rosemary Stanton, Judith Rodriguez, Drusilla Modjeska, Margaret Pomeranz and Fiona Foley.
Who Are We?
Though we have the support of prominent women, we are primarily ordinary Australians. Our parents have brought us up to believe in the best of Australian values-justice, equality, fairness. We are concerned that Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory are not getting a fair go, and our voices are joined in protest. We are concerned about a particular policy, not political parties. We are committed to changing the current situation, so that it more clearly reflects the values of ordinary Australians and respects the contribution of our Indigenous people.
Go to the Women for Wik website here and bookmark for future reference.
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Stolen land and stolen Aboriginal peoples labour created value has kept the 'Blacks" poor. Reparations for land and past labour value super-profits stolen by the colonialists from the first nation peoples, as communities, must be demanded not just a mealy mouth apology inserted in a constitutional preamble and individual compensation.
The debts owed by the white settler nation to the first nation peoples for stolen land and stolen labour value added up over more than 200 years are in the multi billion ranges. As this racial justified criminality was all organised by the white settler class state it bears full and continuing responsibility for just reparations. This stolen labour value in the form of super-profits , wasn't just stolen from the individual workers wages but from the whole Aboriginal peoples. It is the main hidden reason for today's poverty. This economic debt to the first nation peoples is way out of the "sorry" range". Nor is it a question (Howard style) of the present white settler state apologising for 'past" generations. The oppression of and robbery of the Native peoples was organised and directed by the state itself and continues today . First of all by the King of Britain then the colonial British state and its heir, the Commonwealth of Australia that was granted the right to continue this oppression and exploitation on racial lines by the British King in the Australian Constitution.
The genocidal (5) process practiced for more than two centuries against the Aboriginal peoples by the white settler nation is a twofold economic process.
The appropriation of the land AND the appropriation of the labour created wealth and of potential wealth creation by aboriginal peoples.
That is because there are two material sources of wealth. Land and labour.
1.
The appropriation by humans of the natural wealth provided by nature by the land and seas as found. (As in hunting and gathering.) But as a human labour process it requires the aim and the purposeful planned social activity of humans living in societies and the conversion or shaping of those materials provided by nature for construction of implements of labour. If only at first a stick in hand.
Human culture and social organisation develops on the basis of that social life activity of humans. Tribal life. Generations of these labour processes over millennia improves and changes nature by adding labour value to the land itself by increasing its productivity for the humans having a working relation ship to that land. E.g. even by fire management of the land.
Any social group of people that exercises exclusive control over a geographic area exercises national sovereignty in its territory according to its own laws. These laws may be enforced by consensus agreement or by community discipline. In practice, in human life that is a sovereign state. Whether big or small or whether formalised in written laws or not. Later in humankinds existence with economic and social development this tribally derived sovereignty was often formalised in law as nation states and written laws. But traditional 'common law" based on tribally derived rights may often have priority over formal later law.
Occupation of the land by the white settlers and claimed legal title using a fraudulent absurdity as justification for legalised robbery of their land "Terra Nullius" denied Aboriginal peoples access to the first source of wealth land. The Aboriginal peoples lost title to their land as the original means of production and as the place of their life their communities and its cultures.
The King of Britain through his paid servant and lackey agent Lieutenant Cook R.N.claimed legal ownership of the land. At first, this theft of the land was directly by outright murder or indirectly by starvation through exclusion from the tribal lands.
2
Human labours own productive social power.
The appropriation of natural wealth by human labour by even more technologically advanced methods applied to adapting the natural wealth of the materials provided by nature. Thereby harnessing productive human labour and creative thinking itself more efficiently. This Human creative thinking and wealth creation process occurs and proceeds in a process of activity -reflection -theory- activity. E.g. agriculture, utilising and continualy improving the productive power of the soil and the seeds, fruits etc. Or, animal husbandry and the improvement of the animals themselves by planned breeding methods. Or, the development and conversion for use and application of naturally provided mineral wealth Copper, bronze, iron, plastic oil etc. (1)
By monopolising this second aspect of wealth creation, through the claimed ownership of both the land and its natural resources via the white settler ownership of the means of production ,primarily the privatisation by 'legal' tittle to the land and by the imposition of wage differentials based on race, this has led in the main to the effective exclusion of Aboriginal people from the white settler imposed money economy. Or, if they were employed for peanuts. The Blacks were denied not only the actual opportunity to create wealth through labour on the land but denied the chance for retaining sufficient surplus value above survival level for reinvestment for their own further community's economic and further social development.
Unequal wages meant that all the surplus value created by Aboriginal labour above the pure survival level was confiscated. This process created extra ' super-profits" for the white settler peoples economy, greater than the value derived from their own labour. Enabling them to accumulate capital and expand their economy using that stolen or seized extra surplus value, the super profits that were stolen from colonised Black labour. This (free) extra labour created value ,added greatly to the incremental process of accumulation of saveable value, wealth as property and to the faster development of the white settler economy.
The white settlers had their own labour value cake to eat and an extra bit of labour value Black cake to save too. White settler workers too it must be said as part of that white settler nation were paid a subsidised premium for their labour, often as overseers of Black labour and had wages subsidised from the profits from the (cost free) stolen land, its natural productivity its mineral and other resources and from the racialy justified exploitation of underpaid Black labour. This is reflected in the historical fact that even in the trade unions, little practical concern or solidarity with the aboriginal workers was shown, except in the honourable exceptions. Generally where socialists have had some influence. But there is no record of support for Nation or real self-determination. "White Australia" was the rule. The old arbitration system and its "basic wage" for white settler nation workers were not applied to Black workers.
The Australian national state itself, once formed, in its seized 'Territories" and at the local state level ,legalised and enforced this two level wages system and .the state organisation of the welfare and education system along racially preferential lines etc. What was left for the Black workers was often less than survival wages. A little bit of flour sugar and tea and little basic education to suit the needs of the colonial masters. That little, had to be supplemented by the informal labour of the people e.g. hunting and food gathering on the land to which they were still able to maintain access.
That is the second form of racist economic genocide (5) not simply exploitation of labour but the destruction of a whole peoples capacity to develop and improve their lives by investing their own surplus of accumulated labour produced value.
This loss of potentiality in wealth creation and saving has continued for more than 200 years. For many generations. You see the result the poverty and the economic under -development existing today in the Aboriginal communities.
Thus not only was the land stolen but the potentially for improving life through labour activity of the communities was denied too.
Thus the claim by the descendent beneficiaries of this white settler societies land and labour value stealers and by other ignorant bigots that the present horrific living conditions of the first nations peoples are caused by their own 'stupidity" and inability to take advantage of the "equal " opportunities" for development provided for generations by this white settler society are an outright lie and oftensimply racist justifications for the robbery of generations of Black people. This white settler society had made it impossible for the blacks to accumulate value above mere survival levels.
Generations of experiences with this impoverishment, with no opportunity to accumulate value for development and improvement (E.G buying land or a house) has led to a certain demoralisation of these peoples a certain despair and loss of hope that progress was even possible for theur communities and to the resulting development of harmful practices such as large alcohol drug problems etc A turn to nihalistic self destructive individualism in the communities . But within the communities themselves their still remains a proud spirit of ressistance and determination to stick together for the common good.
So, the extraction of wealth from Aboriginal peoples for reasons of exploiter white nation profit was and is twofold. First the loss of the land and secondly the loss of real and potential surplus wealth creation by Aboriginal labour. Thereby, forcibly cutting short the possibility of economic development, as there was no longer a surplus wealth in the communities. Leaving no material basis for community savings to improve or develop production and their social infrastructure. The marginalisation of the Blacks and attacks on their family and community organisations is still re-enforced today by white settler society by the jailing of massive numbers of Aboriginal youth.
This jail craze of the white settlers in the current circumstances, the separation of people from their communities, will lead to the further loss of the labour of even more potentially wealth creating people to the Aboriginal peoples. Is part of the continuing state policy of separating the Aboriginal peoples from any connection with the land and the break up of families and communities? The white settlers will not be happy till all Aboriginal peoples are either locked back in reserves or in gaols.
Even when Aboriginal peoples finally succeeded through long struggle in getting some, mostly marginal land back, the white settler state has the cheek to still claim ownership of its mineral resources! This is in the property interests of the whole white settler nation and by the economic realities of ther property system ,based at bottom on stolen Aboriginal land. In fact the only incomes now available in many communities made dependent are often a miserable dole. So called "sit down money". Except it isn't really "sit down money it is "Locked out of the economy" crumbs, paid to keep the Aboriginals quiet and dependent. The way the economy is now structured, the Country Aboriginals are prevented economically from doing anything else to make a living. City and town based Aboriginals, were originally mostly economic refugees from that property based economic system, underemployed and looking for a way out.
The communities ,as well as individual victims and their descendants ,should demand reparations for both loss of land and past discriminatory theft of stolen labour value. The just claims of the Aboriginal peoples should not simply be tribal based claims for 'land rights now" but also reparations for the stolen labour value from generations of black people due to them as peoples and communities as well as to the victims of the stolen generationS.
The white settler ruling class formalised its control over the "Commonwealth "of Australia as a united national state of the colonies with a constitution that claimed exclusive sovereignty on the basis of race. By excluding even refusing to count the Aboriginal peoples as people and by denying their native sovereignty on the basis of race. A consitution based on racial discrimination and of land ownership in the exclusive hands of the whire settlers, as a grant from an English King. A gift that was not in his sovereign power to give.
A gift of racially based sovereignty of dubious title derived from the verbal proclamation of a seagoing Cook. (4)
This racist constitution never had much of a legal basis in civilised international law. That was and is the basis of their Australian constitutional law. A constitution to enforce the property monopoly based rule of the white settler state. By excluding the aboriginal peoples as a people. Australia-apartheid South Africa - nazi Germany were States organised on the basis of race. Three of a kind. Any later amendments to that constitution ,voted on exclusively by the white settler majority themselves, do not give its original constitutional authority as national sovereignty over Aboriginal peoples and land titles a legal basis. They were invalid illegal amendments according to their own claimed constitutional authority. Catch 22, was the old constitution racist sub clause 51, xxv1. Go read it.
They remain hoisted on their own racist constitutional petard .The emperor has no clothes. Captain Cook, simply run up a dirty flag mumbled some legalistic incantations about an empty land having no legal owners and claimed it for "Mad King George" and for this kings East India Companies private commercial empire. Old Cook never even got to have a look at the inland areas or, such areas as South Australia, Tasmania, or Western Australia, so could hardly have been said to be exercising a sovereignty as territorial control over those areas.
In the first place, even considered as property right, what was ever given in fair exchange? Without fair exchange it is simply legalised theft.
Where are even the beads or the trinkets? Not even a "sorry". No treaty. Nothing. (4)
The later white settler expansion into all Australia and its division of the land into property with legal titles based on a declarations of a cook and a mad king have no legality based on a real peoples sovereignty in international or even in British common or legislative law. As the Mabo, Wik and other land rights cases showed. The whole basis of settler law and sovereignty land deeds etc was based on the legal bullshit of Terra nullius.
So we are talking about armed robbery on a continental scale whose only justification is racial superiority. A state set up for enforcing their "scientific" division of humans into the false classifications of humans based as on blood and skin colour, the organisation of a sovereign state by imposing that ideological racism even in their constitution as the written basis of their sovereignty and rule of law. But, where are the Treaties between sovreign Peoples? A ruling class was dressed up as a sovereign white race nation. The armed forces of that Australian state attempted to enforce that racially based sovereignty by force of arms by its police etc. Only to be met with the sovereign resistance of the Aboriginal peoples. The Aboriginal peoples have never surrendered their originally tribal group, non racially based sovereign rights, either in practice or in law and have always fought to assert and re-assert their sovereignty. Now it is time for all the sovreign first nation peoples and there descendents to form a unified Nation . To claim and enforce treaty rights and reparations on behalf of all these peoples.
Forty years ago when that settler state thought it had fully consolidated its control with a huge settler population, it tried to hide the racial basis of its false sovereignty, to solve its problems of bad "conscience", by kindly granting or imposing on the Aboriginal peoples a vote and even the right to be counted as people. As "Australian' citizens. White settler nationality. But only the right to vote as individual persons as a small socially splintered national minorities unable to exercise collectively any substantial power or proportional control even of their own affairs by exercising that vote in a majority white settler state. By this referendum the settler state attempted to co-opt the Aboriginal peoples into their white settler state with bribes, promises of improving welfare, equal rights, voting and Australian citizenship rights and the like. The white settlers already controlled or claimed to own the land and there was now no opportunity available for the Blacks for improving their lives through social labour in the property based system already established. Aboriginals have been still prevented economically by this property system established on the basis of stolen land from utilising their own socially productive wealth creating labour. As it was then said to be now "uneconomic" with equal pay rates of pay. That is still the current economic material reality.
Further, it is well known that Aboriginals are socially sharing peoples, so the discriminatory racist stealing of labour created value from underpaid individuals deprived the whole community from sharing socialy in that value for mutual benifit . So this was a loss not just to the individuals, but also to the communities and their descendants' wealth, health and wellbeing. Hence the Aboriginals remain poor a permanent underclass deprived of social opportunities and education and all the rest. Peoples marginalised by the white settler society economy. The actual continuing economic exclusion from the economy was and is, the denial of the Aboriginal peoples Human right, to create wealth from the materials provided by nature by their own labour.
That is, to live with a real actual right to work and not just theoretical right as "free persons". They were and are denied the REAL right to work and to accumulate and reinvest a surplus in order to improve and economically develop their own societies by the wealth created by their own social labour. Or even today to be able utilise the mineral wealth of their own land.
What a continuing fraud this white nation settler sovereignty is. Even when wasteland, uneconomic for the white settlers, is handed back the white settler "Crown" pretends it still owns all the mineral wealth. The white settler nation clearly still seeks no re-conciliation just more profits for the white nation. It again sends in its Army, its state power, to take over the communities in order to impose phoney 'leases". The current mining boom drives their greed and sudden "concern" for Black children. $$$ . Past experience teaches that the first nation peoples can expect no mercy when billions in mineral resources are at stake.
That is the hidden agenda. It's troops for Iraq oil and police and troops for seizing mineral wealth from Aboriginal land. That system is called colonialism and economic imperialism. Just like in Iraq they have created a mess. The white settler state is a failed robber state unable to treat all its citizens with equal right and ensure the common good.
The Aboriginals couldn't do any worse than the white settler nation if they managed their own affairs as a nation.
Notes Comments and questions.
(1) The term Black is not used in reference to skin colour or race but a term reflecting a life lived in a central relationship with the various Aboriginal and Islander indegenous communities and the sharing of a common inherited descent from these oppressed native peoples and a common positive culture of community sharing and of resistance to racial and national oppression by the white settler nation spearheaded by its state.
The white settlers need to be educated and civilized away from their racial nonsense into human scientific reality. The Aboriginal peoples can help them overcome this infantile, unscientific ,class derived, backward aberration in their thinking. The 'educators" must re-educate themselves by learning from others. The white settlers are not naturally stupid because they are "white race".or 'Euro-settlers" That racist ideological stuff was just their shifty ideological excuse for justifying some criminal capitalist activities against coloured skin persons. Slavery, colonialism, the stealing of native land and the like. The white settlers just wish to look the other way and deny any responsibility for anything that has happened. These racial theories are handy excuses; you can blame it all on racial difference created by god or on the survival of the fittest race. Etc. There is method and profit in their assumed madness and bigot racial theories. Just as there is today in pretending that things are only bad today because of "racism". National colonialist exploitation gets hidden and disguised by this "racist" talk and problems of racial discrimination. As if that was the main problem .
Problems to be easily resolved by reconciliation between the 'races" . Within the white settler nation.
Not national colonialist oppression justified by racism.
There can be no real reconciliation between an oppressed people and their oppressors until such time that a genuine reconciliation can occur between equal peoples or nations. Nation treaties and reparations by the white settler nation and their state are the first step towards that process. And here we note a problem for the "left "and anarchists and even some Marxist 'internationalists " with their liberal cults of individualism that rails against the harm of all "nationalism". There is a denial and the inabilty to understand the differences between the nationalism of oppressed people and that of imperialist and colonialist nations.A plague on both your houses they will proclaim and deny the right to oppresed peoples to form a nation in order to fight oppression and assert their national identity as peoples as narrow nationalism.All very fine and idealistic but in this case it simply protects the actual dominant nation while they themselves live with the full citizenship rights of that colonialist australian settler nation.The white settler 'left" has never supported and recoils from even the mention of the word NATION and the right to self determination of our own indigenous peoples.
(2) The term White settler nation used in this essay is not a label based on race but merely reflects the way this national group of Euro-colonialist people has historically self-defined themselves And acted as a group or class of colonial settlers after they seized the land for their exclusive use and benefit. Till recent years they openly proclaimed themselves a superior British or Anglo -Saxon 'white race" and enforced their monopoly rule with a "White Australia" constitution and laws. These days since this group has now been expanded to include other selected Euros and even other non -white people minorities,its ideologies are now prettified by its leaders like Howard by terms like "our Australian values" multi-culturalism the 'Australian fair go" and the like. The oppression and exclusion from the economy of the native peoples,the non fair go australian reality has on the whole continued and coloured working people from other countries are often also excluded as 'economic refugees" or as people culturally unable to integrate with the cultural 'values" of the white majority etc. etc. Of course it is not a question of 'race" or personal racism but of nations and class oppression.Thus the use of the term white settler state speaks to the historical reality and continuing actual practice of that state But ,not to political correctness of the "left "and the right that denies and disguises that historical colonialist settler reality.
Homes and real estates are national in nature. This land stealing did not all just happen in the past. The fact that oppressor nation persons (like howard whose own family has a history of robbing the colonised people of Papua new guinea ) today rarely owns the exact farm his/her great grandfather took from the first nations peoples or was 'granted "title to by the settler state, does not mean that those white settlers did not trade within their own nation or even that the original legal title has validity. That original property once seized remained or, always ended up in the hands of the whole white settler nation one way or another, usually through sale in exchange for capital. In the country the farm purchased by 'grandfather' usually had its payments subsidised by super-profits exploited from underpaid black farm labour, the increasing value of the land itself was often based on accumulated labour value embedded in the land, these improvements often were carried out by Black labour. The cattle industry in the west and north are well known examples but the farms in the more closely settled states had their black labour and informaly employed shepherds too. Not to mention the legally disguised slave labour of the 'Kanakas "and others in the early sugar industry.
Super profits were gained in colonies by using slave or disguised slavery by indentured labour paying wages less than their value. In the imperialist heartlands too, these discriminatory wages, are often paid on the basis of racial or national discrimination against natives and immigrants. See AmeriKKKa.
The Blacks in Australia were excluded from the money economy by 'ration ' payments in lieu of real wages, by the super-exploitation of the surplus value of their wealth creating labour. They did not even have the opportunity to accumulate capital, to be able to even buy some land back. In short they were treated as a lower servant 'caste"with occupational restrictions.
Not just ordinary profits from labour were extracted from Aboriginal labour, but colonial style super-profits extracted year after year, just as they are extracted by neo-colonialism and imperialism in the third world today. As a result the Aboriginal peoples are now often still living in third world conditions suffering from capitalisms forcibly created poverty and under-employment.
This legalised inequality in wages paid may not still be the case today, where Blacks as a result of historical development of under development and poverty and under education are often simply excluded from the economy Say, from mechanised or technically advanced farm labour for "lack of education". Now made "unemployable" on "equal" rates of pay etc etc. This is all used as a justification by capitalism for excluding Blacks from the economy today. With anti-discriminatory laws for equal wages big super profits were not still legally available, the white settler nation claimed any available work for itself. But in the past a lot of the farm labour and outback labour and in many other areas was Black.
When was an equal wages policy ever enforced in Australia?
The States police sergeants were too busy robbing the enforced "savings" accounts of the Blacks that they administrated. Who will protect the Aboriginal communities from the new 21st century police and army and government administrative and social workers as the new "protectors " the white settler state is sending in today. Colonialism is leased out ,to be managed as jobs for white administrators and by calling this payment of their wages "aid" as if they were payments made for Aboriginal peoples. At the same time they are intending to soak up any "disposable " incomes that still may exist and the old type of extra income for police or other income administrators might result. Just like the old days!
(3) It was this second type of productive labour and accumulation of surplus that allowed the development of civilisations and class societies.
Civilisations are based on one class appropriating the value of other peoples labour. E.g. slave societies. Creating a division of the peoples into cities and country and exercising sovereignty on the basis of the territorial states controlled by the peoples.
E.g. Domination of the cities by the country was often formalised in law as individual sovereignty feudal Kings etc. But,the domination of the city-based classes over the country as in capitalism has often been formalised in modern states as the "rule of the law" exercised by the dominant ruling class in parliaments as "the peoples." sovereignty. Republics and the like. The people", being only those people or classes permitted to vote, on the understanding that they do not interfere with the established property based rule of the of the ruling class and its property. In this way sovereignty is seen to be exercised by a ruling class in the territory it exclusively controls in the name of the people.
(4) Gary Foley points out on his Koori history website on sovereignty:
"In 1788, under British law and accepted international conventions held by western powers, there were three ways for a colonising nation to legally gain sovereignty over new territories. The first was by conquest, in which case the colonising nation was obliged to negotiate full and just reparations and compensation to the indigenous population for ALL lands alienated. The second was by the Indigenous population to cede their sovereignty to the colonisers (as happened in Fiji), in which case the colonisers were again obliged to negotiate full and just reparation and compensation to the indigenes. The third way was to declare a land terra nullius, meaning the land was devoid of human inhabitation thereby removing the need to negotiate compensation with an indigenous populace."
The question of defining nation.
Later parliamentary 'Acts of state doctrine ' or even later constitutional amendments to a racial based sovereignty by the white settlers themselves cannot be considered superior to common law and justify legalised robbery. No matter how many legal opinions are paid for.
A single common different language is not a national prerequisite for a nation and may in fact be mainly a language of an oppressor nation. As English is an official common legal language in former colonies like India the Philippines etc. Or "Mandarin" a northern language an official Chinese language in Cantonese areas of China. Defining membership of nations by blood quantum's, one-sixteenth Black , 'quarter casteetc. Or by skin colour? Only racist states like Australia and apartheid South Africa think and make laws like that. Hitler asserted that too.
Nor must land areas be geographically contiguous or only comprise one nation or 'racial "group. See the first nations of America and Canada.Or, nations like the Iroquois federation Multi nation and federal multi-racial states are common in this world.( Perhaps we should not mention here the imperialist plan to set up a unitary Palestinian state from areas forcibly separated by colonialism from the rest of Palestine.) The EEC has shown that a great deal can be done with unity of nations and constitutional decisions on the basis of democratic consensus.
Aboriginals exist and live on their scattered territories from La Perouse, to tribal areas and on former mission lands etc. A person from any Aboriginal country even interstate persons naturally gravitates in Sydney to say Redfern and is commonly welcomed because even if only a block or two, it is part of the scattered shared territories of the Aboriginal peoples communities.
What gave the white settlers the right to constitute themselves into a nation?
With no rights for Aboriginals to do the same?
Who claims that the British peoples can have their common law and Aboriginal peoples do not now?
British common law evolved over time and so has Aboriginal common law and custom. Aboriginal common law is based on their original peoples sovereignties and has evolved and developed in the more than two centuries since white settlers set up shop buying and selling on Aboriginal land and getting rich at the Aboriginal peoples expense. The Aboriginal peoples may be small in number but collectively united they can make their own future great as an organised minority nation. Once they free themselves from White settler nation "concerned" superior race paternalism. The old dismantled ATSIC, reformed and reorganised by Aboriginal peoples themselves, may be a starting basis for self-organising the indigenous peoples as a Nation with a unified national voice.
(5) Genocide and international law.
Article II, of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed against a national, "ethnical", racial or religious group as such and committed with intent to destroy the group, in whole or in part. The enumerated acts include:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
This essay are a non- Aboriginal view. It is definitely not "legal opinion".
It is intended as discussion material mainly for the white settler nation in the spirit of solidarity with oppressed peoples and even in the spirit of 'Let my people go".
Because Aboriginal peoples are best able to control and freely determine their own affairs and future.
No copyright is asserted over this anonymous essay it may be freely distributed ,edited ,changed and reprinted in whole or part. But it is hoped that the assertion of the right of the first nation peoples to form a Nation entitled to treaty rights and just reparations for stolen land and colonial super -profits from exploiting first nation peoples labour is stressed.
FIRST PEOPLES NATION ,TREATY AND REPARATIONS NOW!
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