Goodooga, northwest NSW, 23 January 10 - - In this year of a federal election, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his Labor Party had better be prepared to talk to the Aboriginal Nations, or face a tsunami-type backlash, says the convenor of an Aboriginal summit in Canberra from the 30th of January to the 1st of February.
“We will not lie down and take it anymore,” Michael Anderson writes in a media release.
Delegates are coming from all over Australia, notably Perth, Kalgoorlie, Darwin, Sydney, Melbourne, north Queensland and the bush, he says. “They’re telling me they’re tired of government controls.”
The summit is open to the media and Mr Anderson says SBS Radio, the National Indigenous Radio Network and national Aboriginal TV have indicated they’ll cover it. Proceedings will also be streamed live on the internet.
Mr Anderson calls on elders and youth to find solutions to problems created by Great Britain and “maintained by the colonial state of Australia”.
“If the Australian public truly wants us to bridge the gap and address the disadvantages, then I call upon and urge all people who call themselves Aussies to stand behind us and help us get the message across to those whom you elect to give us a voice and let us deal with the issues that state and federal governments know are of their doing.”
The release lists the issues troubling Aboriginal people:
· rise of racism;
· attacking the poor through Minister Jenny Macklin’s welfare quarantining;
· using children as a way of winning the hearts and minds of the Australian public so as to justify their assimilation policy of forcibly removing children from their families;
· shutting down most of the self-determined Aboriginal programs;
· using government-nominate d and -approved Aboriginal collaborators to impose their will through the so-called Aboriginal advisory panels represents the work of troubled and desperate administrators;
· to continue to use police to daily terrorise our children on the streets is a criminal act of the state;
· to police Aboriginal communities through a programme to make Aborigines fear authority are the actions of a dictator state;
· to maintain an operation of welfarism to control the lives of the Aboriginal people is the also the act of a dictatorship;
· removing children and giving them to non-Indigenous people to raise without their Aboriginal heritage and language is an act of genocide by the state;
· to deny Aboriginal land rights is a continuation of British colonialism
- and the list goes on.
“We are and continue to be sovereign independent Aboriginal nations; the land is ours and always will be. The wealth that has been extracted from the land does not help Australia and we, the traditional owners, get poorer and are forced to live on the state’s welfare system.
“The Australian public have always trusted in the words of the governments that what they were doing was in the best interest of the Aborigines, but the public have no idea of the pain and suffering that we have to continue to endure. The dysfunctionalism that permeates through our communities cannot be dealt with through bricks and mortar alone.”
Mr Anderson, the last remaining founder of the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra in 1972, writes, “We know who we are and from this day forth there will be no words such as Aboriginal or Indigenous, for I am a Euahlayi Dthane, a Black man of the Euahlayi Nation through my mother. Through my father I am a Gumilaroi Murri. This is what we now need to tell the state leaders of this country and we need to demand that when they talk of our issue and our nations they need to identify who and what nation they talk of. This must be a demand that we stand by.”
Mr Anderson’s release in full:
In this year of a federal election Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his Labor Party had better be prepared to talk to us, the Aboriginal Nations, or face a tsunami-type backlash.
The rise of racism; attacking the poor through Minister Jenny Macklin’s welfare quarantining; using children as a way of winning the hearts and minds of the Australian public so as to justify their assimilation policy of forcibly removing children from their families; shutting down most of the self-determined Aboriginal programs; using government-nominate d and -approved Aboriginal collaborators to impose their will through the so-called Aboriginal advisory panels represents the work of troubled and desperate administrators; to continue to use police to daily terrorise our children on the streets is a criminal act of the state; to police Aboriginal communities through a programme to make Aborigines fear authority are the actions of a dictator state; to maintain an operation of welfarism to control the lives of the Aboriginal people is the also the act of a dictatorship; removing children and giving them to non-Indigenous people to raise without their Aboriginal heritage and language is an act of genocide by the state; to deny Aboriginal land rights is a continuation of British colonialism - and the list goes on.
We are and continue to be sovereign independent Aboriginal nations; the land is ours and always will be. The wealth that has been extracted from the land does not help Australia and we, the traditional owners, get poorer and are forced to live on the state’s welfare system.
The ‘New Way’ summit I have convened to Canberra from the 30th of January to the 1st of February is a call to our elders and youth to find solutions to problems that have been created by the foreign state of Great Britain and are maintained by the colonial state of Australia.
If the Australian public truly wants us to bridge the gap and address the disadvantages, then I call upon and urge all people who call themselves Aussies to stand behind us and help us get the message across to those whom you elect to give us a voice and let us deal with the issues that state and federal governments know are of their doing. The Australian public have always trusted in the words of the governments that what they were doing was in the best interest of the Aborigines, but the public have no idea of the pain and suffering that we have to continue to endure. The dysfunctionalism that permeates through our communities cannot be dealt with through bricks and mortar alone.
We know who we are and from this day forth there will be no words such as Aboriginal or Indigenous, for I am a Euahlayi Dthane, a Black man of the Euahlayi Nation through my mother. Through my father I am a Gumilaroi Murri. This is what we now need to tell the state leaders of this country and we need to demand that when they talk of our issue and our nations they need to identify who and what nation they talk of. This must be a demand that we stand by.
As the leader of my nation, the Euahlayi of north-western New South Wales and southern central Queensland, and as the convener of this New Way Summit, I call upon the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, once again to take notice to this summit, for it will lay the foundation for the confrontation that Australians constantly say they never.
The spirits of our ancestors, who fought the white man, are always with us as we have gone from one fight to the other. They are always reminding us that blood was shed every year since the British invasion of our ancestral lands. No Australian history wants to talk of this but we will now remind them that we have survived and we will fight and Australia needs to be aware of the anger that is inside many of our pre-existing diverse nations.
Using the divide of full-blooded Aborigines against the Aboriginal castes has been the backdrop for division as was devised by the governments and their advisors, but do not count on this anymore, for we all share the same shocking history of white oppression and rule over our lives and the way we have done business since the coming of the white man. This will end at this New Way Summit.
We will not lie down and take it anymore.
Outcomes of all discussions at the summit will be available for perusal and comment every day atwww.wgar.info. Live streaming will be accessible at http://www.ustream. tv/channel/ wgar.
Michael Anderson can be contacted at 02 68296355 landline, 04272 92 492 mobile, 02 68296375 fax,ngurampaa@bigpond. com.au.
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