Bad news for Aboriginal people
Aboriginal people, the first people of this land, are dying of despair while those in power look the other way. Their eyes and their priorities are clearly focused in other directions. It is for this reason that I have no expectation of an apology from our current Prime Minister.
Yet acknowledgement of the wrongs of the past is a fundamental plank in rebuilding relationships. Every State Government has taken this important step – and said Sorry. The Tasmanian Government has even passed legislation to compensate Tasmanian members of the Stolen Generations. But at the Federal level, rebuilding relationships is not the name of the game.
The rules of the game that prevail in this town under this leadership are to respond to (and only to) what will win votes. And this is not good news for Aboriginal people – or for that matter any groups of people who do not have a powerful voice.
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Lowitja is obviosly your tribal name. Like any true blue Aussie, I will call you Lou, which will immediatly identify me as being a white bloke. I want to say that there are thousands of us who want the aboriginal people to be part of us. The fact that we voted for you in the referendum proves it. You have to move forward and build on that. Many people of aboriginal backgrounds fill places in our society and we are proud of them just as if they were our own family. Dont caste yourselves as different to us. We are all Aussies as we go forward into the 22nd Century.
Lol Rob.
The fact that the prime minister refuses to apologise is evidence that he thinks white Australia has done no wrong to Aboriginal people. Which means this government is likely to continue to perpetrate grave injustices against the people whose country has been invaded.
Do we really expect the original occupants of this country to conform and be just like white Australians, as an earlier poster suggests? Forget it! Just because the majority voted to correct an obvious injustice, it is not the duty of Aboriginal people to repay the ‘favour’ by becoming clones of the invading population. But it is of course true that in some ways, we must all join together as part of the new Australian population.
There are plenty of issues that the country still needs to address before reconciliation can be anything but symbolic. The unnatural death of hundreds of diverse languages and cultures is one in which I am particularly interested.
Aboriginal people are being coerced to sign away their land in the case of Tangentyere community, or alternatively, have it forcibly removed by abhorrent legislative decisions by the Territory government for the financial benefit of mining companies, in the case of the Kurdanji people on the McArthur River.
The government’s policy, more than ever in the last 40 years, is assimilation. Forget land affiliations, forget language, learn English and move into towns and integrate into the mainstream economy.
Cultural identity through land and language (two inseparable entities) is immensely more important for Aboriginal Australians than some abstract and intangible notion of ‘the mainstream economy’.
It seems strange to me to hear John Howard talk about the necessity for new immigrants to have a knowledge of Australian values before they can become citizens when he himself would fail a true test miserably as he has almost no expressed knowledge of the first Australians cultural values.
This country was taken by armed thugs with shiploads of slaves who were able to install themselves as controllers not because they had a superior set of cultural values, only superior weapons!
If only the first white settlers had listened to and learned from the original custodians we would have a better set of Australian values than that proposed in the Govts test.
It is with shame that Govt after Govt have allowed this sorry state of treatment of the Aboriginal people and their culture to continue.
Do not give up hope!
It is not just the lack of an apology which has marred the federal government’s response to the comprehensive Bringing Them Home report. A number of recommendations, including in the area of reparations and compensation, have not been acted on. It should also be noted that, apart from Tasmania, no state has acted in this area either.
Lowitja is also right that governments - and major parties in general - will mainly respond to what they think will win votes. It is not enough to just blame political parties for this, it is imperative that non-indigenous people make it clear that this is an issue they want to see priority given to, and one which will have a key influence on how they vote.