Sovereignty

Our Prime Minuscule shrinks in stature everyday he is office. He spent yesterday at a United Nation’s meeting in New York strutting his claim that Australia has a generous and humanitarian refugee policy. He argued he would be able to be even more generous but for the fact that he has to pander to an electorate which needs constantly to be assured that the government is in total control of our borders and capable of protecting our sovereignty.

At no time in the last 228 years have non-Indigenous Australians established a legitimate claim to sovereignty of this nation. We have not signed a treaty with the Indigenous owners of this land. We have not come to just accommodation with the original owners of the land.

Our claim to sovereignty is based on the rights of an interloper. We have supplanted the system of governance that was in place prior to our arrival. In our own minds we have not been able to go beyond the lie of terra nullius.

Until we come to a just treaty with all the Indigenous Aboriginal nations in Australia then all non-Indigenous people living here will have to admit that our right of residence is tenuous in the extreme. It is a right based on theft, invasion, genocide and dispossession. I would not want to have to defend our right to continue to occupy Australia on such a basis at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

Written in 2016.