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.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights
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.