The constitution is a profoundly racist document, an expression of White Australia, of settler history, with the concepts of Australia having been “discovered” by Europeans under the fiction of terra nullius. Implicit in it is “the passing of the Aborigines”.
The one issue on which all parties in the Australian colonies agreed in 1901 was White Australia. The Australian Labor Party was zealous on this. The Australian way of dealing with racism was to deny it existed.
Failure to recognize the suffering and marginalization of First Nations people was the core of what anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, in his important Boyer Lectures for the ABC in 1968, called “the great Australian silence”.
Indian soldiers were invited to the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in Sydney at 10am on January 1, 1901, but no Aboriginal Australians. The omission may not have been deliberate – perhaps it never occurred to the organizers to ask any.
It is egregious cynicism to argue in 2023 that a positive reference to First Nations people would bring a divisive racist element into the Constitution.
Source: “The… – The Fiberal Party of Australia – Lies & Misdemeanours | Facebook
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