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INDIGENOUS LIVING MATTERS
INDIGENOUS LIVING MATTERS
HISTORY
Australia’s indigenous people have experienced 4 phases in relation to the majority.
1. Mutualism briefly after Europeans arrived
2. Elimination, by disease, physical combat and genocide.
3. Assimilation of survivors
4. Incarceration of objectors
In 2020, indigenous persons were 3.3% of the population, and one in four were in prison.
INDEPENDENCE
Australia’s outback has retained some largely-indigenous communities from before European settlement and developed others since. These communities are stable and self-sufficient, with self-administered health and welfare services, police and education.
INTEGRATION
Indigenous living in Australia has a spectrum of integration, from dispersed living in cities, through partial ghettos, to integrated communities in outback towns.
GHETTOS
Leicester in England is one of several English cities where ethnic residents have adopted separate living in ghettos, condoned by secular authorities, bringing peace to the city’s suburbs. A research finding is that poor Somali students can accomplish more learning in ghetto schools than in better-off integrated schools.
SEPARATE DEVELOPMENT
Brisbane’s Hymba Yumba is an independent school where about 200 mainly indigenous students between Years 1 and 12 study selected school subjects across the national curriculum, presented in indigenous languages. Separate development of indigenous people encourages independence but could reduce assimilation.
APARTHEID
Racial segregation by territory is not present in Australia. Archbishop Tutu declared that treatment of Palestinians reminded him of apartheid, only worse. Israel’s repression of Palestinian citizens, African refugees and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is reported to have become more brutal over time with ethnic cleansing, land seizure, home demolition, military occupation, bombing of Gaza and international law violations.
CONCLUSION
Assimilation is partial. Independence, integration, ghetto-living and separate development are alternatives. No single development strategy is followed. Individual choice is limited by affordability. Social friction has been exacerbated by Black Lives Matter conflict in the USA.
My speculative fiction novel The Grass is Always Browner considers indigeneity in Australia 250 years in the future.
http://www.martinknox.wordpress.com
Does the future have to be uncertain?
There are at least 8 different approaches, for example to forecasting population number.
- Suck it and see: don’t anticipate outcomes; live in the moment.
- Predict using normative model: assumes causation by binary events, e.g heads or tails with 10 coins give a bell-shaped range of outcomes with a mid-range value e.g. 5 heads being most probable.
- Predict using Poisson distribution: assumes complex chain of natural events, e.g Per annum deaths by horse-kick in the Russian cavalry. Outcomes are snapper fish shaped: a blunt nil nose, a fatly probable mid-section and a long tailing off of multiple events.
- Predict using rectangular distribution: roulette-like equiprobability; caused by random luck.
- Deterministic model: calculates what outcome and when.
- Prescriptive forecast: plumps for an outcome to reduce speculation and acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Beware of governments bearing false forecasts.
- Intervention: someone controls occurrence of an outcome.
- Faith: relies on divine intervention.
We are usually ready to believe in someone spruiking a good future.
My novel The Grass is Always Browner is political fiction thriller. It tells a story about Australia 250 years in the future.
Does Australia’s Constitution have racism?
Australia’s Constitution adopted on 1 January 1901 had 3 clauses explicitly concerned with race (see below).In 1901 it was commented that “It enables the Parliament to deal with the people of any alien race after they have entered the Commonwealth; to localise them within defined areas, to restrict their migration, to confine them to certain occupations, or to give them special protection and secure their return after a certain period to the country whence they came.”
DELETED ENTIRELY BY REFERENDUM IN 1967
‘In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’.
STRUCK OUT BY REFERENDUM 1967
Section 51(xxvi) still provides that the Commonwealth Parliament can legislate with respect to ‘the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws’. This is the so-called, ‘races power’.
CURRENT PROVISION
Section 25 recognised that the States could disqualify people from voting in the elections on account of their race.
I am puzzled that Section 25 continues and wonder under what scenario Australian authorities would need this clause, over and above legislation that would apply to non-Indigenous people? Do the concerns above still apply and need the remaining provisions? Or do new concerns warrant their retention? Is it feared that the non-Indigenous population (3%) could passively resist, as did Hindus in India (80%) against the British occupiers in 1919-1930? Or that they could oppose the government, as did Black Africans (75%) in South Africa before 1986? Or perhaps some immigrant race’s misbehaviour could not be controlled by the laws that control the rest of Australians?
My fiction novel The Grass Is Always Browner tells a story of Australia’s ethnic development 250 years in the future. http://www.martinknox.wordpress.com
