High-profile lawyer and activist Michael Mansell from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre argues for seats to be reserved in Parliament specifically for indigenous Australians. "If you're going to have representative democracy it's got to be real, not imagined. And the best way to do that is to allow Aboriginal people to elect our own people to represent us in the federal parliament," Mansell told the IPS news agency. The concept is not a new one. As far back as the 1930s, Aboriginal leader William Cooper petitioned King George V for indigenous representation in Australia's Parliament and similar calls have continued to be made over the intervening decades.
While opponents of the proposal have always held sway in Australia, supporters point to other countries that have some form for indigenous representation in their legislatures as examples from which to learn, including New Zealand, Fiji, Malaysia, Norway and Canada. Mansell is dismissive of the argument that establishing reserved indigenous seats in Australia's parliaments would be too problematic. "Under the Australian Constitution, the Parliament can simply change the electoral laws," he says.
http://australia.to/2010/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47...