11
votes
Victorian Parliament to vote on negotiating Australia's first Aboriginal treaty
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- Title
- Indigenous Victorians herald watershed moment as Parliament votes on treaty law
- Published
- Jun 6 2018
- Word count
- 732 words
Such an awful message. Treating any citizen or group as special because of race is something we should have left back in the 20th century.
If people want to form groups or businesses based on shared ancestry, fine. I think it's distasteful and racist but who am I to judge? For a government to legislate as if such groups were real, and not a cultural construct, is deeply offensive.
It's 2018! If anything, we should be amending the Constitution to prohibit governments treating citizens differently according to identity.
This is just a post-racist way of being racist. "We're so non-racist that we don't have to treat dispossessed people any differently to the people who dispossessed them!"
The Aboriginal people of Australia were in possession of this land, and were living a certain lifestyle on that land, when Europeans came along and killed them and pushed them off their land. Even hundreds of years later, the descendants of those dispossessed people are still suffering the consequences of that dispossession.
How is it problematic to make a treaty with the original owners of the land we now live on, acknowledging that their ancestors owned the land and our ancestors & predecessors took it away from them?
That's the best justification of racism I've seen this week.
Funny. I was thinking the same about your comment. :)
There is no need to frame this as a racial issue.
Would a nation state attempting to foster some good will with another nation state that it had in the past invaded by creating a treaty be "an awful message"?
I would consider this a positive message even if it fell short of making true reparations.
Are Aboriginal people deserving of less because they did not create nation states in the same manner as European countries?
Would considering them so not simply be a repeat of Terra Nullis; considering Australia uninhabited because the Aboriginal people did not construct permanent structures in the same manner as Europeans?
You are suggesting that Aborigines are not Australian citizens but rather foreigners living within our borders.