To get justice, we need more than protest ---- Two years ago, the Albanese Labor government sent the Voice to Parliament to referendum. ---- On one level, the referendum deserved to fail. The Voice to Parliament was a proposal to amend the constitution, giving parliament the authority to establish a powerless consultative committee. Its defenders argued that a Voice would be transformative for First Nations people. The Voice would allow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to advise the government on legislation and policy. This would result in better outcomes in health, education, and employment.
These arguments assumed that governments only failed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people out of ignorance and a failure to consult. This is rank nonsense. Nothing in the proposal would have compelled the government or parliament to 'listen'.
Governments aren't simply ignorant of the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The state exists to maintain capitalist social relations: the system in which a minority of people own almost everything of value, and the rest of us are forced to sell our labour in order to survive. In Australia, capitalist social relations are founded on the dispossession and genocide of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
All capitalist profit within Australia is produced on land stolen from First Nations people. Any attempt to genuinely address the effects of genocide and dispossession runs headlong into the interests of capitalism. For example, mining companies like Rio Tinto destroy sacred sites like Juukan Gorge so that they can extract and sell minerals. To stop Rio Tinto destroying these sites, Aboriginal people need control and ownership over land. Maintaining a strong capitalist economy in Australia means defending Rio Tinto's ability to destroy sacred sites for profit. No Voice or consultation process will change this.
Still, as meaningless as the proposal was, the failure of the referendum has moved politics to the right.
After the referendum
On 31 August, Neo-Nazis launched a brazen attack on Camp Sovereignty in Melbourne. This has to be understood in the aftermath of the 'No' vote.
In the two years since the referendum, emboldened racists have announced 'We voted No' in response to every symbol or expression of First Nations rights. Neo-Nazis have realised they can latch onto this racism and connect with a wider audience. It was members of the National Socialist Network who heckled a Welcome to Country ceremony at an ANZAC Day dawn service in Melbourne. Their calls that 'we don't need to be welcomed' were quickly taken up by the NRL and Melbourne Storm, who cancelled a planned Welcome to Country ceremony at that day's NRL match.
The Queensland Liberal Party responded quickly to the rightward shift. In May 2023, the Queensland government passed the Path to Treaty Act. 34 Liberal MPs supported the legislation. The Act established a Truth-Telling and Healing Inquiry tasked with recording the historical and ongoing impacts of colonisation on First Nations people. As soon as the Voice referendum failed, the winds shifted to the right, and the Liberal Party quickly renounced their past commitment to telling the truth. The Path to Treaty Act did not last a year.
In local governments across Australia, the politics of reaction are in full swing. There are examples in every state of local governments removing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags from council chambers and local government buildings. Dozens of local governments have voted to end Acknowledgements of Country. These are offensive, but ultimately symbolic changes. State government attacks on First Nations youth in Victoria, Queensland, and the Northern Territory are far more substantial.
In Australia, crack downs on 'youth crime' are always coded attacks on First Nations youth. Australian police and the criminal justice system disproportionately target Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Racial profiling is the norm. Statistics in Victoria show police are fifteen times more likely to stop and search people they perceive to be Aboriginal.
In the past year, the Northern Territory government lowered the age of criminal responsibility to ten, expanded mandatory sentences, and reinstated the use of 'spit' hoods-mesh face coverings known to dangerously restrict breathing-in youth detention centres. No one is under any illusion about who will be shoved into these spit hoods. Almost every child in detention in the Northern Territory is Aboriginal.
The Northern Territory and Queensland have both removed the principle of detention 'as a last resort' for young offenders. Victoria is moving in the same direction. This is a policy with one obvious purpose: to massively increase the number of children in prisons. Those children will be Aboriginal because police and courts target First Nations people. And as prison populations expand, basic civil rights are slipping away. Legal Aid Northern Territory recently announced they no longer have the funds to represent anyone who is not already in prison. As a result, children as young as ten could be forced to face court without a lawyer.
Treaty, yeh?
Treaty has been a central demand of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples since the 1988 Barunga Statement. The statement demanded control over ancestral lands, compensation for loss, the return of remains, recognition of customary law, self-determination, and a treaty 'recognising our prior ownership, continued occupation, and sovereignty'.
In 2025, the Victorian Government announced that it had signed a treaty with First Nations people. What is remarkable about Victoria's Treaty is how little it amounts to.
When you filter through the fluff, the Victorian government has agreed to a 'first people's deliberative body', and some minor changes in government policy. The treaty states that 'Treaty is an ongoing process' and that there will be 'Ongoing Statewide Treaty Negotiations'.
Subsuming First Nations political agency into the state, with no real power to remedy past and current injustices, is not self-determination. It is the path preferred by capitalists and politicians precisely because it doesn't threaten their interests. True justice for the evils of colonisation and genocide is incompatible with a capitalist system of production.
Capitalism's continuous need for expansion directly contradicts the model of land stewardship and ecology practiced by First Nations people. It is fundamentally destructive, and directly exploitative of both the environment and people.
Real self-determination, and the control of land, would challenge extractive industries directly, triggering an economic crisis and upending the basis of Australian capitalism. Bosses in mining, forestry, and agriculture have openly admitted as much.
This is why the ruling class will fight against the struggle for land rights, tooth and nail. History is littered with examples of how far capitalist governments are willing to go in the war against decolonisation. Propaganda; bribery; economic strangulation; assassination; overthrowing governments-nothing is off limits.
The task before us
The struggle for sovereignty is fundamental to the class struggle in Australia. Land rights and self-determination strike at the heart of Australian capitalism. They can't be won as long as the bosses and the government have all the power.
At the same time, this means the class struggle is fundamental to the struggle for sovereignty. Indigenous people are just one part of the working class, and cannot be expected to win this fight alone. While First Nations issues and priorities can and should be decided by First Nations people, only the strength of a united working class is capable of taking on the bosses and overthrowing the colony.
That power won't be built by voting in referendums, or by simply protesting. To win, we need to take the fight away from the ballot box and bring it to our workplaces.
The labour movement must demand the return of stolen wages, justice for the stolen generations, a settlement for stolen land, and an end to police murders of Indigenous people. It must do this with the same voice that it demands better wages, conditions, and safety for the entire working class.
A cost needs to be imposed on the exploitation of land and the destruction of sacred sites. Mining companies engaged in these actions should find it hard to get workers, buyers, or transportation for their goods. Port workers can refuse to load cargo; manufacturing workers can refuse to turn them into finished products. The list of possible interventions for workers is almost endless.
All of this requires getting organised. We need to build strength with our co-workers on the job. We need to rebuild the unions and put them under the control of members. And we need to be ready to go on strike.
We'll also need solidarity across industries. Isolated pockets of activists don't have a chance of winning reforms, let alone land rights. But a united working class, organised and unafraid to take action, will never be defeated.
Revolution is still the solution
Capitalism and colonialism go hand in hand. Neither can be defeated for good unless both are destroyed.
The capitalist system of production must be torn down, and the settler-colonial state smashed. A Treaty worth the name, restoring stewardship and self-determination, can only be made through revolution. It requires a system without bosses, politicians, or exploitation, which we call communism. This system will not, and cannot, be established by the state that we aim to abolish.
Only when our society is not built on the continuing theft and destruction of Indigenous land, and the attempted erasure of First Nations culture, can there be the possibility of justice.
https://ancomfed.org/2026/01/land-rights-is-still-the-issue/
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Link: (en) Australia, ACF, Picket Line - Land rights is still the issue (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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