True Left

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-66309637

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Colonisation was "the luckiest thing that happened" to Australia, the nation's second-longest serving Prime Minister John Howard has said.

His remarks were made in relation to a historic referendum due to take place this year on Indigenous recognition.

Speaking to the Australian Newspaper about the upcoming vote, Mr Howard described colonisation as "inevitable".

The mere fact that the states much nearer to Australia did not colonize it (despite the considerable economic advantages that they would similarly have gained from doing so) already refutes the claim of inevitability. Howard's mode of thinking is the barbarian one: if we don't do it, someone else will, so better we get the advantage than they do. The mode of thinking of the states near to Australia is the truly civilized one: we don't want someone else to start doing it, so we ourselves won't start doing it either.

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His government weakened First Nations land rights, suspended Australia's racial discrimination act, and refused to apologise to the Stolen Generations - tens of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were taken from their families by the government until the mid-1960s.

Tonight's results on our National Referendum in support of constitutional recognition of Australia's first peoples and the establishment of a Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples appears to have been defeated. It is a very sad day for Australia, as it appears to prove once again that it really is stuck in racism and colonialism.