A casino was a fitting venue to host Prime Minister Tony Abbott's keynote address to the 25th anniversary dinner of conservative think tank the Sydney Institute on April 28.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights
The Great Barrier Reef is almost certainly going to suffer permanent damage due to coral bleaching if countries do not act to reduce carbon emissions, the Fifth Assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on March 31.
The March in March protests across Australia over March 15-17 were a resounding success – not just because of their size, focus and breadth.
Tens of thousands of people gathered at vigils around Australia over the weekend of February 22 to 23 to protest the brutal killing of asylum seeker Reza Berati inside the Manus Island detention camp in Papua New Guinea.
Aboriginal Australians have the oldest continuous cultures and languages in the world. The first peoples cared for country for thousands of years and have intimate knowledge of its unique environment.
So Tony Abbott is the new prime minister. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor governments delivered this outcome with the narrow self-interest of its MPs and mafia-like faction heads and its desperation to prove itself as the best managers for the billionaire class.
Australia is a wealthy nation built on stolen Aboriginal land and resources. But Aboriginal people score lowest in health, education, employment and housing.
In 1788 Australia was invaded and colonised, but the sovereignty of the original inhabitants of this country was never ceded. Across the continent the Indigenous peoples resisted. But treaties were never negotiated over the use or settlement of the land, and the colonisers invented a legal fiction — terra nullius — to justify their illegal and violent annexation. By pretending that the land wasn’t inhabited by a “civilised” people, the likes of James Cook and Joseph Banks laid the basis for two centuries of racism and oppression.