The talk of a treaty, Indigenous representation and cultural centre leads the top of the list in the changes to develop Indigenous people is all the Indigenous Summit group of 70 Indigenous people and 30 advisors or commonly known experts can come with??

We are definitely as indigenous people headed for assimilation if we continue to depend on or let Non Indigenous people be involved in decisions of development our future.

The government’s appointed Indigenous experts have been around since federation and it has not and will not work, unless the move for change is a 100% Indigenous.

1. Freehold title must be given to Traditional Owner lands.

2. Indigenous people must be free to sell, lease and develop their land without government Interference.

3. The abolition of land councils and move into Independent Body Corporate

4. Indigenous people must be able to directly develop and negotiate their land with Industry

5. The accountability of government trust bodies that withhold land and money from Indigenous people must be released now.

6. A national Indigenous congress set up by the Indigenous Peoples of Australia.

The time has come to develop and fight the interference of a nation that continues to breach our human rights as Indigenous peoples of this country

Dear Indigenous Kimberly ....

with all due respect.. I cannot think of anything better than full and total assimilation.

History has passed by on the idea of an Australia with many different racial cultural groups all competing for a slice of the pie.

We should be thinking more of being ONE... in every respect, and that should not mean a nation of 'white'ness. It should be a nation of 'people'.

Once we drop the "I'm indigenous/your white/He is African/she is chinese" kind of thinking, we are then just 'people'. Then we intermarry as 'people' and then, the sense of 'them/us' dissappears and we all live happily ever after :)

The only reason Ingidenous people would want to retain a totally separate culture would be that they regard it as 'superior' to that which came with European settlement.

I'll totally agree that there is MUCH we can learn from indigenous culture and ways of surviving in this land, and we should be taking all of that on board, and factoring in the accumulated wisdom of the preceeding centuries.

But lets do it 'together' rather than as isolated fragments of a cultural jigsaw puzzle?

Yeah, Boazy, because that's how the Jews and early Christians dealt with it when faced with cultural assimilation didn't they?

Dear Indigenous Kimberely,

Many white Australians care deeply about this Australian injustice.
There has been research showing that a clear majority want 'good relations' with the first nation.

Of course, this is not enough. Nor was it enough to plant a 'sea of hands' and sign 'sorry books' and join a great march of solidarity across Sydney Harbour Bridge. Nor is it enough to say 'sorry,' and leave it at that.

Only justice and a political will can end Australia's enduring disgrace.

The first step is a treaty, a native bill of rights that overrides the states and guarantees land rights and a proper share of resources.

Opposition to this is the denialists' political motivation; it is what their government friends fear; for it will mean regarding Aborigines as both equals and special.

At least twenty-seven other nation states have offered justice to their indigenous peoples in treaty and other forms. 'Both Canada and the United States,' wrote Colin Tatz, ' have accorded "first nation" status to Indians, recognising them as people who had prior occupation, sovereignty and governance, and have engaged them in true conversation about renegotiating treaties, compacts.'

While neighbouring New Zealand has enacted land and sea rights for the Maori people, in Australia the Howard Government spent millions of dollars mounting technical arguments in the courts against the same land and sea rights.

Let's hope that the newly elected Rudd Government will finally do the right thing.

Foxy,

There is no such thing as personal ownership of land for whites or blacks. Even with free title the most we own is Estate. The Queen owns all land. The offices of the Crown can act on behalf of her Dominion/Commonwealth at times, e.g., mining leases on private property.

What merit is to be found in opening a treaty dialogue with a “nation” who were conquered and colonized over 200 years ago?

As Boaz suggests, full assimilation is the better option. Pretending there is a difference between aboriginals and settlers is to maintain the myth that white Australians do not belong here.

Any expectation that people of settler origins are never to be considered the residential equal to aboriginals is racist in its foundation

I would like to know how many generations does a family line have to be represented among the citizenry of Australia before that family line is acknowledged as having equality of presence and sovereign right to be called “Australian” with aboriginals?

As for “Freehold title must be given to Traditional Owner lands.”

The land is held as common property, in settlers terms we call it, anachronistically, “crown land”. For my money, the lands which have, in recent times been reclassified “native” would be better managed for the common good by the common wealth and defined as, once again, “crown” (ir whatever other term suits the politics of the day (government land, republic land, common land etc..)

Dear Oliver,

In 1837, a House of Commons Select Committee conducted an investigation into the conditions of native peoples in the British colonies.

Only one people was found to have been denied absolutely the rights of prior ownership of their land: the Australian Aborigines.

The Select Committee's report was unequivocal. The first Australians had 'an incontrovertible right to their own soil, a plain and sacred right, however, which seems not to have been understood...
The land has been taken from them without the assertion of any other title other than that of superior force.

This was also the view of the British government. The Colonial Office in London had created pastoral leases with one aim: to ensure that Aborigines would continue to have acess to their land although it was leased to 'squatters.'

The policy was not meant as a source of enrichment for whites, but as compensation to the Aborigines for the annexation and colonisation of their land. 'The pastoral lease policy was the high point of British humanitarian concern,' wrote the historian Henry Reynolds. 'The present Australian government (Howard's) is offering the Aborigines less than the British imperial authorities 150 years ago.'

The 'less' was epitomised by John Howard's Native Title Amendment Act of 1998, which watered down the 1993 law, wiped out the universal principle of Native Title in all but name and took away the common law rights that the judges said belonged to Aborigines; nothing like it had been passed by a modern parliament anywhere.

The beneficiaries were not small white farmers, frightened by government propaganda depicting a 'black tide' engulfing properties and lapping the family barbie, but some of the richest and most powerful companies and individuals in white Australia.

Potentially, 42 percent of Australia could pass from leasehold to freehold land controlled by fewer than 20,000 people, including those with the most influential media and political connections (Packers,
Murdochs, Hugh McLachlan and the McDonald family).

CONT'D

In essence, John Howard's law meant the expropriation from one group of Australians, the Indigenous People, of property rights that the High Court had said was theirs, the object being to advantage another group, all of whom happen to be white and wealthy.

Right down to its obfuscating detail, the new law was reminiscent of
those enacted by the apartheid regime in South Africa.

It was this that the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination condemned, with one committee member describing the law as 'a sweeping disinvestment of native title rights.'

The result has been legal attrition, as the new regulations are interpreted differently from state to state, leaving Aborigines in a catch-22 of having to prove their 'continuous connection' with lands of which they have been dispossessed.

I see the "assimilation" word pops in to make a simplisticd answer to a question that was never asked. So we are in the Asia Pacific region that is dominated by Asians, some of the commentors would adovate we assimulate to being part of the whole picture. I speak more than one language, do you? I thank you for some good and informed comments and some not so informed comments.

"In 1837, a House of Commons Select Committee conducted an investigation into the conditions of native peoples in the British colonies. Only one people were found to have been denied absolutely the rights of prior ownership of their land: the Australian Aborigines." - Foxy

That is very intersting. The British people of the did have ownship on land in England. And the nobility merely Estate.

The right of prior ownership would erroneous. The House of Commons were consisted of politicians not anthropologists. I would agree as in NZ and North America that some rights of the indigenous peoples were recognized, but sovergnity rested with the Crown.

As I heard an aboriginal act say in a power moviie, "we ARE the land", We don't OWN the land". That is animism not capitalism.