History repeats: Ethnic cleansing in ACT 1954 and now in WA removal from homelands.

18 December 2014

In a statement from Port Macquarie, Ghillar Michael Anderson, Convenor and Joint Spokesperson of Sovereign Union of First Nations and Peoples in Australia, said today:

We are at a point in history where the governments of Australia blatantly expose themselves as having gone military-mad, as if they have acute paranoia. They continually and blatantly attack the most vulnerable in our communities and argue that they are concerned for our welfare and the widening 'Gap' in terms of the disparity in our education, etc., while calling us Australian citizens. But we know we are not Australians citizens under the Australian Constitution and never have been and this is why governments can commit the gross violations of human rights against us and think they can get away with it.

The governments, when exercising the prerogative powers of the Queen as the constitutional head of Australia and its colonial State, have maintained a consistency of racism and genocide, which began on the arrival of the First Fleet, the first illegal boat people in 1788. The pattern of racism and genocide can be tracked through the annals of the Australian system right to this reigning monarch.

I remind the public that in 1954 the young Queen Elizabeth on her first trip to Australia as Queen personally signed a law in Canberra that permitted the ethnic cleansing of the Australian Capital Territory, clearing it of resident Aboriginal Peoples. When she was on Australian soil she was the Queen of Australia exercising all authority and power that she had as Queen of Australia.

In 1953 the Royal Powers Act enabled to the Queen, when present in Australia, to exercise any powers the Governor-General would normally exercise:

The Queen opening Parliament House, 1954
(National Archives of Australia, A1773 RV376)

Aborigines Welfare Ordinance 1954
(National Library of Australia)

When the recently coronated Queen Elizabeth II came to Canberra in 1954 one of the first Acts she personally signed into the law of the Australian Capital Territory was An Ordinance: Relating to Aborigines [No. 8 of 1954] cited as the Aborigines Welfare Ordinance 1954. It was this Ordinance that was used to remove resident Aboriginal people from the Australian Capital Territory to surrounding areas in New South Wales.

Now we find that proxy agents, in the guise of governance, continue to sign laws into place to remove Aboriginal people from their homelands yet again, as is the recent case in Western Australia and now South Australia, following on from the Northern Territory Intervention of 2007.

Clearly, this monarch and her colonial authorities do not consider Aboriginal Peoples have any rights whatsoever.

There can be no negotiations with a belligerent autocratic government.

The only people who are protecting the Australian governments against the Aboriginal sovereign identity within this country, are the courts who lack political independence and make decisions on citizenship and their own jurisdiction, even though Commonwealth legislation in this country states that laws are for the 'Aboriginal Race and Torres Strait Islanders' and not for the Aboriginal citizens of Australia.

The human rights violations we are experiencing all over this country are themselves genocidal and unfortunately we do not have sufficient legal and political intelligentsia to take on fully the governments and their laws in the way that we should be. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Article II defines genocide as:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The forced removal of Peoples from their ancient homelands is totally unacceptable and relates to Article II(c) in particular. As a First Nations Peoples we must fight this autocratic dictatorship, no matter what the cost may be.

References to background info:
Royal Powers Act, 1953 pdf
Aborigines Ordinance 1954 pdf

Contact: Ghillar Michael Anderson
Convenor of the Sovereign Union,
Head of State of the Euahlayi Peoples Republic
Contact Details here