Full rights for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders

Introduction

When English colonisation began here less than two centuries ago, there were already at least three main peoples inhabiting Australia and the nearby islands – those who came to be known as the Torres Strait Islanders, the Australian Aborigines and the Tasmanian Aborigines.

Geographically isolated from the main areas of human progress, in a difficult environment, these peoples had nevertheless developed, on the basis of simple communal economics, highly complex and intricate human cultures, still of tremendous interest and importance to mankind and studied as such by scientists and artists.

The English colonists, products of a rising capitalist system which treated its own working people with the brutality and insensitivity epitomised by the Australian penal settlements, behaved, as might be expected, even worse towards the native peoples.

Before a century was out, the Tasmanians had been exterminated, and most mainland Aboriginal societies disrupted, robbed of their lands and brought under the control of discriminatory Acts backed up by ruthless special police. The Torres Strait Islanders, though able to maintain some control in their many islands, were subjugated and placed under the control of the Queensland Government, which was then importing many thousands of near-slave labourers from the Pacific Islands, many of whose descendants now live in Queensland and northern New South Wales.

Government settlements and religious missions, invested with powers of government, were created, especially in the sparsely settled northern areas, to become reservoirs of cheap labour for the growing cattle industry.

This, in brief, is the genesis of the so-called "Aboriginal problem", which has now become an Australian and international scandal – the problem of many thousands of gifted, capable human beings denied the human rights guaranteed by the United Nations Charter in the land they have inhabited since ancient times.

In recent years, especially since the late 1950s, awareness of this problem has grown rapidly and governments have been compelled to take some steps – however reluctant, belated and inadequate – towards rectifying some outstanding evils and injustices.

But the basic condition of the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders remains that of oppressed national minorities. This is emphasised, not contradicted, by the fact that the great majority of them are poverty-ridden labourers.

The high unemployment, sickness and illiteracy rates among them, their generally substandard housing and education, and their virtual exclusion from most skilled trades and professions are the direct result of official discrimination against them as peoples, not of any natural shortcomings.

Person for person, they have the same potential as any other human being. What they lack is opportunity, encouragement and help.

This programme is published with the aim of showing what can and must be done in the interests of justice to the oppressed peoples and of Australian democracy.

The Aboriginal national minority is scattered throughout the continent. The Aborigines are most numerous in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

In far northern Australia and in Central Australia they are the majority of the population, the backbone of the cattle industry and, potentially at least, the most capable workforce to develop these areas. They are also becoming large minorities in towns and cities as mechanisation and other causes force them out of the countryside.

Lack of government concern and racist attempts to have only those of pure Aboriginal descent recognised as Aborigines have meant that no proper count of their numbers has ever been made.

More responsible recent estimates, however, indicate that there are not fewer than 100,000 of them.

In addition, there are approximately 6,000 Torres Strait Islanders and some thousands of people descended from other Islanders.

While these are distinct minorities, their general position in Australian society approximates that of the Aborigines. Also, while there are historically formed differences between them, they are tending towards mutual understanding and unity in action as the conscious movement for their rights develops.

Recent amendments to State and Federal Acts have removed some of the most oppressive forms of official discrimination against them, though many remain. They have been given general Federal and State voting rights, but as yet no right to be directly represented as peoples in parliaments and no real control over their own affairs as peoples.

Various Problems

The problems of the peoples differ from place to place. Few still live in primitive conditions, the great majority having been converted into underpaid, underprivileged workers. Some are free, others strictly controlled; some are of pure Aboriginal or Island descent, others of mixed origin. But all who identify themselves as Aborigines or Islanders, are treated as such and accepted as such by the peoples, should so be regarded. Unscientific and insulting definitions in terms of "caste" or "blood" should be rejected.

Living and working conditions differ in different industries, towns and areas.

The outlook of town workers differs from that of those employed under near-slave conditions on cattle stations or pearling luggers, or segregated in Government and Mission settlement areas.

There are differences in law and even in the definition of "Aborigine" from State to State. But all Aborigines and Islanders are oppressed, to a greater or lesser extent, by Acts of the Federal and State Governments, and by discriminatory practices arising from false and irrational prejudices against these peoples which have been cultivated for generations by those who stand to gain from their continued subjugation.

Their problem is a twofold one: the problem of workers suffering exceptionally bad conditions, and the problem of peoples fighting for the right to exist as such.

Science rejects the view that there are naturally superior and inferior peoples.

The Communist Party therefore upholds the right of the Aborigines and Islanders to exist and develop as peoples, to live on their own lands or in the general community according to individual desires, to social equality with other Australians and to full citizen rights.

Their minimum immediate needs are equal citizen rights, equal opportunity of employment, with full trade union rates and conditions, and large-scale Government grants to enable them rapidly to overcome the handicap imposed on them by more than a century of savage exploitation.

The Communist Party opposes both enforced segregation and enforced assimilation of the Aborigines and Islanders and advocates their integration, as distinct peoples, with Australian society as a whole while maintaining their own special rights.

Origin of Protection

In the course of the colonisation of Australia by European settlers, the Aborigines' land has been seized and their social organisation disrupted and largely destroyed. Shooting, poisoning, disease, starvation and degradation had, towards the end of the last century, reduced their numbers to such an extent that official policies towards them were based on a belief that they were dying out.

This was the starting point for the "Protection Acts" introduced by the various State Governments before Federation. These Acts had as their main purpose not the protection of the Aborigines and Islanders but control of them as sources of cheap labour, especially for the cattle and pearling industries.

In the last few years, under growing pressure from the peoples themselves and from democratic-minded individuals in Australia and elsewhere in the world, State and Northern Territory laws have been liberalised to varying degrees, especially in South Australia since Labor assumed power there. But no Government, State or Federal, has yet begun the fundamental programme of work and expenditure essential to enable the peoples to move rapidly into the modern world.

Federal–State Powers

When Australia became a federation of States in 1901, the States jealously retained certain powers, among them power over land, with which the Aboriginal question is intimately connected.

The Federal Constitution specifically excluded Aborigines from the Australian population count and denied the Federal Government the right to make laws with respect to the Aboriginal people in any State.

This has been used again and again by both State and Federal Governments as an excuse for the deplorable situation in the States. Federal control of the main sources of finance has been said to be the reason why States cannot do what is necessary.

This argument, however, ignores the facts that no legal barrier has prevented the Federal Government from action in the Northern Territory, which it controls, and that State Governments have found very large sums of money and settled land and other problems easily in connection with, for example, the entry of big overseas monopolies to exploit mineral deposits.

The Federal Government, after years of successfully evading demands for a referendum to give it the necessary powers, this year gave way but linked the question with another proposal for constitutional reform, thereby confusing the issue.

No amount of legal quibbling can alter the fact that both State and Federal Governments have plain and urgent duties before them: to take whatever steps are needed to make amends for the shameful past.

"Protection" has meant in practice exploitation and persecution of Aborigines and Islanders under State and Federal laws. It has been the excuse for depriving thousands of defenceless people of elementary human rights, segregating them in isolated settlements under white control, destroying their ancient cultures and customs and not replacing these with the major advantages of modern civilisation.

Cheerful Aboriginal youngsters in a NSW country town – what does the future hold for them?

The other side of the river: the all too common sight in Australian country towns – a shack in the Aborigines' "settlement".

A History of Heroism and Struggle

(Continued from Page 10)

The Aboriginal and Island peoples, though naturally gentle and friendly, have defended themselves throughout their history, to the best of their ability. Many stories of their heroism have been recorded. As far back as the twenties and thirties, especially in Queensland and Western Australia, they have been raising demands for human rights in the limited ways open to them. In the immediate post-war years important strikes in Western Australia and the Northern Territory demonstrated that the spirit of struggle was still alive and finding modern forms of expression.

Their continuous history shows the peoples have never lost their sense of identity, despite persistent efforts to have them abandon it.

Herded into sub-standard Government and Mission settlements, denied land ownership, forbidden to organise and control their own individual and social affairs, deprived of up-to-date educational and health services, denied privileges and safeguards enjoyed by other members of the Australian community, or treated as second-class citizens when free of the Acts, the Aborigines and Islanders nevertheless succeeded in maintaining their identity as peoples.

They refused to die and, at least since the early 1950s, their numbers have been increasing.

For many years, devoted individuals pleaded for recognition of the human rights of the Aboriginal and Island peoples, publishing scientific and other materials demonstrating their high intelligence and ability, and exposing many cases of merciless exploitation of them.

But because the Aboriginal people had been broken and divided, with detribalised elements scattered around the towns and the majority segregated in remote settlements, and because racialism was fostered in the Australian labour movement during the long period of domination by right-wing theories, no wide mass movement could develop around the needs of the Aborigines until recent times.

The formation of the USSR following the Revolution of 1917 showed that independence for all nationalities together with international solidarity was the way forward to a new world. In Australia, the formation of the Communist Party of Australia in 1920, with its aim of bringing socialist consciousness to the mass movement, made a new working-class approach to the problem of the Australian Aborigines possible.

From the beginning, the Party fought against all forms of racialism, especially those contained in the "White Australia" policy, and supported efforts to improve the lot of Aborigines.

The publication in 1939 of Tom Wright's pamphlet A New Deal for the Aborigines marked a big step forward in working-class attitudes, though Wright's work suffered from concentrating only on the remaining tribal and semi-tribal Aborigines.

In 1947, Gerald Peel, M.A., then a Communist Party organiser, published a valuable study of the Torres Strait Islanders (Isles of the Torres Strait), putting forward a basic program which has since been enlarged by the Islanders themselves.

Plight Revealed

The Second World War, which necessarily involved struggle against the far-right views and practices of Hitler fascism, raised sharply the fundamental questions of human rights, and revealed the hideous consequences of racialist theories as practised by the fascists.

The plight of the Aborigines became known to thousands of Australians, largely through the movements of the population compelled by industrial and military needs, and through the great contributions by Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to the war effort.

In the course of the post-war years, the great national liberation movements of the peoples of Asia and Africa, the freedom movement of the US Negroes, the South African and Rhodesian issues, and the worldwide struggle against colonialism in all its forms has made an increasing impact on Australia. Those fighting for Aboriginal rights began to gain more support.

Criticism in the United Nations by Soviet, African, and other delegates of Australian policies towards the peoples of New Guinea and the Aborigines has helped Australians to realise that the conditions forced on these peoples are among the worst in the world.
The great post-war immigration compelled Australians to learn to live with people of various national origins. The inhuman treatment of the Aborigines became even more obvious when contrasted with official attitudes to "New Australians".

Since the war, there has been a very big expansion of air and road transport. Radio and other means of communication have been greatly improved. Formerly remote areas have been systematically explored in search of oil, bauxite, iron, copper, uranium and other minerals. Inland mines and settlements have been developed. Military activities, including the establishment of rocket ranges and the siting of bases, have ranged over big areas.

A by-product of this has been improved public knowledge of hitherto concealed facts about the conditions of the Aboriginal inhabitants of sparsely settled areas. At the same time, many Aborigines and their friends have been made aware of the destructive effects of monopoly invasion of their remaining homelands. Big numbers of Torres Strait Islanders have been brought to the mainland to work on developmental projects. This has deepened their knowledge and helped improve Aboriginal-Islander understanding.

New Equality

Revelations of the squalid conditions forced on the people on most Government and Mission settlements led to demands for drastic improvements from many sections of the community. State and Federal Government handovers to Australian and foreign monopolies of millions of acres of land formerly reserved for Aboriginal occupation underlined the fact that the Aborigines have no title to their ancestral lands, and that long-established settlements can be destroyed and the people forcibly removed at short notice. Their right to collective and individual land ownership was thus made an urgent and immediate question.

All this helped to develop deeper and wider awareness of the situation of the cruelly oppressed Aboriginal people. The conditions of the Aborigines are becoming recognised as a threat to all working conditions and a disgrace to Australian democracy.

Consequently, in recent years, the movement for Aboriginal rights began to assume a new quality.

It is becoming an organised, growing mass movement, in which capable Aboriginal representatives are increasingly taking leading parts, with a number of trade unions and other organisations playing an increasingly important role. Communists have a very good record in helping this development.

In 1963, for the first time, the ACTU Congress adopted a sound basic policy, opening the way for much stronger participation by the unions. This policy has since been strengthened.

The former handful of devoted individuals has expanded into a network of organisations fighting for Aboriginal rights, with centres in all States, many linked together in a strong Federal movement, but some acting independently.

The organisations have made systematic studies of the conditions of the Aboriginal people in all parts of the Commonwealth and formulated sets of demands.

Trade union representatives, members of the ALP, Communist Party and various youth, religious and women's organisations, professional people and other progressive individuals active in this movement play an important part in helping arouse Australian consciousness of the situation.

Action Wins Results

Actions have been undertaken against particularly glaring injustices, with considerable success, and Governments have been compelled to pay serious attention to a problem they had thought successfully buried.

A profoundly important development is the fact that wherever Aboriginal and Island peoples feel the strength of the growing movement and can feel sure that they have reliable friends in the white community, especially in the strong trade unions, they are beginning to stand up for themselves and produce their own leaders in their struggle for freedom.

This means that a true movement of the peoples themselves is beginning. The era of the broken tribal remnants is beginning to come to an end.

Perhaps the most significant proof of this is the strike struggle of the Northern Territory Aboriginal station hands which began last year and is bound to continue indefinitely.

The movement of the Aboriginal people is not confined to remote places, nor does it centre only on obvious problems. The shifting of thousands of unskilled Aborigines into major cities such as Sydney has created ghetto-like areas in which many families are eking out a bare existence. This relatively new feature of the problem creates big responsibilities for trade unions and other organisations concerning themselves with living standards.

The city-dwelling Aborigines, having greater opportunities to learn and organise and establish connections with the labour and progressive movements, are naturally beginning to develop capable leaders who can assist the movement as a whole.

It is essential that the importance of the movement of the peoples themselves be clearly recognised. The task of Communists and others really desirous of assisting the Aboriginal and Island peoples is to give them fraternal aid in their struggle for emancipation, not to act as paternal "benefactors".

Main Objectives

The Aboriginal and Islanders' movement has already defined its main objectives.

Chief among them are:

1. Full citizen rights within the Australian community.
2. Special benefits to counter the effects of more than a century of oppression and to enable the peoples rapidly to assume their rightful place, equipped with the education, trade and professional training, health, housing and other facilities necessary to make equal rights a reality, not merely formal.
3. The right to control their own affairs as distinct national minorities within the Australian nation; to preserve and develop their own cultures, including language; inalienable possession of their remaining tribal areas, of the lands now set aside as Government or Mission settlements, or of better land where these are unsuitable; ownership of mineral and other natural wealth located on their lands; and economic aid to enable them to develop rapidly as modern communities.

Among white Australians there are two ways of looking at these demands—from the democratic, humanist viewpoint of the great majority, who are working people, or from the viewpoint of the few who profit from exploitation of Aborigines and Islanders.

Reject "Assimilation"

In 1951, the State and Federal governments, reflecting the views of the exploiters, proclaimed "assimilation", or the absorbing of the Aborigines into the white population, as their official policy.

This has since been reaffirmed on a number of occasions by meetings of responsible Federal and State Ministers.

In practice, however, little has been done to make it possible for most Aborigines or Islanders to be "assimilated", even if that were a correct policy. The great majority are still forced to live under conditions which make it impossible for them to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary for them to enter the major Australian communities on equal terms.

In North Queensland and elsewhere, a deliberate policy of enforced segregation on backward settlements and islands is pursued.

"Assimilation", however, is not the way forward. Stripped of pretence, it means in practice the elimination of the Aborigines as a people, through enforced absorption into the general population of Australia.

As a former South Australian Minister in charge of Aboriginal Affairs (Mr. Pearson) put it, assimilation means that the Aborigines "are called upon to make the changes, to learn our language, our ways, our food, our laws, our customs and our sophistications."

There are many undesirable features of Australian capitalist society and many things of great value in the experience accumulated over centuries by the Aborigines and Islanders.

In their own environment, they have developed unique skills and arts, great courage, initiative and intelligence.

They have much to contribute to Australia and the world from their own social and cultural heritage. "Assimilation" would destroy what they have to give to mankind, as well as denying them the fundamental right of all peoples to preserve their identity and develop along their own lines.

To foster the false concept that gradual assimilation is the only possible and desirable policy, and to combat the influence of the Aboriginal Advancement movement, Federal and State governments have assisted various organisations to engage in welfare work and preach assimilation.

Those working for the liberation of the Aborigines and Islanders do not oppose welfare work. They find it is possible and desirable to work with well-intentioned people in the organisations dispensing charity. The best elements among these become convinced, in the course of activity, of the need to assist the basic struggle for liberty.

Assimilationist propaganda cannot disguise or solve the basic cause of the problems of the Aborigines and Islanders—denial of fundamental human rights.

Working Class

The working class, especially its industrial section, is the main social force in Australia in the struggle for reforms within capitalism and for decisive social change. It has a major responsibility towards the Aborigines and Islanders.

Over the last decade or so, much serious work has gone into the formation of a correct working-class policy on the problems of these peoples. A considerable body of theory has been developed and tested in practice.

The Communist Party has contributed to this development by the adoption of a fundamental policy on Aborigines and Islanders as part of its National Programme, by the publication of numerous articles in its press and periodicals, and through the active concern of Communists with the struggles of the Aboriginal and Island peoples.

Much work is still to be done, but the main lines of a correct policy are clear. Such a policy takes as fundamental principles the right of all peoples to self-determination and the need to develop friendship between all peoples on the basis of equality.

This policy recognises the right of the Aboriginal and Island peoples to full citizenship, equal wages and other award conditions, together with such special aid as may be needed to enable them to enjoy equal rights, and also to exist and grow as distinct national minorities.

This means that Aborigines and Islanders must be able to live either as members of the general Australian community or in their own autonomously controlled communities, according to individual choice.

Strict legal guarantees against any form of discrimination are required. Racialism must be treated as a serious crime. A beginning has been made on this in South Australia.

In the towns, the shameful "fringe settlements" and "ghettoes" of sub-standard dwellings must be eliminated and replaced with adequate modern houses, available to Aborigines and Islanders on terms of completely equal opportunity with all other citizens. Creation of such equal opportunity will, in many cases, require special facilities and financial assistance for Aborigines and Islanders.

Secure and inalienable titles to definite areas of good community land and local self-government are essential for the development of Aboriginal and Island communities. Adequate economic and technical assistance must be provided by State and Federal Governments to enable the peoples to develop their lands along modern lines, to become educated and trained to the highest standards, and to establish modern towns and industries. Major immediate attention is needed to ensure that they have a large share of opportunity and help in developing North Australia.

Integration, Equality

This is a policy of integration of the Aboriginal and Island minorities with the European-descended majority of the Australian population, as a separate entity, enjoying complete social and economic equality with all others.

This policy is opposed to both compulsory assimilation and enforced segregation. It means that Aborigines should be free to live as they choose, in wholly or predominantly Aboriginal communities or in the general Australian community, and to move freely from one to the other as they wish.

The Communist Party fully supports the struggles now proceeding to win elementary rights for the Aboriginal and Island peoples. The Party calls on all its members to give active assistance to them, to work in a spirit of co-operation and unity with all who are sincerely engaged in them, to inspire still stronger participation in them by the trade unions and other people's organisations, to combat vigorously all false, reactionary and racialist ideas about Aborigines and Islanders, and to develop further in practice the ideas of this Programme.

Immediate Demands

Chief among the immediate demands now being raised are:

• Granting of full citizenship rights to all Aborigines and Islanders.
• Treatment of the problems of families moving to cities as an urgent Government responsibility.
• The right of all Aborigines to organise, and to full trade union wage-rates and award conditions.
• The right to receive and control the full amount of wages earned.
• Abolition of the system of unpaid and underpaid labour on Government settlements and Missions, cattle stations and elsewhere.
• The right to own land, collectively or individually. Allocation of adequate areas of good land for community development.
• Compensation for lands already alienated and an end to the process of handing over Aboriginal lands to mining and other monopolies.
• Abolition of such forms of oppression as special Aboriginal Courts and the dictatorial powers of Settlement and Mission superintendents.
• Establishment of the right of the peoples to control their own affairs at least to the extent now enjoyed by New Zealand Maoris and U.S. "Indians".
• Repeal of all repressive sections of Acts denying controlled Aborigines elementary human freedoms in such matters as marriage, movement, residence, communication, etc.
• All social services to be made known and available to all Aborigines. Payments to be made direct to them.

While it has always supported moves for amendment of the Commonwealth Constitution to enable the Federal Government to assume powers to deal with Aborigines on the same terms as other citizens, the Communist Party points out that the main direction of the struggle is against the oppression sanctioned by existing State and Federal laws and customs.

The Party warns that the taking over of powers by the Federal Government is not enough in itself. Protracted and uncompromising struggle will have to be waged to compel the Federal Government to utilise those powers for the benefit of the Aboriginal and Island peoples, including the provision of ample economic and technical aid for the period necessary to enable the peoples to develop fully.

This would, incidentally, go far towards solving the so-called problem of peopling and developing North Australia. The thousands of vigorous, skilful Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders already in the North can, with adequate assistance, transform it rapidly. While most are still engaged in the pastoral industry, the successful entry of increasing numbers into modern industry indicates the possibility of rapid change.

Whole People's Struggle

The majority of the Aboriginal and Island peoples has been converted into a particularly oppressed section of the working class. Their economic problems are therefore the direct concern of the whole working class.

Their problems as oppressed national minorities are also the concern of the working class, which is called on by history not only to emancipate itself but, in so doing, to help emancipate all other sections of the people, with whom closer alliance is necessary.

Those who benefit chiefly from the wage-robbery of Aboriginal and Island workers and from the theft of Aboriginal lands are the big (mostly foreign) pastoral and mining concerns. It is the power of these and other monopolies over State and Federal Governments that stands in the way of the liberation of the Aborigines and Islanders, prevents abolition of the backward state of life forced on them and denies them land ownership and control of their own affairs.

The struggle for Aboriginal and Islanders' rights, therefore, is an important component of the struggle of the Australian people against monopoly and its governments and for radical social change.

For this reason, the fight for Aboriginal and Islanders' rights should be regarded as an important aspect of the whole political struggle in Australia, not a matter for a few well-wishers, but one to be taken up by all progressive people, all true patriots, headed by the organised working class. We call on all Communists to play their part in it, in unity and co-operation with other progressives, especially the Aborigines and Islanders themselves, who are certain to become more deeply involved in the struggle for their own rights and destinies within the next few years.

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