Australia: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Kenneth Morgan

Author:Kenneth Morgan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Aboriginal rights

Aborigines had the right to vote in some Australian colonies, but Queensland in 1885 followed by Western Australia in 1893 debarred them from voting. The creation of the Australian nation in 1901 was concomitant with the exclusion of Indigenous people from the right to vote, from citizenship and from the census. When state and federal election rolls were standardized in 1922, Aborigines were excluded from the franchise. Legislation in 1949 confirmed those on state rolls could vote as well as those who had served in the armed forces. All were enfranchised in 1962. The success of the Civil Rights movement in securing advances for black people in the United States influenced this change. In Australia itself, the work of Aboriginal activists was also important. Harold Holt’s Liberal government held a national referendum in 1967 on whether the Commonwealth should be given the power to legislate for Indigenous Australians. Voters overwhelmingly supported this major political change. The inclusion of Indigenous groups in national politics was so limited by the early 1970s, however, that activists set up tents with an Aboriginal flag on the lawn outside Old Parliament House, Canberra, as an alternative parliament called a Tent Embassy.

A major concern of Aboriginal groups lies in securing land rights. Two centuries of settler expansion throughout Australia led to pastoralists and mining companies operating businesses on lands that had ancestral, sacred significance for Indigenous people. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976) was the first legal recognition of the Indigenous system of land-ownership. It granted freehold title to Aboriginal groups to hold land that had previously been ‘reserves’. Two landmark legal decisions of the 1990s were also important. The Mabo judgment issued by the Australian High Court in June 1992 recognized for the first time that native title existed in parts of Australia and that Indigenous inhabitants were rightful owners of the soil. This implicitly contradicted the European colonizers’ understanding that Australia was terra nullius, but the legal decision only covered vacant Crown land, national parks, and some leased land. Some state governments refused to cooperate over national legislation dealing with new land leases and compensation payments to Aboriginal communities.

In 1996, in the Wik judgment between the native Wik peoples and the Queensland government, judges ruled that native title and pastoral leases could coexist but that leases did not necessarily annul native title. This blurred the situation over the entitlement, occupation, and use of land. In the late 1990s, the Liberal government was unsympathetic to the implicit advance to Aboriginal rights operative in the Wik judgment, and it spent two years drafting legislation to protect owners of mining and pastoral leases. Howard summed up his government’s attitude on the matter by stating that ‘the pendulum had swung too far towards Aborigines and had to be reset’. In 1999, Howard moved a ‘Motion of Reconciliation’, which expressed ‘deep and sincere regret that Indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practices of past generations’. Mounting evidence about violence, health problems, and sexual abuse in Aboriginal

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