Land

The 'youlk' looks similar to a kipfler potato and grows in poor sandy soil, which is unsuitable for grain growing or grazing and is now being farmed by an Aboriginal growing group in south west WA as a pilot for more groups. The growing group project is expected to run like other mainstream grower groups. But it is a customised group for Aboriginal farmers as many Indigenous-owned farming properties had different management logistics to other modern-day farms. In some cases, there are 20 members and in some cases 120 members so it is a whole different dynamic to the colonial farming protocol.

Rodney Gibbons and Wendy Moore outside Hobart. (The Australian Pic: Peter Mathew)

Stephen Fitzpatrick The Australian 12 December 2016

Constitutional recognition of First Nations people has been blindsided by more demands, with an official forum in Hobart insisting that plans for a referendum must be accompanied by Treaty talks.

The State Government is reviewing the viability of WA's 274 Aboriginal communities, with details of the process due to be released in July, so the future of WA's 35 town-based Aboriginal reserves is set to come under the spotlight, with some residents determined to stay while others accept an offer of new houses in town. Town-based reserves are Aboriginal communities that formed around townships around the middle of the 20th century, as Aboriginal families were displaced from their bush homes and moved off cattle stations.

Action has begun in the High Court to try to stop a native title deal that could be worth $1.3 billion to the Noongar people of the south west of Western Australia.

The challenge is by other Noongar native title claimants who say they did not agree to the deal with the WA government to relinquish native title rights in return for a $1.3 billion compensation package.

The package would include land and funds for a trust to be managed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders.

Reports of deceased names used and Aboriginal people have been turned away from polling places in various places because their names are no longer on the membership roll despite having voted in the 2011 NSW Aboriginal Land Council election. Potential voters were turned away. We need to establish a register of how many people were actually turned away on the voting day and other irregularities. In this regard people can contact the Sovereign Union Facebook message system and tell your story.

The first shipment of Australia's nuclear waste to be returned from re-processing in France has now left a French port, and will arrive on our shores by the end of the year. The return of the 25 tonnes of nuclear waste is putting renewed pressure on the Federal Government to find a location for a permanent waste dump. The shipment began its journey just a day after senior Aboriginal women gathered in Adelaide to mark their fight against a proposed dump in South Australia in the 1990s. The women say they will fight against any new move to put the waste on their land.

Tony Abbott tells us that his northern development obsession "will benefit every single Australian" but a Research Fellow in Anthropology at Australian National University writes that while this may be good news to developers, it makes many First Nations people in the region very anxious.
Today it's much harder for First Nations people to support development, as many are now able to see clearly how the costs and benefits associated with large-scale development in the region are distributed unequally.

Stephen Mayne Crikey 2 February 2015

The 2013-14 political donations data confirms a long trend in Australian politics, with the ALP still fundamentally reliant on the union movement and the Liberal Party in the thrall of big business, rent-seekers and a few wealthy families.

Ancient Indigenous Australian bush-burning could be used around the world to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to United Nations research, which also challenges Prime Minister Tony Abbott's refusal to embrace the purchase of international carbon credits. Abbott has previously said buying overseas offsets sends money "offshore into dodgy carbon farms in Equatorial Guinea and Kazakhstan".

The government this month delayed considering the measure until 2017 or later, saying it would rather make cuts domestically.