In 1983 as a young naïve youth worker I moved to Alice Springs to see what I could do to help Aboriginal people. Since the early 1970’s I had been concerned about what I’d read about what was happening with Aborigines in Central Australia and wanted to do something to help.
I spent a total time of six years in Alice Springs, finally leaving very depressed and convinced that the situation was unresolvable and could never be ‘fixed’. But one thing that struck me as unusual and always bothered me for the six years I was there, and since, was the constant call for ‘self-determination’, not so much by Aboriginal people themselves, but by the whitefella activists amongst them, some I later found out to be card-carrying members of the Communist Party, some who now hold senior positions in bureaucracy and academia.
The repeated demands for “Aboriginal controlled organisations” (which were inevitably run by activist whitefellas from Sydney and Melbourne, supporting a token Aboriginal ‘boss’) always sat uncomfortably with me and I could never quite work out why. Now I understand.
Contemporary Aboriginal self-determination is not about ‘fitting in’ with the rest of mainstream Australia, of integrating or assimilating with the rest of us, but of splitting away from mainstream Australia and doing their own thing. Meanwhile, the rest of us get to pay for it whilst the rent seekers actually produce nothing of value and economically contribute very little to the community. Indeed, as a result of self-determination, many self-destruct, ruining their own lives and those of their children.
The term ‘assimilation’ is now an anathema to progressives, although ‘integration’ now seems the term de rigueur but it’s essentially the same thing. Aborigines need to learn to fit in to and be a part of what we have known to be Australian culture for the last 200 years. Indeed, most of them have. (So why are they still receiving special treatment, benefits and funding you may well ask? That’s a topic for another conversation.)
None of this means that Aborigines need to lose their own culture – far from it. Unfortunately, much of what passes for Aboriginal ‘culture’ today is in fact a recent invention of the last 50 years. Fortunately, much authentic Aboriginal culture of the past has vanished – although unfortunately still practised in some remote regions, the initiations, genital mutilation, deliberate cicatrices, burns, ritual spearing, sorcery and payback murders have by and large disappeared, although ‘humbugging’ is still common. Nevertheless, inter-tribal grievances often remain alive and well, as can be seen in some football matches. Even though at times they still get violent, at least those inter-tribal conflicts can be played out with a football and not with spears and clubs.
However, the Aboriginal industry is now chock full of ill-informed urban deluded pretenders, myth-makers and illusionists giving rise to the pretence of ‘Aboriginal knowledge’, everything from agriculture and fisheries (a lá Bruce Pascoe), water and fire management (a lá ‘cultural burning’) to Aboriginal ‘art’, ‘fashion’ and ‘astronomy’, and not to mention Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley’s merely 45-year-old and thoroughly overdone ‘Welcome to Country”. This is mostly all snake oil fakery at its best, all in an effort to convince contemporary Australians that Aborigines of old were something they clearly never were. Even worse, most of the history books written about early Aboriginal life and culture have vanished from the shelves to be replaced by modern anti-white ‘invasion, colonisation and inter-generational trauma’ literature. It is unusual today to find any history book about Aborigines in a secondary or tertiary institution that is more than fifteen years old. This is the real cultural censure and erasure that is happening right under our noses in today’s Australia. We are the poorer for it.
Meanwhile, the recent invention, exaggeration, distortion and misrepresentation of the alleged Australian Aborigine ‘Frontier Wars’ serves to create a replacement ‘history’ in an attempt to raise the status of Aboriginal people and degrade the status of the original white settlers. Yet another distorted sham produced by the same power-grabbing activist elite. It is in their interests to falsify and distort our history in an attempt to make us all seem like racists.
I would like to have more self-determination in my own life too, but I am constrained by the laws of the land. Unfortunately, self-determination for many people who identify as Aboriginal today means they can do whatever I like, and there’s nothing you whitefellas can do about it. This is nowhere more apparent than on the streets of Alice Springs today.
‘Self-determination’ means we’ll do what we like and you can pay for it. Self-determination’ is about taking all that whitefellas have to offer, but offering nothing back in return. Self-determination is about undermining whitefella institutions, judiciaries, organisations and bureaucracies, and taking control of them. In reality, self-determination is about enculturated white people who with maybe a speck of Aboriginal DNA in them now identify exclusively as ‘Aborigines’, thereby giving themselves an economic and social leg-up. It always was and always will be about money, power and control, and who has it. It means that we will take over all of your whitefella institutions and you will not try to stop us, and you will like it (in much the same way as the ‘gender equity’ and ‘critical race theory’ brigades have already successfully done). It means that the cultural Marxist ‘long march through the institutions’ is almost complete. Australians must reject the concept of ‘self-determination’ for one race of people in this country and their falsely claimed preeminent ascendency over the rest of us.
More examples of ‘self-determination’ can be found in the closure of climbing sites at Ayers Rock (Uluru), Mt Warning (Wollumbin), Mt Gillen, and many Grampians climbs, all for ill-defined or unclear ‘cultural’ reasons’. After much outcry, consideration is now being given to re-opening the Mt Warning climb escorted by ‘Indigenous Guides’ for a fee. What a surprise – more rent seeking. Australian place names are also rapidly being replaced with (most likely now made-up) Aboriginal names (eg: K’gari, once known as Fraser Island). All of this process is about claims to ownership – to ‘sovereignty’. These changes should not be mistaken for deference to Aboriginal culture; it’s simply an insidious takeover. What we are experiencing here is by definition peaceful guerrilla warfare, and guerrilla warfare it is, with the specific intention of one ideology taking over the country from another!
Don’t believe it? Look no further than what’s happened in New Zealand.
Further, self-determination is not about ‘closing the gap’, nor is it about Aborigines ‘having a voice’, because all of that can be achieved without self-determination, or a change to the Constitution. Indeed, the $35 billion+ currently being spent on Aboriginal affairs, and the 11+ Aboriginal Members of Parliament is more than enough to fulfil both aims. The ‘Voice’ referendum is purely and simply about the drive towards Aboriginal sovereignty, the ultimate ‘self-determination’, which can only be achieved through changing the Constitution. We must never allow that to happen!
Self-determination today under the Albanese Government means that Australians will be subject to a referendum to divide Australia along the lines of race, which is an anathema to our egalitarian society. Yet nevertheless, the Government, via its Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Amendment Bill 2022 states that “The Bill will also allow the Commonwealth to fund educational campaigns to promote voters’ understanding of referendums and the referendum proposal.” At the same time, in a joint media release issued on 1/12/20221, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Special Minister of State Don Farrell, Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, and Special Envoy for Reconciliation and the Implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart Pat Dodson (brother of UNDRIP co-author Mick Dodson) clearly stated that:
To support community education, the Government proposes to temporarily lift a funding restriction in the Act, to enable funding of educational initiatives to counter misinformation.
The entire media release is worth reading, but what stands out, hiding in plain sight, is the Albanese Government’s intention to de-facto fund and promote the ‘Yes’ campaign whilst at the same time to not fund and hamstring the ‘No’ campaign. Indeed, anything that the No campaign says can and will be construed as “misinformation”. We have seen this already with Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton’s appalling attacks against Jacinta Price – watch out for more of that to come – perhaps a foretaste of an empowered Voice?
To make an informed self-determination for their own referendum choice, ordinary Australians must have full access to both sides of the argument, pro and con, yes and no, yet the Albanese Government has already legislated to ensure this will not happen. Australians are already subject to a massive daily pro-yes propaganda barrage by the taxpayer funded ABC and SBS. This is not informed self-determination for ordinary Aussies – this is force-fed propaganda to push a specific agenda upon all Australians, the actual intent of which is not being revealed (indeed, it is being carefully hidden) and remains unknown to the vast majority of the population. Once Aussies realise what the ‘Voice’ is really all about – Aboriginal ‘sovereignty’ – it will be too late!
In what is clearly not a ‘conspiracy theory’, the entire game plan is laid out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), co-authored by Mick Dodson, the brother of Labor’s Special Envoy for Reconciliation and the Implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart Senator Pat Dodson, and ratified by the Rudd Government in 2009. Do you see what they’re doing here? It’s time to Wake Up Australia before it’s too late. The self-determining and indeed self-serving takeover of Australia by socialist ‘indigenous’ activists and their supporters who identify as Aboriginal is already well under way!
In addition, the Australian Human Rights Commission has in 2021 called upon the federal Government to “develop a national program to implement UNDRIP and schedule it to the definition of human rights in the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act 2011 (Cth)”2 This too is a major part of what the ‘Voice’ is all about. It’s another path to the same goal.
Labor and their confident conceited socialist acolytes would have us believe that support for the Yes vote is a lay down misère – it is beholden upon the rest of us for the future of all Australians and for the survival of our just and fair egalitarian democracy that it is not.
It is difficult to believe that most Australians would support a form of ‘self-determination’ for Aboriginal Australians that would mean the creation of a separate Aboriginal sovereign nation within the Australian continent, but this is exactly where the ‘Voice’ will take us. Once embedded in the Constitution, such an internal ‘sovereign nation’ will become inevitable and impossible to get rid of. This is the message we must get out to all Australians!
References:
1 https://ministers.ag.gov.au/media-centre/next-steps-towards-voice-referendum-01-12-2022
Dr David Barton is a proud Celtic and Anglo-Saxon man with a long generational family history in Australia and lives in Central Victoria.
