- The Guardian
- Issue #2162
It’s a war that started recently, but really it’s been going on for a long time. It’s appalling, but it’s so constant that people not directly affected are beginning to tune out. It’s ramped up a bit lately.
This could describe the Israeli genocide of Palestinian people. That’s been going on since 1948, but is often reported as though it started on 7 October 2023. What else could we be talking about? The war on Aboriginal people.
Melodramatic? Colonisation isn’t like conventional war, with clearly defined borders, declarations and battles, although historians have made a good case that early European settlement was actually a series of ‘frontier wars.’ With the first people of Australia, as with Gaza, there’s what happened recently, and what’s been going on for a long time.
Lately, things aren’t good. The defeat of The Voice to Parliament emboldened racists and made potential allies more timid. Queensland’s Labor government walked back from treaty negotiations and now Queensland has a Liberal National Party government that seems actively hostile to Aboriginal interests.
There’s also a Country Liberal Party government in the Northern Territory promoting “law and order” policies which it knows adversely affect Aboriginal people. They’re bringing back spit hoods, which have been defined by experts as “torture.” Incarceration rates for Aboriginal people in the NT have doubled. The North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency called it “an alarming trend” that reflects “the ongoing failure of the justice system.”
The problem is not just on the conservative side of politics. Victoria’s Labor government took no time to reverse bail laws after a high profile attack. They knew the bail laws adversely affected Aboriginal people because a coroner had told them so after Veronica Nelson died while in prison for minor shoplifting-related charges. Labor showed that it knew the laws were wrong by changing them for the better. Faced with anger from the Murdoch press, they changed those laws back in an instant. Labor knew this would hurt Aboriginal people, but keeping the Murdoch tabloids off their back was more important. Most recently, Camp Sovereignty, a sacred Aboriginal burial site in central Melbourne was attacked by neo-Nazis. The silence of Australia’s so-called anti-semitism envoy was deafening.
It’s not all bad news. South Australia quietly introduced a state Voice to Parliament this year. At time of writing, Victoria is about to have a treaty tabled in state parliament. If the treaty is passed, there will be a First People’s Assembly. These things aren’t nothing, and come after decades of hard work by Aboriginal leaders and activists.
Indigenous people need a lot of support for the years and decades ahead. Colonisation was and is inseparable from imperialism, which as Lenin said, is the final form of capitalism. We can see this in Aboriginal land being used to ‘host’ troops and materiel for future US wars. The Communist Party of Australia was the first political organisation after European settlement to support Aboriginal people in their fight for land rights and human rights.
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