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.