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Green Left – AUSTRALIA: Aboriginal MP: ALP fails on land rights

Aboriginal MP: ALP fails on land rights Peter Robson13 June 2009 – “Marion Scrymgour — the highest ranking Aboriginal member of any government in Australia — quit the Northern Territory Labor Party over its Aboriginal policy on June 4. As an independent, she now holds the balance of power. .The former Indigenous affairs minister quit the party due to disagreements on the proposed “outstations” policy, which would provide priority infrastructure funding to only 20 of the roughly 600 remote Aboriginal homeland communities.

She opposed the policy, saying it was not what the ALP had taken to the August 2008 election. “I feel strongly because we have lied to Aboriginal people”,………………..“You’re allowing a vibrant movement in those homelands to wither and to just be left out there with no government support. There is this fear that, you know, we’re going to just totally walk away from homelands, not put any extra funding in that they need, but to allow them to be abandoned and they have no choice out of necessity to move back to the main community.”

Aboriginal homelands represent some of the earliest forms of native title recognised by Australian law. Their beginnings date back to the Gurindji strike in 1966, when Aboriginal workers fought and won the right to return to their traditional homelands and build communities.

This right was granted in 1975 and today about 10,000 Aboriginal people in the NT live on their ancestral lands. Forty-three of these communities are in Scrymgour’s seat of Arafura. ………………………. As National Indigenous Times editor Chris Graham wrote on Crikey.com on June 5: “Marion Scrymgour just changed black politics forever. In politics you can justify almost anything. But being an Aboriginal member of the Labor or Liberal Party is no longer one of them.”

Green Left – AUSTRALIA: Aboriginal MP: ALP fails on land rights

June 15, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized