Tweet of the Week

 

From Paul Kelly (FB) pic.twitter.com/Kvobo6kPUZ

— noeline purdy (@ozwildflower) August 29, 2023

 

Tweet of the Week

 

The 'Yes' Voice campaign has tip-toed around the 'No' camp for months, unwilling to take the fight to them. But Uluru Dialogue co-chair @mdavisqlder isn't afraid - scorching statement about a "single No advocate" using her "privileged media platform to confuse mainstream media" pic.twitter.com/ThPPtqjVzi

— James Massola (@jamesmassola) August 9, 2023

PARLIAMENT OF AUSTRALIA 2023: a short tale of Kevin and his misleading prop

 

The moment Deputy Manager of Opposition Business & Nationals MP for Page Kevin Hogan shamed the rank and file of his party, shamed the people of his electorate and deeply shamed himself.

Kevin Hogan MP at 2:44pm during House of Representatives scheduled Question Time on 8 August 2023. Snapshot from official parliamentary digital live broadcast.

House of Representatives, Hansard, on Tuesday 8 August 2023 at the point Mr. Hogan deliberately and knowingly misrepresented the pages he held in his hand:

The SPEAKER: I'll hear from the member for Page, who is seeking leave.

Mr Hogan: I thank the Prime Minister for earlier tabling page 1 of the document, Uluru Statement from the

Heart. I seek leave to table the full 26-page document, Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The SPEAKER: Is leave granted?

Mr Burke: Leave is not granted.

The SPEAKER: The member for Page will put away his prop.

How do I know that what he held in his hand was not the Uluru Statement From The Heart?

Original Uluru Statement from the Heart. IMAGE: J-Wire, 6 March 2019

Because it is a very specific document created in keeping with the tradition of the Yirrkala bark petitions and the Barunga statement, the Uluru Statement From the Heart was made in the form of a work of art on canvas which in this instance included approx. 444 words in the text. It was signed by over 250 First Nations people representing approx.1,200 delegates who participated in the regional dialogues and conferences which reached consensus, with 100 signatures including the name of their nation. The artwork was painted by Maruku artist and Uluru traditional owner Rene Kulitja and Mutitjulu artists Christine Brumby, Charmaine Kulitja and Happy Reid [The Monthly, May 2019].

What Hogan knowingly held in his hand appeared to be an extract from a 112 page compilation document created with a "3/8/23, 1:10:26 PM" date stamp, which contains copies of the records of many of the regional dialogues as well as a document which includes "Our Story" & a plain text transcript of the wording on the original signed Uluru Statement From The Heart canvas.

A best he perpetrated an infantile stunt that day, at worst he attempted to both mislead the Parliament and the Australian people.

Cartoons of the Week

 

Jon Kudelka

Peter Broelman

A reminder of why "Enshrining A First Nations Voice In The Australian Constitution" is important

 

Why is the Uluru Statement from the Heart and, what it asks of all Australia, so important?

It is a matter of historical record and of a continuous culture enduring from time immemorial on this continent down to the present day. A matter of connection with and care of Country — an understanding of responsibility towards and belonging to a place which has existed since long before the British-European notion of sovereignty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8sYLZk5QeM

KIMBERLEY ROCK ART: A World Treasure. 2020. Kimberley rock art is one the largest figurative bodies of art to survive anywhere on the planet.... and yet so little is known about it. The Kimberley Foundation Australia is about to change that. The Foundation is sponsoring a world-class team of scientists to date the rock art.

IMAGE: The Blackfulla Perspective (2018)
@theblackfullaperspective2186
Click on image to enlarge

The languages of Aboriginal Australia
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
(1994)
Click on image to enlarge

In Australia today est. 812,000 people formally identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. This figure is believed to probably be an undercount of the Indigenous population, in part due to the voluntary nature of the question in the national census and the difficulty in census teams visiting some parts of the country due to the physical remoteness of some Aboriginal communities.

A national referendum is expected to take place sometime in the 2023-24 financial year asking all citizens registered to vote to express their view on including a new provision in the Australian Constitution which establishes a First Nations Voice. 

Enshrining a First Nations Voice in the Australian Constitution

https://youtu.be/5gF6DqYH6FE

"We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart": https://ulurustatemdev.wpengine.com/the-statement/view-the-statement/

Message from the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, National Sorry Day 2022:

https://twitter.com/AlboMP

 

Cartoons of the Week

Reg Lynch

Jon Kudelka

Mark David

Australian Politics in 2019: the betrayal

Echo NetDaily, 15 July 2019:

Thus Spake Mungo: The betrayal

Scott Morrison really likes quiet Australians – as quiet as possible. So it was really no surprise that his response to his minister, Ken Wyatt’s modest and tentative proposal to consider reviving an Indigenous Voice through the Uluru Statement from the Heart was simple and direct: bloody well shut up and do what you are told.

We will decide who speaks for Indigenous Australia and the circumstances in which they speak, and by we, I mean me, and Eric Abetz and Peter Dutton and the Institute of Public Affairs and Andrew Bolt – not Indigenous Australians. They can do what they are told.

So the glimmer of hope last week was extinguished as soon as it began. Wyatt knew it probably would be – when he delicately referred to ‘reticence’ within his party room, he was prepared for a backlash, but maybe not one as cynical, hypocritical and downright vicious as the one that transpired.

In nanoseconds the same old lies were trotted out, most outrageously the one about the Voice being a third chamber of parliament. If the deliberately ignorant ever thought that was the case, they have certainly been informed by now that it never was and never is – the proposal is for a Voice, an advisory body with no power to legislate or veto whatever the parliament decides.

This must have been clear even to Dutton. But this did not stop him repeating the fabrication on national television. What he actually means, of course, is that the truth is irrelevant – what matters is that it can be turned into a massive scare campaign to deceive the gullible in much the same way the coalition devised the invention of Labor’s death taxes, which worked on May 18.

And if that involves rejecting, traducing and misrepresenting the long and tortuous process that led to Uluru, well they can just suck it up. Everyone knows there are no votes in Aborigines.

So Wyatt meekly surrendered to the inevitable and will now go back to what he called pragmatism, negotiation, compromise – we must have consensus before we even think about going to a referendum, otherwise there is a risk of it failing.

And indeed there is, but only because of the intransigence of the reactionary rump that now holds sway over his government. The deep strain of latent racism that prevails throughout the joint party room and its acolytes is not confined to the fringes of the National Party – it has infected Liberals as well, some of whom call themselves the protectors of mainstream Australia.

They are worried about what they regard as causing divisions – offering rights and privileges to one group to disadvantage the rest. This is precisely what they demand for the religious zealots, but no matter. As they well know, there are no votes in Aborigines. And there is a sneaking suspicion that their predicament, while deplorable, is somehow their own fault – if they could just forget the past and get on with it, the incarcerations, the mortality rates, the unemployment, the homeless, the poverty and despair would simply disappear.

So we have the always predictable Craig Kelly say he did not want to spend money on a referendum – he would rather spend it on closing the gap (actually he would rather spend it on a coal fired power station, but let that pass). Barnaby Joyce says the solution is to break up the senate to bring in more rural members. Amanda Stoker, apparently attempting to remake herself into a transgender Peter Dutton, is against anything even vaguely progressive on principle.

And she is not the only one – come in Morgan Begg, of IPA, which by no coincidence is secretly funded by a large chunk of the mining industry, a traditional enemy of Indigenous rights. Begg sprang into the pages of The Australian (where else?) to claim that a Voice would violate all principles of racial equality. And he went back to the hugely successful 1967 referendum to boost his thesis: by agreeing to count Aborigines in the national census, Australians voted to remove race from the constitution.

But that was only part of that they voted for. They also voted to give the Commonwealth Parliament the right – even the duty – to legislate specifically for Aborigines, a considerably more substantial outcome. This was the power John Howard used in 2006 to bring in his military intervention of allegations of child abuse. There is no record of Begg inveighing against such blatant racism division, illiberalism.

And his hypocrisy is echoed by many conservatives, including Morrison, who is determined to avoid embedding any suggestion of a Voice in the constitution – the key, the non-negotiable plank in the Uluru Statement. Morrison says that if there is to be a Voice – and mind you, he is not saying there will be – an advisory body established by parliament will be quite sufficient.

But this misses the point: not only would such a body be vulnerable to political interference, in the same way Howard abolished the former Australian and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 2004, but the whole idea is that the Voice should be endorsed by the Australian people, not just by the politicians of the time.

This after all, was the argument of the conservatives over same sex marriage – the change was so important it had to go to a plebiscite. But obviously reconciliation with Indigenous Australians can be regarded as relatively trivial – there are no votes in Aborigines.

In the end, Morrison and Wyatt will probably be able to cobble together some anodyne words, some impotent tokenism he can take to a referendum

In the end, Morrison and Wyatt will probably be able to cobble together some anodyne words, some impotent tokenism he can take to a referendum which may or may not pass, and who cares anyway. But it will be a travesty of Uluru, a betrayal of the painstaking months of good faith the delegates invested in the hope that this time, at last, someone would listen.

Wyatt has been lauded as the first of his race to join cabinet as the first Minister for Indigenous Australia – Morgan Begg and Andrew Bolt would no doubt call this divisive in itself. But the task was too much for him or probably anyone else. Ken Wyatt could have been a hero – not only an Indigenous hero, but a hero for all Australians of goodwill, the majority who are willing to support the long march to real reconciliation. Instead, he has become just another casualty, yet another victim of the casual racism and cruelty of the right wing rump……

Read the full article here.

NAIDOC Week, 7-14 July 2019

This year's theme: Voice. Treaty. Truth. Let's work together.

The Indigenous voice of this country is over 65,000 plus years old.

They are the first words spoken on this continent. Languages that passed down lore, culture and knowledge for over millennia. They are precious to our nation.

It’s that Indigenous voice that include know-how, practices, skills and innovations - found in a wide variety of contexts, such as agricultural, scientific, technical, ecological and medicinal fields, as well as biodiversity-related knowledge.  They are words connecting us to country, an understanding of country and of a people who are the oldest continuing culture on the planet.

And with 2019 being celebrated as the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages, it’s time for our knowledge to be heard through our voice.

For generations, we have sought recognition of our unique place in Australian history and society today. We need to be the architects of our lives and futures.

For generations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have looked for significant and lasting change.

Voice. Treaty. Truth. were three key elements to the reforms set out in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. These reforms represent the unified position of First Nations Australians.

However, the Uluru Statement built on generations of consultation and discussions among Indigenous people on a range of issues and grievances. Consultations about the further reforms necessary to secure and underpin our rights and to ensure they can be exercised and enjoyed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

It specifically sequenced a set of reforms: first, a First Nations Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Constitution and second, a Makarrata Commission to supervise treaty processes and truth-telling.  

(Makarrata is a word from the language of the Yolngu people in Arnhem Land. The Yolngu concept of Makarrata captures the idea of two parties coming together after a struggle, healing the divisions of the past. It is about acknowledging that something has been done wrong, and it seeks to make things right.)

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people want their voice to be heard. First Nations were excluded from the Constitutional convention debates of the 1800’s when the Australian Constitution came into force.  Indigenous people were excluded from the bargaining table.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have always wanted an enhanced role in decision-making in Australia’s democracy.

In the European settlement of Australia, there were no treaties, no formal settlements, no compacts. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people therefore did not cede sovereignty to our land. It was taken away from us. That will remain a continuing source of dispute.

Our sovereignty has never been ceded – not in 1788, not in 1967, not with the Native Title Act, not with the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown and should never be extinguished.

Australia is one of the few liberal democracies around the world which still does not have a treaty or treaties or some other kind of formal acknowledgement or arrangement with its Indigenous minorities.

A substantive treaty has always been the primary aspiration of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander movement.

Critically, treaties are inseparable from Truth.

Lasting and effective agreement cannot be achieved unless we have a shared, truthful understanding of the nature of the dispute, of the history, of how we got to where we stand.

The true story of colonisation must be told, must be heard, must be acknowledged.

But hearing this history is necessary before we can come to some true reconciliation, some genuine healing for both sides.

And of course, this is not just the history of our First Peoples – it is the history of all of us, of all of Australia, and we need to own it.

Then we can move forward together.

Credits: Image and text from  NAIDOC.ORG.AU