Crispin Hull

The processes of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation would just give a warm feeling from holding hands and singing songs, a former head of the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Charles Perkins, said yesterday.

He said the real question was “”who owns this land in the first place”.

He was speaking at a conference on Constitutional Change in the 1990s in Darwin.

He called for immediate talk of sovereignty, national land rights and a treaty. These issues had to come first, he said.
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The director of the Northern Land Council, Mick Dodson, called yesterday for a separate Aboriginal government with direct relations with the Federal Government.

The idea was rejected as preposterous by the Northern Territory Chief Minister, Marshall Perron.

Mr Dodson said the education, health, housing, municipal services, roads, power and water services provided by the Northern Territory were not the sort of services Aboriginal people wanted.
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Conference entitled Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia. Theatrette Parliament House and Humanities Research Centre, ANU. The conference will centre of the idea of republicanism in Australia. Organised by the Centre for Australian Cultural Studies.

Crocodiles are good for tourism and tourism is good for the crocs. They add an excitement, danger and exoticism for overseas travellers, especially Americans, without the discomfort. There’s nothing like viewing a fearsome, dangerous crocodile in Australia _ a country where they speak English and you can drink water out of the tap. All the excitement without the discomfort of Africa.

Moreover, force is added to their travel stories back home in Winslow, Arizona, by the fact an American tourist was actually killed by one.
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The Labor Party had done it, there would be screams that the socialist hordes were at the gates ready to rip the fabric of society asunder.

But if it is proposed by the conservative parties, it raises hardly a murmur.

I am talking about John Howard’s Jobsback proposal to set up a Federal bureaucracy (the Office of Employee Advocate) to meddle in the traditional way freedom of contract is upheld in the common-law courts: which allows the rich to hire lawyers so the poor and the oppressed get done.

Is this not like the Office of Race Relations or a Sex Discrimination Commission going into to bat for the oppressed non-WASPs?
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The ACT Government has to be concerned about the High Court’s ruling in the X-rated video case last week, at least in the long-term.

In the short-term it is of little moment. The tax can be quite easily restored.

But first let’s look at what the court said. Section 90 of the Constitution says the power of the Federal Parliament to impose excise is an exclusive power. That means State and Territory Parliaments cannot levy excise taxes. But the precise definition of excise has troubled the High Court for the past 80 years.
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Lanhupuy is the Member for Arnhem in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly. As an Aboriginal representing many traditional Aboriginal people and a member of a Westminster-style law-making body he is in a good position to talk about the application of the two different sorts of law.

“”In Aboriginal eyes, European law meanders like a river on a flood plain that has no barriers to constrain its flow or direction,” he said in Darwin last week. “”Although we can see merit in having a law that can adapt to changing circumstances, it is in complete contradiction to Aboriginal law and custom, where practices and beliefs have carried on for many thousands of years in much the same way.”

Aboriginal society “”has a complex and intricately developed set of laws and a cultural relationship which is based not only on the individual, but also the family and community.”
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Dawson is now in a minority of one on a High Court Bench on a fundamental constitutional question: the location of ultimate sovereignty in Australia.

Dawson’s approach is the classic legalistic one. He says the power and authority of the Constitution comes from the British Parliament, not the Australian people.

In the broadcasting-ban case last week he said: “”And the Constitution is itself a law declared by the Imperial Parliament to be “binding on the courts, judges and people of every state and every part of the Commonwealth’. It does not purport to obtain its force from any power residing in the people to constitute a government. The legal foundation of the Australian Constitution is an exercise of the sovereign power by the Imperial Parliament.”
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The Leader of the Northern Territory’s Labor Opposition, Brian Ede, has called for the chemical castration of repeat sex offenders.

He told the Northern Territory’s Legislative Assembly courts should have the power to order that “”repeat sexual offenders submit to a program of treatment which may include a requirement that the offender take Depo-Provera or a like drug, being the option commonly known as chemical castration”.

“”Sometimes jails are not sufficient deterrent,” he said on Wednesday. “”Among the people I am talking about _ repeat sexual offenders, pedophiles and the like _ jail is not a deterrent. They have been there before, and they go into jail and big-note themselves about some poor little girl to which they did something. I can tell you that out there in the pubs where this mob gets together and big-note themselves, chemical castration is a deterrent. People start to think twice when they think about that little item.”
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The common-law rights that might be expected in an implied bill of rights would be such things as freedom of speech, assembly and religion, freedom from search and seizure without a warrant based on sworn evidence and stating what can be searched and seized, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom from confiscation of property without compensation and no torture or other cruel and unusual punishment and a right to trial by jury for serious crimes.