GARY FOLEY: Labor gave us Native Title, which was a considerable step-down from what we were talking about, what we almost got in 1986 – LAND RIGHTS. You didn’t see people marching down the streets in the 60s and 70s saying “Native Title now!” When we were talking about Land Rights in those days, we weren’t talking about some Mickey Mouse notion of Native Title. Native Title gives you nothing. It is the most inferior form of land tenure under Commonwealth law. We were talking about real OWNERSHIP; land that we could have control over, so we could say “no, you can’t come in here” or “we want to do this with our land”. That’s what self-determination is – the power to control your own affairs; ownership of land is fundamental to this in terms of creating the basis for people to survive the attack of colonialism. When the Native Title Act was proclaimed (1993) was in fact the greatest act of dispossession of Aboriginal people in the history of Australia since Captain Cook stuck their flag in our ground. The Native Title Act says that freehold title extinguishes Native Title. So in the stroke of a pen, all of the really ‘valuable’ land in Australia was excluded from claim by Aboriginal people. Never forget that the people who negotiated the Native Title Act with the Keating Labor administration were a bunch of government and self-appointed Aboriginal spokespersons – the MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. They were unelected and did not have a mandate to negotiate. There’s TV footage of the magnificent seven clinking glasses of champagne when the Act passed. Noel Pearson claimed it was the greatest advancement in the history of Aboriginal Australia, that it was the salvation of Aboriginal people. #CirculateToEducate. GARY FOLEY: Labor gave us Native Title, which was a considerable step-down from what we were talking about, what we almost got in 1986 – LAND RIGHTS. You didn’t see people marching down the streets in the 60s and 70s saying “Native Title now!” When we were talking about Land Rights in those days, we weren’t talking about some Mickey Mouse notion of Native Title. Native Title gives you nothing. It is the most inferior form of land tenure under Commonwealth law. We were talking about real OWNERSHIP; land that we could have control over, so we could say “no, you can’t come in here” or “we want to do this with our land”. That’s what self-determination is – the power to control your own affairs; ownership of land is fundamental to this in terms of creating the basis for people to survive the attack of colonialism. When the Native Title Act was proclaimed (1993) was in fact the greatest act of dispossession of Aboriginal people in the history of Australia since Captain Cook stuck their flag in our ground. The Native Title Act says that freehold title extinguishes Native Title. So in the stroke of a pen, all of the really ‘valuable’ land in Australia was excluded from claim by Aboriginal people. Never forget that the people who negotiated the Native Title Act with the Keating Labor administration were a bunch of government and self-appointed Aboriginal spokespersons – the MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. They were unelected and did not have a mandate to negotiate. There’s TV footage of the magnificent seven clinking glasses of champagne when the Act passed. Noel Pearson claimed it was the greatest advancement in the history of Aboriginal Australia, that it was the salvation of Aboriginal people. #CirculateToEducate
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 05:34:57 +0000