Experts say a voice to parliament won’t impact First Nations sovereignty as the Greens’ Lidia Thorpe fears
The constitutional law expert and dean of the University of New South Wales law school, George Williams, noted that “people speak about sovereignty in different ways – for many it’s as much a moral or political concept as it is legal”.The crown, the commonwealth of Australia, the states and territories.
The colonies federated in 1901, and in 1967 a referendum gave the commonwealth authority over Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but, since no treaty was made with Indigenous people, sovereignty was never ceded.Williams said Mabo and other high court cases establish that “at colonisation a new legal system arrived and that displaced the prior Indigenous legal systems”.
“And they can make those political, rhetorical or moral claims but the high court hasn’t recognised them.”The Uluru statement from the heart contains an assertion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ sovereignty. “This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.What is Thorpe’s concern?
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