40 years on nothing to celebrate

Lionel poets burns the Oz constitution

I can't help but wonder what there is to celebrate about the fact that
it was only 40 years ago that we decided to acknowledge that the First
Australians were human beings. It was, after all, 22 years after the
demise of Nazi Germany and the failure of our own 'final solution' (a
phrase in common use in 1930's Australia) was due more to our
inefficiency compared to Germany than any moral fibre we possessed. As
I recall, the 90% vote was as much a repudiation of the more
embarrassing vestiges of the White Australia Policy than out of any
real concern for the status the First Australians.

At the time the Gurindji people had just begun their walk-off from
Wave Hill to assert that, after 180 odd years, the colonists had not
destroyed all resistance. In 1967 Bill Stanner called the Gurindji
walkoff 'a little miracle' in his lectures describing the 'great
Australian silence' about the absence of the First Australians in our
Colonial histories.

The struggle to reclaim this land from the colonists continues to this
day with little success. The misnamed Native Title Act has become
nothing more than a way of legalising the continuing theft of land by
the colonizers. As Marandoo Yanner put it the other day, "For every
[square]kilometer we've gained we've lost 100 square kilometres".

Instead of Native Title being something worth valuing and respecting
it has been universally seen as a problem by the comprador class led
by John Howard, the traitor. I accuse him of high treason.

When this country is invaded by the next colonial empire they will
turn around to us all and say your title only exists in the 'crown' of
some old empire. How can you demand that we respect your backyards and
your farms when you have shown no obligation to settle with your own
people. This is the great travesty that has been wrought over the last
12 years by this cowardly little man beholden to no Australian cause.
This man has betrayed us all irrespective of our antecedents. Sure he
has had allies on both sides of politics but it has been his desire to
live in the lotus land of the present, recognizing no past and no
future, that has called the tune.

What sort of country are we that celebrates our soldiers acting as
mercenaries ('lest we forget' indeed) and despises and forgets those
people who have fought and died defending it's own shores over the
last 200 years?

http://kiangardarup.blogspot.com/2007/05/40-years-on-jaccuse.html