The ABC has missed a rare opportunity to deeply engage with the diversity of views among Indigenous Australians about whether and how they should be ‘recognised’ in the Constitution.
What the Northern Territory’s experience with state interventions reveals is that rather than protecting young people, it has placed them at greater risk of mistreatment and trauma.
Until we see a marked change in the stories that are told, together with a shift from inclusion to social justice, the national story of Australian sport will remain very, very white.
Ever since British settlement, water rights in Australia’s north have favoured landowners over traditional owners, effectively locking Aboriginal people out of agricultural development.
The ALRC report made some useful recommendations about how settler law could deal more fairly with Aboriginal people by taking their traditions and customs into account.
In some Indigenous communities, the ratio of programs to people served is possibly the highest in the world. Somehow, for many, Closing the Gap remains an elusive goal. A rethink is needed.
The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’s report was meant to be a blueprint for reducing the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous Australians and deaths in custody.
European invasion completely disrupted the way aboriginal Australians managed fire. Learning from Australia’s first people could help us fight fires in the future.
As the Australian Government pushes ahead with its Northern Development agenda “making it easier to use natural assets”, it’s important to ask how this may affect the Indigenous peoples in whose territories development will occur.
Tony Abbott’s rejection of Indigenous-only conventions need not derail the push for constitutional recognition. But it demonstrates just how crucial sound process is to achieving change.