A prominent Yes campaigner for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament has accused No campaigner and Shadow Indigenous Australians Minister Jacinta Nampijinpa Price of "hate" for First Nations people after she called welcome to country ceremonies "divisive".
Define sovereignty, because clearly we don’t mean the same thing.
My position on my status as a citizen and not a “guest” is clear and also very reasonable, if you have a problem with it please elaborate.
I agree with other commenters’ definitions of sovereignty. In Australia there are competing sovereignties. An imperial one – “Australia”, conquest, absolute power. And an Indigenous one – spiritual connection, ancestry, sacred ties. In each of these sovereignties, the word “sovereignty” has a different definition and is deployed for a different purpose.
Indigenous sovereignty existed for 60 millennia, and then the British stole the land and denied that sovereignty in place of their own. The Australian state has the means to enforce its own sovereignty through things like laws, police, prison, disenfranchisement, poverty, but Indigenous sovereignty still exists. This is a fact. If I stole something from you and claimed it as my own with a threat of violence, it’d still be yours, even after thousands of years.
Under Australian sovereignty, you’re certainly a citizen. Under Indigenous sovereignty, it’s more complicated, and from what I understand Indigenous people have a variety of perspectives. I haven’t heard anyone use the term ‘guest’, but I have heard ‘invader’. It’s an uncomfortable label, but it’s entirely reasonable given the colonial history of Australia. Others have more inviting perspectives on this conflict between sovereignties.
Here’s an article about it if you’re interested: https://www.smh.com.au/national/what-s-indigenous-sovereignty-and-can-a-voice-extinguish-it-20230113-p5ccdk.html
Thank you for sharing your perspective on what sovereignty means, it’s more than the other person I was trying to discuss this with did.
All Im really seeing from that article is that sovereignty according to some activists means
-spirituality -connection to land
Which matches closely to the original Western interpretation of
-derived from god -occupation of land
I really don’t see much difference, and I don’t see much worth in either. Realised sovereignty, the effective ability to enforce it, is the only thing that matters at the end of the day.
These activists are making out like in 60,000 years they never went to war, never stole land, and never enforced their claim over another group of people.
Of course they did. Then it happened to the lot of them. That sucks for them but that’s how it goes.
That’s why everyone spends so much on Defence.