Ghillar, Michael Anderson Sovereign Union 5 April 2017
It has come to my attention that we do need to understand who is running the Referendum Council, which is now trying to distance itself from the failed Recognise and Reconciliation campaign for the constitutional inclusion of the words 'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders'. This engine room they call the 'Referendum Council' must be urgently scrutinised. Who are these people and what are their backgrounds?
We are told by all and sundry that any constitutional reform will not impact on the continuing independent sovereign status of Sovereign First Nations, but any lawyer or legal firm worth their salt will tell you that under English common law, unless the words are specifically stated, everything is compromised, that is to say: If there is not a statement to the effect that, and I quote,
'This constitutional amendment does not derogate, or shall be construed to derogate, from the rights of the First Nations in respect of their continuing independent sovereign status that inhered in those First Nations at the time of British colonisation, and that these sovereign inherent rights are protected as belonging to those First Nations and continue to subsist.'
If this is not stated as a matter of fact and law in the document(s), then any constitutional amendment to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution of Australia will establish a constitutional head of power for the Commonwealth government to pass laws for us, as First Nations Peoples, because they will 'own' us as assimilated subjects. This constitutional head of power would make it possible for them to pass any laws that they may wish, including the ability to suspend all Human Rights and/or to discriminate against us, just as John Howard has done when he suspended the Racial Discrimination Act to: 1) introduce the Northern Territory Intervention and 2) to change the Native Title Act and introduce 'bucket loads of extinguishment'.
When you have legal firms like Arnold Bloch Leibler and multi-national corporations, together with heads of churches, allegedly to create a spin that says: We are doing the right thing for you Aborigines,' this has a putrid smell along with the webs of deceit and lies. The most evil axis of intent to destroy First Peoples and their rights is when God, Government and Greed come together as one. This axis of evil cannot be trusted.
Let us first examine those who join forces to work against our grassroots will to remain sovereign independent Nations and Peoples.
Let's begin with the Referendum Council CEO, Geoff Scott. This fellow has had more starts than the racehorse, Phar Lap, and Geoff's story is very short. He has never finished a race. His contribution to advancing Aboriginal people in any form is non-existent in terms of achievements. In fact, he has never been able to hold a job long enough at a senior level to achieve anything meaningful and progressive. So one can understand why he has been chosen to lead this Referendum Council as CEO and we can expect that under his leadership we may be afforded another failure. Having said this, it may backfire and inspire him to achieve an outcome, which will have devastating affects for all us grassroots First Nations Peoples.
Now let's look at the Referendum Council itself and I only wish to focus on a few members.
We should first turn our attention to Mark Leibler AC, Co-Chair of Referendum Council with Pat Anderson. What do we really know about him? We know he is a tax lawyer who is now a senior partner in 'Arnold Bloch Leibler', a company that works with big business to minimise taxes. He is hailed as one of the most prominent advocates of Zionism in Australia and is an active supporter of Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands. He is also a very good friend of former Prime Minister, John Howard. So we can surmise that Mark Leibler's leanings are to assimilate us into one society, being influenced by the same beliefs and customs as our oppressors, whilst he himself has the capacity to integrate on his own terms into the occupying colonial state of Australia, whilst maintaining his own identity, religion and cultural background.
Next we turn our attention to the other Co-Chair, Pat Anderson AO. Clearly Pat Anderson was successfully de-aboriginalised and de-sensitised to our grassroots causes and our culture and customs through the educational institutions that she attended. Her public profile suggests that she grew up in the Parap camp in Darwin thus losing touch with her origins and the impacts of the oppressive laws that crushed her people before she became educated. Surely, given this background, she would understand the need to maintain identity and pride of place. But let's look at another side of her profile, which informs us that she travelled the world spending time in Israel. Is it correct therefore for us to make assumptions that Zionism has had a significant impact in her political thinking? Could this account for her Co-Chair status with Australia's leading Zionist advocate, Mark Leibler, and thus her empathy with the Zionist movement to crush the gentiles, the Palestinians, by occupying their lands and territories and destroying their cultural identity. Sounds all so familiar?
This then also accounts for her ability to create and fudge the 'Little Children are Sacred Report' that misrepresented the true facts of child abuse in Aboriginal communities throughout the Northern Territory. This led her Co-Chair's mate, John Howard, to use Martial Law powers to initiate the Northern Territory Emergency Response, otherwise known as the ' Northern Territory Intervention'. It needs to be stated that it is reported that local Northern Territory Police severely criticised the 'Little Children are Sacred Report', when it was released, because it was primarily based on hearsay evidence, which was indeed untested in any court. This deep concern of the Police was reported in the local Alice Springs newspaper at the time.
Now Pat Anderson works with a group of very suspect people on the Referendum Council, who choose to manipulate against Aboriginal grassroots interest, frequently calling any opposition 'violent protesters', when in fact they are our non-violent self-educating younger generations. Her ability to manipulate is a control factor, which she is obviously very adept at.
Referendum Council Regional Meetings
Dubbo Meeting Report: Grassroots Aboriginal movement sqaushes Recognise
The Referendum Council mechanism of organising the 'consultation' Dialogues, through Land Councils is interesting to say the least. If readers go to the Sovereign Union website and look at an essay titled 'That Word - Treaty' it will be seen that the Federation of Land Councils was set up to oppose the only nationally elected body, called the National Aboriginal Conference (NAC) at the time and after former PM Malcolm Fraser made it very clear, that his government would only negotiate a Treaty with the elected Aboriginal people of the NAC. This crushed the late Dr. H.C. 'Nugget' Coombs, who thought that his white Treaty support body would have a major influencing factor on the content of a Treaty. The late Dr. H.C. 'Nugget' Coombs was clever to disband his white Treaty Support group and in 1983 in Alice Springs he created the Federation of Aboriginal Land Councils, which included as founding members people like Patrick Dodson, Marcia Langton, Terry O'Shane, the late Mick Miller, David Ross etc to name a few.
Now we find that Pat Anderson organises Dialogue 'consultations' through the Land Council system by invitation only and they refuse any public recording of these meetings.
Therefore I ask: Who does Pat Anderson truly work for? A policy that there will be NO public records of these significant Dialogue 'consultations' suggests total dishonesty and cannot legitimately be called true national consultations, to do so by invitation only denies us a truly transparent and inclusive process. Clearly, it has been decided that we are NOT deserving of the right to a democratic and self-determining decision-making process, for us and our future generations.
Who is Stan Grant and where does he come from? We must acknowledge that Stan Grant is one of our Aboriginal success stories in terms of being assimilated, or should I say integrated, into the colonial system. He must be commended for his achievements, as there are few Aboriginal people who have attained a position in mainstream society as he has.
But let's talk about Stan Grant's Aboriginal origins. He is Wiradjuri. On his white side is the Irish convict, John Grant, who came into Wiradjuri country and took up land at Merriginowry where the land was 'cleared' by the killing of the local Wiradjuri. At Merriganowry, where John Grant 'took up' land, he had two white wives and a number of white children. Then he had children to a young Wiradjuri woman, Mary-Ann, the mother of Bill Grant, Stan Grant's antecedent. On Bill Grant's marriage certificate he stated his father was "John Grant, squatter".
From what is on the public record, John Grant's brother, Jerrimah, was hung in Ireland for trying to kill his English landlord, who was allegedly taking advantage of his sister. John Grant came to Australia as a convict for attempted murder of their English landlord. Then he was sent to Appin, 60 km south west of Sydney, as an assigned convict.
Stan Grant himself reveals painful truths in his book 'Tears of Strangers', which he
researched well and in which he is clearly horrified by the behaviour of John Grant Senior.
On page 97, he provides references to the 1816 massacre of Gundangarra people near Dr William Redfern's properties, near Appin. These cold bloodied murders were at the orders of Governor Macquarie, who instructed the 4th regiment to 'hunt them down and kill them'. Redfern's overseer was suspected of assisting the Blacks and he was removed and replaced by John Grant (who was a trusted friend of Dr Redfern). John Grant was then rewarded with a grant of land at Hartley, where he became magistrate. Not satisfied with this, he went down the Lachlan and 'took up Merriganoury'. 'By 1828 the former convict would hold more land and livestock assets than any other Catholic in the Colony.'
On page 82, Stan has spoken with Graham Grant, a great great grandson of John Grant Senior, who told him: " the old bloke used to hang the blacks, then they made him get a license for it. It didn't stop him though."
Later, on page 87 Stan writes: "As a child, Graham was taken into the confidence of his great aunt Ethel (John Grant's grand daughter), who whispered a sickening deathbed confession. Ethel as a young girl had been told to lace with arsenic the blacks' ration of flour."
Given Stan Grant's lineage back to his ancestor's promotion after the Appin massacre and given this history, it is fair to say, that there is an element of doubt that arises about his trustworthiness and commitment to fighting for the sovereign rights of Aboriginal Peoples, and/or will his actions decimate us finally by his support for the Aboriginal procurement through constitutional recognition, as orchestrated by the Referendum Council? [The legal definition of 'procure' refers to commencing a proceeding; bringing about a result; persuading, inducing, or causing a person to do a particular act; obtaining possession or control over an item... ]
I therefore call upon all supporters of our NO campaign to take a good deep and honest look at all the losers and wannabe success stories, who are trying to run a campaign of evil and total assimilation against the will of the grassroots Aboriginal communities, whilst playing the mind game of doing it for the 'poor ol' Aborigines'. They do this by appealing to the sympathies of the good old Christian community, who think its time to review their 'social justice' relationship with the Aborigines, who they still really do not know. We should never forget the 2011 UN recommendation to Australia that Australia needs to review their relationship with Aboriginal Peoples.
So the Commonwealth government's mind game is to win the hearts and minds of the fence sitters and who really didn't care what the governments have been doing to us all these years to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. One only needs to go back and read all the minutes of the Aboriginal Welfare Conferences and read all the laws that are described in McCorquodale's Book, which outlines every law that has been passed about and against Aboriginal Peoples right up to the 1970s.
And now they want to 'recognise' us? We are not for sale at any price and will never assimilate. Each First Nation has a right to say NO, to not be included in the Constitution. The First Nations have to make the decision, not individuals, and the government knows that land now known as Australia does not have an homogenous single Aboriginal community. This is their hurdle. We, of the south and east, have also been educated and we know right from wrong. We know evil and good.
The trouble for the Referendum Council is not that we are violent left wing radicals, but that we have been educated to think for ourselves. The majority on the Council cannot bring themselves to acknowledge our achievements through our political radical street campaigns of the 1970s to bring about Land Rights, community development, employment and vocational training, legal services and medical services. The government did not give these things willingly. They were hard fought, but too many of the assimilated Aboriginal people on the Referendum Council are compromising these achievements and now work to clean the slate, so as to mainstream all the programs where non-Aboriginal people become the heads of these programs and First Nations people become slaves to and within that system, thus totally destroying our own identity and nationality. This will ultimately wipe out any rights for individual First Nations to be self-determining on and within their own lands.
This Referendum Council must be exposed for who they are and what they are trying to do to our Peoples. Its objectives are far worse than Lieutenant, later Captain, Cook and the invasion by Phillip's penal colony of 1788.
Other members of The Referendum Council are:
Andrew Demetriou: Businessman and former CEO of 'AFL' and also former CEO of Acquire Learning' where there were allegations of deceptive selling practices. He has business interests in Brazil and India.
Jane McAloon: Company secretary of BHP Billiton mining Group.
Amanda Vanstone: Former Liberal Party Senator and held several ministerial portfolios under the Howard Government. Her time as Minister of Immigration was marked with controversies.
Kristina Keneally: Former Premier of New South Wales (Labor). She was the Premier when the government began the privatisation of the state's electricity assets.
Natasha Stott Despoja: Former leader of the Australian Democrats. She is married to Liberal Party lobbyist and an unashamed 'Tory' (The British Conservative Party).
Murray Gleeson: A Lawyer who later became the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia and was residing in that position when John Howard suspended the Racial Discrimination Act. He graduated with former PM John Howard, the architect behind 'Recognition'.
Mark Rose, AM: A partner and CEO of 'Allens Arthur Robinson' one of Australia's biggest Law firms, a member of the Business Council of Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Others on Referendum Council are Megan Davis; Mick Gooda; Chrissy Grant; Tanya Hosch (former Director of 'Recognition'); Noel Pearson; Dalassa Yorkston; Galarrwuy Yunupingu - Patrick Dodson resigned to enter politics.