By Jake Lynch
Incarceration rates among Australia’s indigenous people bear comparison with the jailing of blacks in minority-ruled South Africa.
Aborigines make up just 2.5% of the country’s population, but they account for nearly a quarter of all prisoners.
In the Northern Territory, the ‘outback Australia’ made famous in the Crocodile Dundee films of comedian Paul Hogan, the proportion of those held under lock and key who are Aboriginal is a staggering 83%.
Under the ‘Northern Territory National Emergency Response’ – known to everyone else as ‘the Intervention’ – government ‘business managers’ have assumed draconian powers over Aboriginal communities, and acquired compulsory leases over Aboriginal township land.
Assumptions still run through government policies, imposed from Territory and federal authorities alike, as the wording through a stick of rock, that Aboriginal people need to be assimilated into the way of life, and forms of political organization, brought by westerners.
But a creative resistance movement to the Intervention is now taking shape.
Read more at: http://www.transcend.org/tms/2010/04/apartheid-is-alive-and-well/
And come to the International Peace Research Association conference, in Sydney, July 6-10, to be opened by Patrick Dodson, the ‘father of Aboriginal reconciliation’, and addressed by Professor Larissa Behrendt, the eminent Aboriginal legal scholar.
More details at www.iprasydney2010.org
Register and pay to attend the whole event at http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/peace_conflict/news/ipra2010.shtml
Or pay on the door: $95 daily rate; $50 for students.
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Jake
Associate Professor Jake Lynch, BA, Dip Journalism Studies, PhD
Director, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies
Chair of Organizing Committee, IPRA conference 2010
Executive Member, Sydney Peace Foundation
Room 121 | Mackie Building (K01)
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AUSTRALIA
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