"is continent's original inhabitants had an existing and longlasting sovereign system of land ownership that white people ignored." - H

Can you please elaborate with authoritative citations? My studies of North American clans who suggest that animist nomads would see themselves as part of the lands [inhabited bt spirits and perhaps deceased ancestors]. The concent of "ownership" of land comes for the settlemt of city-states like Ur in Sumer [6,000 BP] in the Middle Eastern to Western path of civilization.

Seventeenth century treaties with between parties in North America usually showed totem animals the land and the reconciling parties having a life-line drawn through and between them. The land was not "owned".

Also, as Boaz notes invasion is a fact of history. The Anglo-West has repelled the Russians, Germans and Japanese. The aboriginal folk would nould have had no chance. As I have said on other posts what is wrong with being a part of a significant state in the most powerful and democratic civilization in the History of History? Scores ethnicities recognise this and our new Australians become new friends.

Lastly many of the "gripes" should be against the old British Crown whom treated convicts worse than the indigenous peoples.

Indigenous people need to make a step away from being fringe dweellers and participant in twenty-first century Australia. They are welcome. It is up to them.

O.

"If there was a race between democratic nations to see who could best address the violation of the human rights (of its original people),
australia would be coming stone motherless last."
Professor Colin Tatz, Genocide Studies Centre, Sydney.

Australia is the only developed country on a World Health Organisation
'shame list' of countries where children are still blinded by trachoma. Impoverished Sri Lanka has beaten the disease, but not rich Australia.

Once in office, John Howard began to reverse the most significant gain made by the Aboriginal people. This was the Native Title Act, passed by Federal Parliament in 1993. Based on a landmark ruling by the Australian High Court the year before, the new law had removed from common law the fiction that Australia was uninhabited when Captain James Cook planted the Union Flag in 1770. Known as 'Terra
Nullius,' it was used for most of two centuries to justify the dispossession of the Indigenous population.

Unlike Australia's sheep, the Aborigines were not counted until the late sixties. "We occupied the land, but we were fauna," said Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson. When British nuclear scientists were given permission by Prime Minister Robert Menzies to test nuclear weapons on Aboriginal land at Maralinga in the 1950s, they used site maps marked 'Uninhabited.'

Patrick Connolly, who served with the Royal Air Force at Maralinga, was threatened with prosecution by the security services after he revealed that 'during the two-and-a-half years I was there, I would have seen 400 to 500 Aborigines in contaminated areas. Occasionally, we would bring them in for decontamination. Other times we just shooed them off like rabbits.'

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

CONT'D

The first step is a treaty, a native bill of rights that overrides the states and guarantees landrights 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 had spent millions of dollars mounting technical arguments in the courts against the same land and sea rights.

Let us hope that the newly elected Government will finally rectify the situation - and get us removed from any further 'shame lists.'

Foxy,

Only a few would disagree the aborigines have been poorly treated and perhaps some form of affirmative action should continue. So were convicts and so WWI diggers [fooled] by The Crown.

I recall in school in 1960s the people of Nauru living lavishly of bird droppings. They were told to invest and educate themselves or in fifty years they would have nothing. Apart from Nauru House in Melbourne they ignored the situation. Look at their plight now.

If I have an eye disease and don't go to the doctor, is that the Government's fault? TAFE's Open Training and Education Network offers very low cost up to Certificate IV [Advanced Diploma] coures by correspondence. It's just a matter of filling in a form. I'd be happy for the Government to pay.

A [first] nation by sociological definition is a society which is diverse ethnically. The aboriginals clans were never a nation. There we clans as were the Scots, Angles and Vikings were two thousand years ago. It is "pretend" language.

“Today, white man's law reigns. Yet it does so illegally.”

Well it is here to stay and I would suggest you will find greater success in working with it than working against it.

The other point of note is Australian aboriginal society is one which did not prevail over colonial occupation.

Once you accept that fact, you will be better equipped to move forward with your life.

In white Australia, an enduring myth is the 'missing millions' of dollars that the Federal and State Governments 'pour' into 'Aboriginal welfare.' It is the stuff of political and bar-room received wisdom, the fuel of bigotry, and it is false.

A nationwide health review, disclosed, in 2007, that Aboriginal health care received 25 per cent less government funding per head of population than health care for the whites. For every dollar spent per head under the national Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, only twenty cents were spent, per head, on Aboriginal people.

It's part of the Australian psyche at some level. By believing that money has been spent and wasted, people move to the conclusion that conforms with what is in the backs of their minds: that the real reason is innate or genetic. More important, it allows white Australians to say it isn't their fault, it's the fault of Aboriginal people. A whole language of denigration backs this up - "They don't look after their kids, and if only they would wash themselves," and allows the majority population to distance itself from the truth that our first nation continues to be denied essential citizenship rights.

Basic services, housing, a decent access to education, a hope for the future. That's why we're last in the world, particularly when compared with New Zealand, Canada, and the US, which have comparable Indigenous populations and where there has been significant progress in the last generation.

In those countries, a baby born to Indigenous people has a life expectancy of only three to six years less than the rest of the population.

Here, the difference is eighteen to twenty years.

The question is what makes us different?

The Health Minister, has made an extra ordinary admission. "In my area of health, there is no evidence of any improvement whatsoever in the last decade ... the gap (between Aboriginal and white health) has actually widened."