Perpetuating the myth that Aboriginal people are at greater risk in jail than non-Aboriginals puts even more lives in greater danger, as indigenous women often refrain from reporting violent menfolk for fear they will be mistreated and die in custody. Trading truth for a fashionable lie has its consequences

Read More

The effect of this proposed change to the Constitution will be to remove one section which allows the Commonwealth to make laws with respect to Aboriginal people and replace it with ... another and wordier provision allowing the Commonwealth to make laws with respect to Aboriginal people

Read More

The popular meme insists a scintilla of Aboriginal blood confers a special spirituality and connection with Country, saddling the owner with the trauma of past atrocities while simultaneously granting absolution for black-on-white misdeeds. By all means move heaven and earth to lift disadvantaged Aborigines but let’s not make articles of faith of myth and, yes, mischief

Read More

The great irony is that the 'treaty process' the Victorian government has initiated and Indigenous activists have embraced owes nothing to Aboriginal culture. What it promises to deliver is different laws for different races, which is the very definition of the racism its advocates profess to find so repugnant

Read More

It is generally known that those Welcome to Country ceremonies which these days precede almost every public event are made of whole cloth. Yet the fiction, as the celebrated anthropologist A. P. Elkin might have noted, is far more palatable than the actual means by which rival tribes sorted their disagreements and promoted amity

Read More

Constitutional recognition would create different rules for different races, which would benefit a well-placed few while denying many Aborigines access to their full potential. It is a tragic irony that the paternalism of the past, which today's elites decry, would be imposed by template on the least fortunate, least educated and most isolated

Read More

Beer-sodden Western Australia's police shooting up secret sites, Kangaroo Island ferry passengers deriding Aborigines and the island's residents according the, ahem, proud indigenous visitor a 'bitter' reception -- is there no end to the Melbourne University professor's gift for getting himself oppressed?

Read More

For too long now, laws have eroded free speech in Australia, and the indigenous Voice would see that liberty further constrained. Of the numerous objections that can and should be raised, the prospect of a nation divided into those who can air claims and those who will find it in their best interest to remain mute is perhaps the most insidious consequence

Read More

Most young Australians have been spoon-fed the ‘invasion = colonisation’ and ‘frontier wars/genocide’ mantras from primary school through to university. Education is a powerful thing, and whoever controls it controls the future. Is it any wonder, amid a declining appreciation of what it means to be Australian, the likes of Bruce Pascoe make out like bandits? 

Read More

As sovereign individuals we have agency, but with agency comes responsibility, which is why the Uluru Statement is first of all an exercise in the authors' self-deception. Rather than acknowledge incarceration rates, violence and community dysfunction as ills that can only be remedied from within, they are packaged as scars of external oppression visited upon the blameless

Read More