Indigenous

  • Lex Wotton political gag without precedent, says lawyer

    August will mark one year since Palm Island Aboriginal leader Lex Wotton was released on parole. Unlike the police officer charged with the 2004 murder of Palm Island resident Mulrunji Doomadgee, Wotton was jailed for taking part in the protests against Doomadgee’s death. No one was jailed for Doomadgee’s death in police custody. Despite his release, Wotton is muzzled by parole conditions aimed to silence him. He is subject to a four-year political gag, which bans him from speaking to the media or attending meetings. Wotton has launched a High Court challenge against the gag order.

  • Cafes, hairdressers and the NT intervention

    Sara Hudson, a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, recently wrote a comment piece on ABC’s Drum Opinion that supported the Northern Territory intervention. It also attacked public land title in remote Aboriginal communities. The article was what you might expect from a research fellow from the conservative think tank. "Public bad, private good", and so on. But one passage stood out to me, given I had visited many remote Aboriginal communities recently.

  • Bellotti family fights for justice

    The family of Rex Bellotti Junior have called a rally for July 23 in Albany where Aboriginal youth Bellotti, then 15 years old, was run over by police driving on the wrong side of the road in March 2009. The family organised the protest to call for a public inquiry into alleged police misconduct and the failure of the state government and the Western Australian police to provide adequate compensation and support for Bellotti and his family. State politicians and legal bodies have left the family to fend for themselves.

  • Israel: Gaza flotilla activists released after groundbreaking court win

    Two Australian Palestine solidarity activists, former NSW Greens MP Sylvia Hale and Jews Against the Occupation activist Vivienne Porzsolt, were released from immigration detention by an Israeli court on July 13. The court ordered they not be deported. The judge ruled that while they had not broken any rules, they had a limited time to apply to the Israeli Defence Force to visit Bethlehem and Ramallah in the West Bank. The pair had told immigration on entry to Israel that they wanted to visit Palestine.

  • Peru: Police kill six protesters

    In the final days of Alan Garcia’s rancid presidency, crimes against the Peruvian people are still being committed. The department of Puno, bordering Bolivia in the country’s south-east, has now been added to a long list of locations where anti-mining protesters have been gunned down by security forces. On June 25, six indigenous activists were reportedly killed and dozens more wounded when Peruvian police opened fire on a 4000-strong crowd occupying the Manco Capac airport in the city of Juliaca.

  • Aboriginal heritage, rare habitat bulldozed at Bulahdelah

    The NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) is continuing to build the Bulahdelah bypass, north of Newcastle, despite a community campaign to halt the project. The bypass road was first proposed in 2000. Three main routes were canvassed: one to the west of the town, passing through several flat paddocks; another to the east, cutting through the foot of the Alum mountain; and an option that involved widening the existing road. The safer, more geologically stable and slightly western route was ditched in favour of the mountain route.

  • Save Kimberley campaign at critical point

    The fight to stop the James Price Point gas hub in the Kimberly in Western Australia's north reached a critical point on July 4 as police arrested dozens of people.

  • Forum hears alternatives to Intervention

    About 50 people attended a forum on July 8 titled "Rebuilding from the Ground Up: alternatives to the failed NT Intervention". The meeting heard from Valerie Martin, a Yuendumu resident in the Northern Territory, which is one of the "hub towns" under the government’s Northern Territory Intervention. She took part in the Prescribed Area People's Alliance conference in Darwin in June, which launched the “Rebuilding from the Ground Up” document.

  • Partial native title win on Nth Stradbroke Is.

    Under an agreement endorsed by the federal court, the Quandamooka Aboriginal people of North Stradbroke Island, 22 kilometres off the Brisbane coast, have gained partial native title over the island. Speaking at a July 4 handover ceremony, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said the agreement opens the way for settlements of other native title claims in the Brisbane region, the July 5 Australian reported.

  • John Pilger: Australia invaded, not 'settled'

    The City of Sydney has voted to replace the words “European arrival” in the official record with “invasion”. The deputy lord mayor, Marcelle Hoff, says it is intellectually dishonest to use any other word in describing how Aboriginal Australia was dispossessed by the British. “We were invaded,” said Paul Morris, an Aboriginal adviser to the council. “It is the truth and it shouldn’t be watered down. We wouldn’t expect Jewish people to accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust, so why should we?”