Category Archives: Indigenous Australians

Liberal senator to outline a model for an Indigenous voice to parliament

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Andrew Bragg wants to honour the Uluru Statement of the Heart and uphold parliamentary sovereignty

The Liberal senator Andrew Bragg says an Indigenous voice to parliament should be formed by a network of Indigenous communities across the country, in a “bottom-up” approach that would ensure First Nation voices had a direct say to parliament.

Bragg, who has strongly endorsed constitutional recognition, will use a speech in Canberra today to build the case for an Indigenous voice to parliament, outlining a model that he says would honour the Uluru Statement of the Heart, while also upholding parliamentary sovereignty.

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Exiting the cashless welfare card trial is almost impossible, critics say

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Government accused of ‘demonising vulnerable people’ after only 100 of the 5,000 people on the program allowed to leave

Only 100 of the more than 5,000 people on the cashless welfare card trial have been allowed off the scheme, and the process for exemption has been labelled humiliating and hard to understand.

The government argues the card, which stores up to 80% of a welfare recipient’s payment for use at selected stores, leads to a reduction in violence and harm related to drinking alcohol, illegal drug use and gambling.

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‘I don’t know how we come back from this’: Australia’s big dry sucks life from once-proud towns

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Guardian Australia reports from three communities hard hit by one of the worst droughts in living memory

Australia is experiencing one of its most severe droughts on record, resulting in desperate water shortages across large parts of New South Wales and southern Queensland. Dams in some parts of western NSW have all but dried up, with rainfall levels through the winter in the lowest 10% of historical records in some areas.

The crisis in the far west of the state became unavoidable after the mass fish kills along the lower Darling River last summer, but now much bigger towns closer to the coast, including Dubbo, are also running out of water.

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Labor labels Coalition’s drug-testing plan ‘demeaning’ – politics live

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Scott Morrison accused of trying to force jobseekers to pee in a cup because he wants to pick fights with the opposition. All the day’s news, live

George Brandis has been spotted in the building.

We are not sure why our man in London is here, but no doubt it is all very terribly important.

Pauline Hanson is speaking to Sky News about a speech she is giving on family law reform, where she is calling for 50/50 joint custody of children, from the moment of separation.

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Tanya Day’s family win bid to release CCTV footage to combat ‘invisibility’ of her suffering

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Inquest agrees that family’s advocacy and public interest outweighs concerns about privacy and dignity

The family of Aboriginal woman Tanya Day has persuaded the coroners court to release footage of her final conscious hours, saying that not releasing it would render her suffering – like the suffering of so many Indigenous people – invisible.

Coroner Caitlin English announced on Friday that she would release selected footage of Day’s time in the cells of Castlemaine police station. She said the public interest and the possibility that it could prevent further deaths in custody outweighed her earlier concerns about protecting the 55-year-old’s privacy and dignity.

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White women were colonisers too. To move forward, we have to stop letting them off the hook | Ruby Hamad

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We will never understand the impact of colonial oppression if we underestimate white women’s role in it, writes Ruby Hamad

On 21 September 2018, at the peak of the #MeToo movement that had supposedly shattered the silence around the sexual assault and harassment of women, 75 women, most of them white, convened in Washington DC to profess their support for the embattled supreme court justice nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

A psychology professor, Christine Blasey Ford, had claimed Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her decades earlier when she was just 15. Ford’s testimony was buttressed by two other women with similar allegations, but this was not enough to stop Kavanaugh being confirmed.

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Tanya Day’s arresting officer tells inquest he didn’t think she needed medical attention

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Constable dismisses suggestion that according to police checklist he should have taken her to hospital

The police officer who arrested Tanya Day at Castlemaine train station said he did not think she needed medical attention despite police guidelines stating that intoxicated people who cannot provide intelligible answers should be sent to hospital.

Senior Constable Stephen Thomas told an inquest into the 55-year-old Yorta Yorta woman’s death in custody that he also did not tell her she had been placed under arrest, saying it was “the most low-key arrest I have ever done”.

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Australia entering ‘second convict age’ as imprisonment rates soar

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Incarceration rates have risen 130% since 1985, according to new research by Labor MP and economist Andrew Leigh

Indigenous Australians are now more likely to be in prison than African-Americans, according to new research by Labor parliamentarian and economist Andrew Leigh warning that Australia has entered “a second convict age”.

Leigh’s new working paper finds that in 2018, around 43,000 Australians were in prison, a rate of 221 for every 100,000 adults – which he says is a significant jump since incarceration rates began climbing in 1985.

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WA Labor conference: chaos after walkout during Welcome to Country

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WA Labor president apologises to Indigenous Australians for walkout by right faction union delegates

Western Australia’s Labor conference has turned chaotic after a large number of delegates walked out during a Welcome to the Country ceremony and tribute to the former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke.

It was reported a large portion of the crowd heckled Perth MP Patrick Gorman and the WA Labor president, Carolyn Smith, before storming out of the complex.

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Australia to be sued over mining project’s ‘unmerciful’ destruction of Indigenous land

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Galarrwuy Yunupingu taking legal action for loss of native title as well as destruction of dreaming sites

The federal government is facing a lawsuit over damage done to Indigenous land by the decades-old mining project that sparked the Yirrkala Bark Petitions.

Gumatj leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu revealed on Saturday that he and his people were taking legal action against the commonwealth, seeking compensation for the loss of native title over the minerals exploited by mine operator Nabalco and its successor, Rio Tinto, as well as the destruction of key dreaming sites.

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Yothu Yindi Foundation chief says Australian governments ‘dining out’ on Aboriginal misery

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Denise Bowen says governments spending money on urban centres and tourists instead of tackling disadvantage

Aboriginal people are prisoners to incompetence and maladministration by governments that spend on urban centres and tourists instead of tackling rampant disadvantage, the head of the Yothu Yindi Foundation has said.

Speaking at the Garma festival in northeast Arnhem Land, the chief executive of the foundation, Denise Bowden, took aim at the Northern Territory government and the commonwealth, which she said had responsibility for the NT, and for the “rivers of gold” that its GST formula sends to Darwin.

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Chinese-Australian history predates the first fleet – and my family helped me find out how | Benjamin Law

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When you’re the child of migrants, your forebears may as well have come from the moon. So I set out to rediscover mine

Growing up in Queensland as ABCs (Australian-born Chinese), my siblings and I would get our backs up whenever strangers complimented us on our English – which was often. “Why wouldn’t I be fluent?” I’d think, fuming. “I was born in Nambour.” It didn’t matter: white Australians around us seemed as impressed by our English, as much as our Hong Kong relatives pitied our butchered Cantonese.

Yet I have an admission. Whenever I saw or encountered other Chinese-Australians speaking fluent English myself, my jaw would hang in disbelief. Seeing Chinese-Australians – or any Asian-Australians, really – on TV was rare in the 1980s and 1990s. But when people like Annette Shun Wah presented on SBS, Elizabeth Chong showed Bert Newton how to stuff a chicken with spring onions, or Dr Cindy Pan discussed prophylactics on Sex/Life – and with Australian accents, like mine! – my brain couldn’t process it. Weren’t my family the only ones?

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Tourists are rushing to climb Uluru before ban takes effect

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Crowds of tourists are scaling the world heritage-listed site against the wishes of the traditional owners

Tourists are travelling to Uluru to climb the rock, against the wishes of the traditional owners, to get in before the practice is banned in October.

Parks Australia said there were “certainly visitors travelling with the intention of climbing Uluru before the climb closure comes into effect”.

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Death in custody: police failed to see Indigenous man no longer needed restraining, coroner says

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Shaun Coolwell died in hospital after being handcuffed and injected with the sedative midazolam

Queensland police and paramedics dealing with an Indigenous man during a violent, drug-induced episode failed to recognise the sudden deterioration of his health, a coroner has said.

Shaun Charles Coolwell died in hospital after being sedated and restrained in his sister’s Logan home, south of Brisbane, in October 2015.

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Western Australian police stations to fly Aboriginal flag in reconciliation move

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Indigenous community welcomes plan but warns against prioritising symbolism over action

Western Australia will become the first state in Australia to permanently fly the Aboriginal flag outside every police station as part of an attempt to address long-standing divisions between police and Indigenous communities.

The proposal forms part of WA police’s first ever reconciliation action plan, released on Tuesday, which also includes a promise to increase Indigenous staffing levels in the organisation, develop protocols for delivering a Welcome to Country at police events, and “look into the feasibility of offering Aboriginal language lessons to staff”.

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There’s no such thing as an Aboriginal ‘alien’ – and the high court should say so | Micah Kickett and Julian R Murphy

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Deporting Indigenous peoples strips them of their identity and right to country and devalues their cultural obligations and responsibilities

Aboriginal people have occupied the continent of Australia for more than 60,000 years, so why does the Australian government feel justified imprisoning them in immigration detention centres and threatening them with deportation?

Australia’s indefinite detention of asylum seekers in inhumane conditions has long been a public concern, but only recently have we learned that the government is prepared to treat its Indigenous people in a similar manner. This week, two Aboriginal Australians who have experienced such treatment brought their cases to the high court, asking the court to rule that the federal government’s constitutional power to make laws with respect to “aliens” (essentially, foreigners) cannot apply to Aboriginal Australians.

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Authorities at odds over claim Adelaide Oval staff told not to admit Aboriginal people

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Instructions not to sell tickets were reportedly received before last year’s Naidoc Week AFL game

Box office staff at the Adelaide Oval were reportedly directed to stop selling tickets to Aboriginal people while fans gathered before last year’s Naidoc Week AFL match celebrating Indigenous culture.

The box office and Oval management said a supervisor “misinterpreted” an instruction from the police and security not to sell tickets to a specific group of people who were intoxicated and had been refused entry.

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Cyclone Trevor: racism claims denied as Northern Territory begins clean-up

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  • Claims fly-in fly-out workers given better accommodation than Indigenous evacuees
  • Cyclone Veronica continues to threaten WA’s Pilbara region

As the Northern Territory begins its big mop-up after Cyclone Trevor, local authorities have hosed down racism claims concerning evacuation efforts.

Trevor forced mass evacuations before it made landfall on Saturday morning as a category four system, with destructive winds gusting up to 250km/h.

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Hotel giant Accor accused of segregating Aboriginal guests into lower-quality rooms

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Australian government to investigate claims French-owned Ibis Styles in Alice Springs reserved poorest accommodation for Indigenous visitors

The international hotel giant Accor has launched an investigation into allegations that staff at one of its Australian hotels have been segregating Aboriginal guests in lower quality rooms.

The French multinational company said on Friday it was “extremely saddened and disappointed” at the revelations, which were reported by the ABC’s Background Briefing program.

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