Paul Gregoire: Labor votes down Lidia Thorpe’s bill to uphold First Nation’s rights in law

Paul Gregoire discusses Labor votes down Lidia Thorpe’s bill to uphold First Nation’s rights in law.

Senator Lidia Thorpe had introduced the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Bill 2022. This was defeated in the Senate 27-10 despite the essence of the bill being just requiring the PM to report to parliament how well the Australian government is complying with the UNDRIP.

“Australia is especially violent when compared amongst the other English-speaking settler colonies,” Mununjali Yugambeh and South Sea Islander Professor Chelsea Watego, author of Another Day in the Colony, told the UNDRIP roundtable.

“We are familiar with terra nullius. We were deemed so subhuman that we lacked any Indigenous political sovereignty. And while we had the Mabo decision, that idea that our Indigenous political sovereignty not be recognised still remains firmly intact, as we saw today.”

The “violence is enacted” against First Peoples via all Australian institutions, she said. The UNDRIP held an opportunity for a way forward, and the current “needs-based approach” taken to First Nations affairs restricts self-determination.

This rights-denying system, Watego said, results in local First Peoples remaining the most incarcerated people on the planet. “The evidence base is clear here: the state is insisting on perpetrating violence on Indigenous peoples.”

Emphasis Mine

We, white Australians, have to accept that we are beneficiaries of a racist system. We are not the primary beneficiaries as these are the Capitalists and Rentiers. However, we are enough of beneficiary to be complicit in this racist violence.

With the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum, the momentum towards greater recognition of Indigeneous rights has slipped back. We have to educate ourselves about the truth of Australian history and support movements for Indigineous rights.