The History Wars

Australia changed forever on June 3, 1992, when the High Court dismissed terra nullius, the legal fiction that the continent and its outlying islands belonged to no one before the arrival of the Europeans.

In his Redfern speech of December 1992, Keating spoke about the crimes committed against Aborigines throughout Australia’s history. “We took the traditional lands and smashed the original way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers.”

For the Liberals Mabo was a heaven-sent opportunity for another fear-and-loathing campaign. With the help of mining magnates and the media, many Australians came to believe their own backyards and farming/grazing lands could be taken away from them. The nation was instantly engulfed by hate, racism and division and so started the History Wars.

During his prime ministership, John Howard delivered a speech in October 2006 on Quadrant’s fiftieth anniversary, where he openly praised those who had led the campaign to deny both the child removal and the genocide, stating of Quadrant’s endeavours: “none is more important than the role it has played as counterforce to the 'black-armband' view of Australian history.” - a derogatory term coined by historian Geoffrey Blainey (after Mabo), then adopted by many prominent politicians and commentators ever after.

The steady covert support offered by the Howard government and the enthusiastic overt support offered by the Murdoch press, in particular by its flagship, the Australian, led to a counter-revolution concerning the interpretation of Australia's indigenous dispossession and genocide.

Initially driven mainly by uranium miners fearful of further land-rights legislation and expressed most sharply in the speeches of the head of Western Mining, Hugh Morgan, it began not with historical revisionism, but with plainly racist denigration of traditional Aboriginal culture of a kind not heard in Australia for decades.

One of the Howard government's last contributions to politics was to decline the ratification of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The newly elected Rudd government reconsidered and gave it nothing more than endorsement. The treaty remains unsigned today.

After a national apology to the indigenous people (of which only half of Australia supported and a large number of Liberal MPs did not show up), Prime Minister Kevin Rudd later changed his view as an offer of truce in the History Wars, twice arguing that a nation’s history could be more interesting if no blood had been shed on its soil and also warning against 'neglecting or even deriding the great stories of our explorers, of our pioneers, and our entrepreneurs'.

The racist denigration of the indigenous people continued on. The Murdoch press launched a new attack, fuelled by a review of Indigenous employment conducted for the Federal Government in 2015 by billionaire mining magnate Andrew Forrest - described by Prime Minister Tony Abbott as 'pulling them up by the bootstraps'.

At a time when more than 200 indigenous communities across the nation were being closed down, Mr Abbott supported Forrest's campaign, claiming the indigenous problem was caused by their inability to forgive Australia for it's past wrong doings, further suggesting "what we can't do is endlessly subsidise [bad] lifestyle choices". Mr Abbott, born in the UK, further claimed that Australia was unsettled before British "foreign investment".

Under the new prime minstership of Malcolm Turnbull, Forrest continued to denigrate the indigenous people, going so far as to produce graphic video evidence of the social problems faced by indigenous people in a push to impose heavier Income Support controls on indigenous communities. Communities who already make up 84% of those who work 10hrs/wk more for their welfare payments than non-indigenous communities.

After cutting $600 million from indigenous services, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull remains firmly focused on rolling out Andrew Forrest's income support control mechanism, the Healthy Welfare Card, which makes only 10% cash available to them (20% if they're good little boys and girls), restricts where they can buy groceries and domestic goods, requires special permission for any other spending and, very shortly, will cut them off income support completely if they test positive for drugs.

The Murdoch press campaign waged against indigenous Australians reports 'nearly half of all adult indigenous Australians are now primarily reliant on welfare', often referring to it as passive welfare and claiming it is the destruction of indigenous society. Such claims as "Long term welfare dependency sucks the life out of people" further imply it is the indigenous people who have brought poverty and misfortune upon themselves.

One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson's contribution to the denigration of the indigenous people was made a public spectacle when she suggested there was no definition of Aboriginal, sparking a yet another national racism debate. According to her book, Mrs Hanson shares Hugh Morgan's views - that aboriginals are cannibals and won't survive without state intervention.

The 230 year prevailing political 'intent' is clear; to convince the Australian public that indigenous people pose a threat, not only to themselves but to all Australians, and must be inflicted with ever harsher conditions to disrupt their ability to remain a group with a national identity.

According to Article 2 of the UN Geneva Convention: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with 'intent' to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Consider (A) Indigenous Australian avoidable deaths under the Coalition Government (about 0.1 million avoidable deaths over 12 years out of a population of about 460,000; passive murder) as compared to (B) Jewish deaths in Nazi German-occupied Hungary in 1944/45 (0.2-0.4 million deaths out of a Jewish population of 0.7 million; mostly active murder).

Anyone denying (B) faces 10 years in prison in Austria and lengthy imprisonment in other Western European countries – yet Australia continues to effectively ignore (A).