The Bill of Rights was first originated from England, where it asserts for constitutional protection for individuals, and lists different types of prohibitions on government power (Bill of rights institute, 2016). The process of which Australia became a nation, Federation, it involved constitutional conventions, although our constitutional founders addressed that the issue of the Bill of Rights, they ultimately decided against it. McClelland (2002, pg. 138) describes the rejection of proposals to include fundamental rights in Australia’s constitution that was not based on considered arguments. The basic rights of Australians were adequately protected by common law, but instead, it was a combination of racist motives and an obsession with preserving…
My research for this project will be on Nyoongar (Noongar/Nooga/Nyungar) people. Indigenous Australians are also referred to as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia and there are several hundred groups/communities/tribes spread across Australia e.g. Ngunnawal people were the first inhabitants of Canberra, Eora people of Sydney, Alyawarre people of north east Alice Springs, Nyoongar people of Western Australia etc. Nyoongar people are Indigenous Australians who live in the south-western corner of Western Australia (from Geraldton to Esperance) which consists of 14 different groups.…
RESEARCH QUESTION Consider how Canadian colonial policy has affected Aboriginal sovereignty in the post-confederation Canada and modern day Canada; examine factors that influenced the right to exercise these sovereignty claims through a Foucauldian lens considering race and racialization. METHODOLOGY I will be evaluating my question as a within-case comparison, looking that the differences over time, in this instance post-confederation Canada (1867) and modern day Canada (1980’s-2016). I will utilize Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power to analyse tactics of colonial oppression over Aboriginal sovereignty. My comparison will identify factors such as colonialism, The Indian Act and residential school assimilation policies…
Aboriginal land rights is the return of the land which was unfairly taken from them on the original settlement of Australia. Eddie koiki Mabo fought against this and tried to save the meriam islands from the Queensland government who tried to deny them use of their own lands Mabo was strongly against this as his people had been there longer then anyone could remember. He claimed they had lived in permanent communities and had their own political and social organisations in their community. The qld government began to try and take over the native Aboriginals way of life on mer island. But Mabo felt so strongly on this issue that he lead a court case trying to deny the government any chance of taking their land but the case also aimed to allow…
Law reform is the act of altering laws to better suit the importance of social values. Laws constantly need to be modified to suit the needs of the society, they cannot remain static. An essential feature of the legal system is to adapt and solve uprising problems. The reforming of law is needed for it to remain relevant and have the support of the general public.…
The importance of the court can be seen through the development of the legislation and their essential role in Native Title matters. Aboriginal ownership of land has always been recognised by Britain; however, despite British recognition, the colonists in Australia managed to officially disregard this recognition by creating Australian law on the concept of ‘Terra Nullius’. Terra Nullius is the fiction that Australia was unoccupied at the time of colonisation. Many land councils and aboriginal organisations throughout Australia lobbied the Federal Government to protect any native title and fought for a more flexible and appropriate system than the one offered through the courts. It wasn’t until 1992 that Native title was first recognised in…
As a system ascertained to be holistic in approach, and based on the philosophy of indigenous inhabitants, the indigenous justice system mostly guided by unwritten laws, customs, and cultural values has not only helped in curtailing crime, but also served restorative purpose for both the offenders and the victims (Melton, 1995) . This paper attempts to contribute to the body of knowledge on the indigenous justice system by answering two main research questions: an exploration of how the Indigenous Justice System works among the Aboriginal Peoples; and how effective the informal social control mechanism of this system has been in curtailing crime and deviance. The purpose of the paper is to view the Indigenous Justice System of Aboriginal Peoples…
The first settlers arrived in Australia 35,000 years ago during the great ice age. The sea levels lowered between Indonesia and New Guinea and created a land bridge that would allow nomadic tribes to cross from Southeast Asia. Like many other humans of that epoch, they were hunters and gatherers and traveled from place to place in search of young creatures. Thousands of years after these drifters arrived; the glaciers thawed and brought up the seas once again, which kept the citizenry of Australia permanently in that esteem.…
Aboriginal people (Indigenous people of Australia, see Image 1) have the longest living cultural history of any single language group in the world, dating back to more than 50,000 years. It has been able to survive this long as it is a dynamic culture. A dynamic culture is a culture that is able to adapt to the time period and is able to change without losing its core paradigms. This is why Aboriginal spirituality is known as a dynamic religion as its culture which is dynamic, shaped its religion.…
1. Introduction Indigenous Australians suffer significant disadvantages in life expectancy, health and welfare status in comparison to non- indigenous Australians with chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular, liver and respiratory diseases contributing significantly to this disparity. Complex interrelated factors such as high-risk behaviours, limitations in access to health services, cultural and historic beliefs and influences on the management of these conditions have a significant role in the observed health inequity. The overall social and economic disadvantage and disparity in health infrastructure, employment, housing and education is associated with and contributory to several of these risk factors. Some of these social determinants are explored here in the context of type 2 diabetes in the Australian indigenous peoples.…
Throughout the course of history various ethnic and racial groups have been discriminated against. In the mid-nineteenth centuries it was the Native Americans who faced heavy discriminatory practices by the American people. In, “Los Angeles’ 1850s Slave Market Is Now the Site of a Federal Courthouse”, an article by Robert Petersen, he describes the tactics employed by the white settlers in order to suppress the Indians and take over the land. The article begins by describing how when the Europeans came to America in 1769, there were more than 300,000 Natives that lived in the area we know today as California.…
When I asked many of my Asian friends about their impression about Australian people, almost no one thought of Aboriginal people at first. I recalled a friend’s excitement about his first holiday last year down under where his only perception about the Aboriginal people is the boomerang bought from a souvenir shop in Melbourne. Before coming to Australia, my impression about them was limited to black curly hair people living in the outback, boomerang, didgeridoo, traditional dance typically portrayed in tourism brochures. I hardly knew that these are merely some of stereotypes about the oldest living people on earth. After living in this country for a while, I began to realise more serious misconceptions attributed to them perceived by contemporary…
Individual discrimination, or discrimination that individuals carry out in their everyday livings, typically for the reason that they remain prejudiced, however occasionally all the more so if they exist not prejudiced. Individual discrimination is an abundancy in the humankind. The insults and humiliations that John Howard Griffin was forced to endure in his experimentation about 40 years ago and concluded as soon as he returned back to the actuality of being white, but then again individuals of a different shade cannot partake in the convenience of transferring their race or ethnicity. On behalf of them, individual discrimination as a result of whites remains a repetitive event. Joe Feagin (1991), (pg. 418) a previous president of the American…
The Yolngu culture, which means, “person”, is among the oldest living cultures on earth. Some researchers claim it is 400,000 years from two different lineages. Forty four thousand years ago the mixing of genes was reported before Australia separated from Papua New Guinea. Researched have stated that humanity could have started in Australia. The Aboriginal people were considered the first Australian.…
Discrimination Against Aboriginal People In Canada: The Fight Isn’t Over The lives of the Aboriginal people in Canada have never been the same since European settlers unjustifiably stole their native land right from under their feet. Life for Aboriginal people will always be affected by the European colonization of Canada, and discrimination against the first nations community still exists to this day.…