Indigenous

Chanting "Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land," more than 500 members of Aboriginal communities from across the country and their supporters marched from Civic in the centre of Canberra to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in front of Old Parliament House on January 26, also known as Invasion Day. The embassy was also the site of the second meeting of the Indigenous National Freedom Summit, following its founding in Alice Springs in November 2014.

The National Freedom Movement is planning a second sit-in protest at Parliament House in Canberra when federal parliament resumes on February 9. Protesters will raise issues, including the large numbers of Aboriginal children being taken from their families and the destruction of homeland communities. Aboriginal leader Michael Anderson said: “Unity is how we will achieve anything. We need to come together as nations, support and educate each other on how we take what is ours.” VIGIL FOR BALI NINE HELD

Noted journalist John Pilger directed and is the lead investigator in an extraordinary documentary, Utopia: An Epic Story of Struggle and Resistance. Pilger incisively and tenaciously reveals the brutal conquest and continued racist treatment of the Aboriginal people in Australia. Against this appalling historical documentation of conquest, discrimination and neglect, Pilger also highlights the continued resistance of the original inhabitants of the land stolen by British settlers.

"Today was the best Invasion Day protest that I have ever been to," Socialist Alliance councillor Sue Bolton told Green Left on January 26. "There was a real feeling of Aboriginal Pride and Resistance. The crowd was bigger today too."

The Socialist Alliance released this statement on January 23 on the Queensland election. * * * The re-election of the Liberal-National Party (LNP) for a second term on January 31 — with or without Premier Campbell Newman — would be devastating. A re-elected LNP would claim a mandate to complete the sale of public assets, begun by the previous Labor government and extended during the first three years of LNP.

Jonathan Sri, Greens candidate for the seat of South Brisbane, joined Evan Verner to talk about the state of politics in Queensland and Australia, what made him run as a politician and his views on different political issues. In this interview, Sri discusses his views on politics and how music has influenced his view of the world. * * * The first time I saw Jonathan Sri was at a rally where he was on stage delivering one of his slam poems. "This is Queensland, where no man is carried we like our blacks in jail and our gays unmarried

As the Queensland election campaign enters its final days, a Labor victory seems unlikely. Labor and the Liberal-National Party (LNP) say they will not do deals with minor parties. Recent opinion polls indicate the LNP will be re-elected with a clear majority. However, Campbell Newman could still be replaced as premier. Opinion polls are predicting between 10% and 11% swings to Labor. It needs a swing of 5.4% to unseat Newman in his electorate of Ashgrove.

A popular argument suggests Aboriginal people always burned country so non-Aboriginal Australians should too, albeit for modern purposes, such as fuel reduction burns. Historian Bill Gammage argued this in the popular and influential book The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011). Remarkably, the book has attracted the praise of writers from both the left wing Green Left Weekly and the far-right Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

"They took my boy’s body away," said mother, Gwen Sturt. "I wanted to go with my son. They left us behind. They didn’t care to listen."

Below is a Charter of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Rights was adopted by the Socialist Alliance in 2013. * * * Introduction

The rate of Aboriginal children removed from their families has increased each year since Kevin Rudd said sorry to the Stolen Generations, and more and more Aboriginal children are being placed with non-Indigenous carers, a new report into Indigenous disadvantage has revealed. In 2008, Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the victims of past policies of forced removal that led to the Stolen Generations, promising that the “injustices of the past will never, never happen again”.

Aboriginal people and their supporters are converging in Canberra from all over Australia for the Invasion Day weekend. The weekend will feature a "sit-in" that is expected to release an historic Declaration of Independence reaffirming Aboriginal sovereignty in this country.