Uppity blacks find support in traitorous United Nations

Huh. I was gonna write a concluding post on “the intervention” but given the near-total absence of a response to previous posts on the subject, decided not to. (See : more notes on “the intervention” (two) (June 24, 2009) | more notes on “the intervention” (one) (June 23, 2009) | notes on “the intervention” (June 14, 2009).) Anyways, a rotten Communist Professor with the very foreign-sounding name of James Anaya has concluded that HoWARd & KRudd’s “intervention” may be, um, discriminatory and demeaning.

Still, and on a more positive note, it should be remembered that Peter Garrett — the Minister for Shit-eating Grins, Uranium Mining, Wood-chipping & The Yartz — has informed the world that indigenous peoples in South Australia are simply overjoyed with the intervention soon to be conducted by Alliance Resources Ltd into Adnyamathanha lands (see : Read About It : Peter Garrett ♥s Uranium, July 16, 2009).

My advice? Grab a flag and wave!

From the Department of “And That’s Why We Should Keep the Bloody Flag the Same!” comes:

o n e

UN delegate blasts ‘demeaning’ NT intervention
Misha Schubert
The Age
August 28, 2009

THE United Nations special delegate on indigenous rights has slammed the intervention into remote communities in the Northern Territory as discriminatory and demeaning.

In a stinging verdict after an 11-day tour of indigenous communities, Professor James Anaya also deplored the ”entrenched racism” faced by indigenous people – but said it was not unique to Australia.

Damning the intervention, Professor Anaya said that while special measures might have been needed, such action must be tailored and proportional and last only as long as necessary. It had failed on all three grounds, imposing ”demeaning” income quarantining on responsible individuals and applying too broadly and for far too long.

”These measures overtly discriminate against Aboriginal peoples, infringe their right of self-determination and stigmatise already stigmatised communities,” he declared.

The measures also breached two treaties to which Australia is a signatory: the [International] Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights…

t w o

Faith alone won’t help the first Australians to better lives
Michelle Grattan
The Age
August 28, 2009

KEVIN Rudd says we should put behind us the ”history wars and the culture wars” that raged in the HoWARd years. In a speech yesterday, he sought centre ground, arguing it was time to move beyond the polarisation between negative and positive interpretations of our past, between “straight narrative” and “extreme relativism”.

Real life – and real history – has a bit of everything. He is calling for something of a new beginning, which is welcome, given the divisiveness of much of the old debate, a lot of it concerning the story of indigenous affairs – although those who hold hard lines are unlikely to be convinced.

Another attempt at a new beginning was launched yesterday when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma revealed his recommended structure for a new indigenous national representative body. Its roles would be advocacy and advice. Many of those who have followed indigenous affairs over a long period will have a feeling of deja vu. There have been repeated efforts to get an effective national Aboriginal voice – and repeated failures.

The most recent, ambitious and arguably the most disastrous was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. By the end, it had sold itself and the Aboriginal people out by its self-indulgence, bad behaviour and incompetence…

t h r e e

Gary Foley : By 2075 The Aboriginal Genocide Will Be Complete
Presented By : Sydney Opera House & St James Ethics
Venue : The Studio
Date : October 4, 2009
Program : Festival of Dangerous Ideas

Gary Foley, one of Australia’s most provocative and respected Aboriginal leaders and intellectuals, identifies some of the key problems with our approach to Indigenous policy, by both the HoWARd and Rudd Governments.

He argues that if Australian government policies continue in their present direction, Aboriginal people will be extinct by 2075.

Foley identifies key concerns with the influential politics of fellow Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson, particularly with Pearson’s assertion that “self-determination has failed”.

He is critical of the assumption that the Australian Labor Party has been an ally of Aboriginal people and argues that the Rudd apology to the Stolen Generations is an example of the duplicity and deceit of politicians.

Gary Foley is an indigenous Australian activist, academic, writer and actor. He is best known for his role in establishing the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972 and for establishing an Aboriginal legal service in Redfern in the 1970s. He currently runs an Aboriginal history website and lectures and tutors at Victoria University.

Bonus!

MEDIA RELEASE – We are refugees in our own country

Formal request made to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights to register us as refugees with the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, under the International Refugee Convention.

Today, across the Northern Territory, and since 2007, Indigenous people are facing a path of destruction through the denial of our basic human rights under the Federal government’s intervention.

The Aboriginal people of Ampilatwatja, comprising 30 elders and members of the Alyawarra nation, walked off their community in July in protest against, and to remove themselves from, the Australian government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) legislation, which has subjected them to martial law, exercised by a military junta, since its enactment in 2007.

Since this time, Aboriginal people living in Prescribed Areas have been excluded from the protection of the Racial Discrimination Act and Northern Territory Anti-Discrimination [Act]. The NTER legislation constitutes serious, substantial and persistent racial discrimination against Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, multiple violations of the Race Convention and other international human rights covenants, to which Australia is signatory.

Aboriginal people had no other option but to walk off the Prescribed Area, thereby removing them from being subject to the NTER legislation, and which additionally accords them the status of being internally displaced refugees. “We no longer have any rights to exist as humans in our own country and are outcasts in our own community”, says Richard Downs, spokesperson for the Alyawarra elders.

Aboriginal people are nothing without our land – our connection to the land is real; we belong to the land, and any threat to this connection results in immediate physical and psychological illness; trauma and despair. Research conducted by the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association shows that Aboriginal people are experiencing feelings of “collective existential despair”, characterised by widespread helplessness, hopelessness and worthlessness, and with profound implications on resilience, and the social, mental and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory; indeed, throughout Australia.

Our basic human rights are being violated… at this very moment, we are being violated.

The policies that were developed, and pushed through quickly under the governments’ colonial martial law, are causing severe and irreparable damage to Aboriginal people throughout the Northern Territory of Australia.

“The current status of Aboriginal people is that we are refugees in a Country we have called our own since time immemorial”, says Richard Downs, spokesman for the Alyawarra nation.

This legislation contravenes Section 116 of the Australian Constitution: “The Commonwealth shall not make any law for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion”. By depriving the Alyawarra nation the right to their religious and cultural freedoms by forcing them to move off their land to escape a military junta, thereby deprives them the right of access to their homelands to fulfil their cultural and religious obligations.

“Past and present policies continue to deny our right to be within our homelands on our own terms”, states Michael Anderson, leader of the Euahlayi Nation of northwest NSW and southwest Queensland and elected spokesman of the 16 tribes in the Gumilaroi nation.

Therefore the Alyawarra nation makes the following recommendations and respectfully request that you:

1. Register the Alyawarra nation as refugees under the International Refugee Convention as Internally Displaced Persons, thereby according them the international obligations and protections this status affords, and

2. Ensure that the Australian government is aware of, and fulfils, its obligations under the International Refugee Convention, the UN Charter for Human Rights, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and other international human rights covenants, to which Australia purports to be a signatory.

Contacts:

Richard Downs – Alyawarra Nation / spiritualdesert[at]yahoo[dot]com[dot]au / 0428 611 169 / PO Box ???, Tennant Creek, [Northern Territory], 0861 // Michael Anderson – Euahlayi Nation / ngurampaa[at]bigpond[dot]com / 0427 292 492

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The blog of the Working Group for Aboriginal Rights (Australia) contains bucketloads more infos on what’s happening in the exciting world of Aboriginal dispossession, the discriminatory and demeaning treatment to which indigenous citizens are subject, and the fact that so many of the ungrateful bastards won’t let their heads rest on the pillow White Australia has been generous enough to provide them amirite?

By the middle of the 19th Century the situation for Aborigines in most parts of Australia looked very grim. Barry Morris has described it thus, ‘The colonial process had reduced the Aborigines to a residual minority, but they had not been eliminated. The problem was expected to resolve itself.’ In other words a new policy emerged dubbed, ‘Smooth the Dying Pillow’, it was based on the assumption that what was left of the Aboriginal populace would now die out. So whilst indiscriminate killings of Aborigines were to continue well into the 1930’s, the widespread genocidal activity of early ‘settlement’ gave way to a policy of containment. This was embodied by the Aborigines Protection Act 1909, which established the first Australian ‘concentration camps’ to provide a place for the doomed race to die off. It is also interesting to note that the first act of the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 was to restrict non-white immigration so, as Pat Grimshaw put it, ‘Australia’s spaces would be filled instead by pure white babies.’ ~ ‘Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori Struggle for Self-Determination’, Gary Foley, 1999