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Notes -
The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!
You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.
'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.
Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.
This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.
Here is the summary of their report.
You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'
This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.
Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.
If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.
Is it possible the body writing this is full of true believers who actually think they’ll get all this crap?
Very likely. Also they could be stupid drama queens with poor judgement.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidia_Thorpe
It just keeps going, it's a national disgrace that this individual is still a Senator. But this is the intellectual calibre of many in the indigenous movement, not totally unrepresentative:
Does Australia not include a portion of their oath which reads "that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion" or something to that effect?
I mean yes oaths are just words which are just hot air until someone decides they mean something, but still. For example, on US federal forms, the point is not to catch the honest (e.g., on the US citizenship form the question which reads "Have you ever been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any Communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?") but to punish the dishonest. The Honest Communist who reads that question and checks the box marked "yes" is not the target of the form, because he does not exist. The Dishonest Communist who checks the box marked "no" is the target of the form, because then three years later when it comes out that yes he was a member of the Marxist International Domestic Workers Political Activism Party (of Lenin) of Farlandia, you can yoink his citizenship for lying on the form.
I think back in the day it was so manifestly obvious that swearing an oath meant you had to stand by it they never encoded such a section. In any event she could say 'i take this obligation freely and sincerely' in her usual overtly insincere and obnoxious manner. Root problem isn't solved. In the 1930s a fair few Wehrmacht officers felt restricted from plotting against Hitler because they swore an oath to him. It was not on! People would go around saying 'my word is my bond'.
In any event she did sign the paper so she formally ticked the box. Oaths are just box-ticking these days, no more meaningful than terms and conditions for free software, no more meaningful than the King's Champion who used to ride up, throw down a gauntlet and challenge anyone who disputed the new monarch's right to rule in single combat. He's still there of course, just holds a standard now.
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