Entrenched denial of Aboriginal equity resides in Section 25 of the Commonwealth Constitution

By Patrick Byrt, Human Rights Convenor

... Ultimately the linchpin to the process of entrenched denial of Aboriginal equity resides in the White Australia Policy foundation to the Australian Constitution and its institution in the six (6) Australian States (with their racist legislative powers under Section 25 of the ongoing racialist Australian Constitution), which empowers the Parliaments of the States to legislate to prevent the people of any race from voting for the Parliament of that State if so desired.

This then must raise whether the people of such a race in that State would have any right to vote for the Senate and/or their Federal Representative in the House of Representatives, owing to the interrelation in the constitution between the legal entitlements to the franchise for State and Federal Parliaments.

For instance, if a State used such a power against the Aboriginal race as it was intended to be used, would a person of that race in that State be entitled to stand for Federal Parliament as a Senator for that State or as a candidate to be a Federal Representative in a Federal seat there?

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

Such is the nature rather than the clear ambit of the power that resides in State Parliaments over Aboriginal people.

With such a Sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Aboriginal people is it any wonder that there is a great fear in the Aboriginal people about what a State has the power to do to you all, which includes stripping Aboriginal people of their land rights.

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

The push for stripping away any residual rights of the Aboriginal people to the minerals beneath their lands was initiated nationally in South Australia by its "Reformist" Premier Don Dunstan, who got the SA Parliament to pass legislation during his period as Premier of Labor government to abrogate such rights in fee simple holders to own the minerals under the ground, which until then were in common law a part of the ownership of freehold land.

In terms of potential mining areas, this meant farmers in the main.

But the law did not make any exception for the Aboriginal Descendants who had inherited their land rights to their traditional lands from their ancestors.
This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

Today in Australia there is no government policy committed to the land rights of the Aboriginal Descendants for ownership of the minerals beneath their lands, and there possibly would be an opportunity to raise this as a political issue, were all Aboriginal people to be less fearful of what White Australia Policy Founded State governments would resort to doing to their existing rights if they speak out using their rights and risk there being a "white" backlash against Aboriginal voices.

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

Although the crucial challenge to success of a loss of courage among those aspiring to gain rights, freedom and independence can be met by ensuring that an adequately ongoing encouragement is undertaken; despite the effectiveness of persistence as a tool against deterrence; no matter the up lift in inspiration that a determination to struggle for spiritual values brings; and contrary to the uplift in endurance that constant re-commitment provides; it is utterly and solely the legally entrenched social exclusion from an equal right to an equal participation in negotiation for the repeated renewal of the contested social order that alone is unsurpassably definitive of the unalterably debasing depth of the wretched ignominy that is grindingly imposed by racial intolerance as a daily fare of prejudice, racism and discrimination, by which racist government vaunts its daily victory over the dispossessed.

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

What needs to happen is for support to be generated in Reconciliation for raising a new public policy agenda item in the national discussion on rights about the issue that it is time in the name of Human Rights for a new sense of national justice about eradicating the ongoing and still powerful forces of the legally entrenched White Australia Policy Foundation to the Australia States and Commonwealth under the Australian Constitution that prevents the Australian population from undertake a national "coming to terms" over the unfinished business of Aboriginal land rights and self-determination based on Aboriginal rights to economic empowerment, by systemically prohibiting Aboriginal negotiation over the social order.

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

The right place to promote the national legal issues about this is from South Australia because of the land rights legal foundation to South Australia as raised for public debate and the national policy agenda in the new book: "Coming To Terms" on the 1836 Letters Patent in South Australia by prominently well qualified lawyers.

Coming to Terms challenges conventional thinking about Aboriginal title in South Australia. It does so by examining the legal consequences of provisions in the State's founding documents that reserve or protect Aboriginal rights to land.

Unless the actual legal precedents that are available to be used in South Australia to make the case for the protection by Magna Carta and the Proclamation of an English Government on 28 December 1836 for a new colony South Australia, of the land rights vested and recognised as such by the 1836 Letters Patent issued by William IV on 19 February 1836 in London to define the boundaries of South Australia are used in national debate and political discussion about the utter denial and unlawful failure of governments to defend Aboriginal rights, there is very much less prospect that an Aboriginal national political movement could raise a political battle over the racism of the White Australia Policy founded States, which would be able to gain traction in national political debate and therefore not be able to take off in the direction of contesting that denial to the Aboriginal people of their ongoing equity rights in the minerals being removed from their ancestral lands without getting the justified payment of any royalty to them for the wealth that is being made from their lands.

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

There is a good political argument to be raised that the Letters Patent that apply in South Australia are a development of the 1763 Royal Proclamation that was the law of the Empire on Aboriginal land rights which was behind the failure of the Batman Treaty with the traditional Wurundjeri Owners of the site of Melbourne in 1835.

It is this Royal proclamation which offers the Aboriginal people the moral if not legal or equitable basis to asserting their justification for a legislated exception being made by all the State Parliaments so that royalties are set aside from mining on Aboriginal lands for the express development of Aboriginal self-determination.

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

The Aboriginal Commissioner for Aboriginal Engagement in South Australia has already made this case quite clear for South Australia that mining developments need to set aside payments for Aboriginal people into a development fund for the benefit of Aboriginal people across the State.

Also the Ngarrindjeri people are leading a struggle under the Aboriginal Alliance Coalition Movement for the implementation of the Letters Patent in South Australia.

This makes South Australia a good and fertile field for advancing the opportunity presented by the injustices Aboriginal people suffer on their own lands, to undertake a united national Aboriginal political movement based on the principles of the Letters Patent, and opposed directly to the continuation of the White Australia Policy Founded States having any race power any longer to control their populations by race based laws and policy.

This book is published in South Australia by Wakefield Press: www.wakefieldpress.com.

Coming to Terms Aboriginal Title in South Australia Edited by Shaun Berg Foreword by Geoffrey Robertson PB 592 PP 230 x 168 ISBN 9781862548671 $39.00.

95 History / Aboriginal Issues Wakefield Press.

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 » Print Verson pdf - 345kb

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

It is a matter of having the organisation set up to link the dots between the denial of the equity rights of the Aboriginal people to receive royalty payments for minerals taken from their lands and the laws by which race based constitutional arrangements are kept in place to keep Aboriginal people from receiving land justice in their own lands, when the legal linchpin to this is the racist Section 25 of the Commonwealth Constitution.

The way forward is to bring together the movements for a Bill of Rights and for Reconciliation with an Aboriginal led movement for a national Aboriginal political party and the achievement of a Treaty including a national Bill of Rights, which abrogates Section 25 of the White Australia Policy Constitution and provides instead for Aboriginal parliamentary representation.

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

If this is acceptable to you brothers and sister then I suggest that you write to the Ngarrindjeri to seek to obtain the support of the Aboriginal Alliance Coalition Movement for creating a National Aboriginal political party structure to be established in South Australia based on pursuing the 1836 Letters Patent and having a national Aboriginal Political Movement formed in pursuit of Reconciliation with the policy objectives of eradicating the ongoing impacts of the White Australia Policy Founded State powers and replacing their political structure with the creation of Aboriginal political representative structures delivering land rights and self-determination for the development of Aboriginal lands and waters including mining royalty rights.

This is a political issue that an Aboriginal political movement for a national party might raise.

Ngarrindjeri people contacts are:
Ngarrindjeri Tendi Rupelle (the Chief leader of the Ngarrindjeri government {Tendi} and the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority)
George Trevorrow - Phone 08 8575 6001.

www.coorongwildernesslodge.com Email kurangk@lm.net.au

Tom Trevorrow of the Ngarrindjeri Lands and Progress association - Phone: 08 8575 1557 - Contactable in the first instance via - www.ngarrindjeri.com

Ngarrindjeri Matt Rigney - Chairperson of the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations MLDRIN www.mldrin.org.au - Mobile: 0428 997 297 - former Greens SA candidate.

Murray Bridge Ngarrindjeri Victor Wilson of the Kalparrin Community at Murray Bridge - Victor Wilson c/- admin@kalparrin.com www.kalparrin.com Please get back to me with your consideration of this approach.

Kind regards,
Patrick