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Vol. 82/No. 9 March 5, 2018
Protesters demand Aboriginal rights, hit racist ‘Australia Day’
BY RON POULSEN
SYDNEY — Tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly youth, protested
around the country Jan. 26 in the largest demonstrations in support of
Aboriginal rights in decades. The actions were called to counter the
rulers’ patriotic Australia Day holiday.
Aboriginal people view the anniversary of the founding of the original
British penal settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788 as Invasion Day, making
it a focal point for anger over oppressive social conditions indigenous
people continue to face. This undermines the moral legitimacy and
so-called “national cohesion” the capitalist rulers crave as they face a
deepening political and moral crisis.
Aboriginal youth and elders here led off a march of up to 20,000 from
The Block — a traditional inner-city Aboriginal district — to the nearby
Yabun concert celebrating indigenous culture and music.
Another Aboriginal rights rally here drew 1,000. Backed by Labor Party
and union officials, some Aboriginal leaders called for a treaty between
the government and Australia’s First Peoples, similar to those reached
between native peoples and other colonial-settler imperialist
governments in New Zealand and Canada.
They marched to the building in central Sydney where a Day of Mourning
congress was held in 1938, the first national Aboriginal civil rights
protest.
The marches were awash with red, black and yellow, the colors of the
Aboriginal flag. Chanting “No pride in genocide!” and “Always was,
always will be, Aboriginal land!” protesters pointed to the decimation
of the indigenous population by massacres, disease and being driven off
their ancestral tribal lands.
Largest such protests since 1970s
Thousands in other cities around the country joined similar protests. By
far the biggest was in Melbourne, where some 60,000 took to the streets.
“I haven’t seen a crowd like this since the 1970s, the heyday of the
Aboriginal political movement,” Gary Foley, a longtime Black activist
and now a history professor, told the rally.
The Australian rulers’ celebration “is essentially about colonization,
death, murder, and rape,” Aboriginal activist Adrian Burragubba told the
Sydney rally. Burragubba is the leader of a campaign by traditional
Aboriginal landowners to block the huge Adani coal mine development in
Queensland.
Ken Canning from Fighting in Resistance Equally, who chaired the Sydney
rally, drew attention to Black deaths in detention. “We have the highest
deaths in custody rates in the world per head of population, the highest
imprisonment rates,” he said.
“Too many cops, never any justice!” marchers chanted as they kicked off
the demonstration here. Other banners denounced federal government
police intervention in the affairs of remote Northern Territory
Aboriginal communities.
The protest was to highlight the “fight for the right to our land, our
culture, our language, our people, our laws,” Sue-Ellen Tighe, founder
of Grandmothers Against Removals, told the Sydney rally. “In 2018 we
should not be the marginalized race in the nation. We are the First
Peoples.”
Some placards called for the Australian government to “change the date”
of Australia Day, reflecting a growing debate in politics and the media
here. Some Greens, Labor and Black representatives to Parliament seek to
deflect Aboriginal protests by moving the nationalist celebration to
some other, “less divisive” holiday.
In recent years, the rulers have used the celebration to talk about
Australia’s growing “multiculturalism,” trying to reinforce the myth
that “we are one.”
“But there is no ‘we’ in Australia’s class-divided society,” I said,
speaking for the Communist League, at a Militant Labor Forum here Feb.
17. “This is what we explained to people on the march.
“The billionaire ruling families exploit and oppress the real ‘us’ — the
working class and its allies, whether Aborigine or Caucasian, immigrant
or native-born,” I said. “The Communist League points to the example of
the socialist revolution in Cuba, where workers and farmers organized to
take political power and uprooted discrimination and oppression.”
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