I am in earnest.
I will not equivocate.
I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard.
William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, 1831
Latest Papers
The working papers collection comprises historical papers as well as current ideas and works in progress on some of the major issues and topics of our times.
Reflections on ten years of Indigenous participation in the Australian banking and finance industry. Glen Brennan talks about the achievement of increased Indigenous employment in the banking industry and the new frontier of "future proofing" Aboriginal trusts and benefits through empowered and knowledgeable Indigenous representatives, trustees and business owners
Aboriginal homelands are the places that Australians need to be supporting now according to Djambawa Marawili. They are the source of health and life for Aboriginal people. The trend is for government to invest in mainstream communities and towns, making it harder and harder on tribal country. Can we find a way to support the core of the culture: ceremonial life on homelands. Djambawa explains that for Yolngu people, ceremony is as important as our mainstream economy. Ceremonial life is an economy in our terms that is worthy of investment that brings tremendous rewards for all concerned.
When I last saw Joan Kirner she asked "What trouble have you been up to?" "Lots as usual". "Good!", she said.
Successive Federal and Northern Territory governments have understandably acted to ban kava, however, in cutting back funding to Aboriginal homelands and communities they have also created an inevitable escalation of an illegal, out of control market that makes Al Capone’s bootleg industry of Chicago in the 1930s look like a tea party.
A Glimpse of the Impact of Cyclones Lam and Nathan on Remote Aboriginal Homelands
Co-Mingling public grants and re-current funding with private and philanthropic investments is the name of the game for next generation social change organisations.
If ever a person was born to run for the White House then it is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Linda Burney’s announcement of Labor’s plan to build a $100 million plus Indigenous Cultural Centre at Barangaroo incorporating the hand back of the eye of the Harbour Me-Mel (Goat Island) on Saturday sent a wave through the NSW election. It was an act of leadership whose reverberations go beyond the NSW State election. The Labor plan is a blue print to guide the city of Sydney, the corporate sector and the gateway of Australia. It has the potential to enliven the whole city and nation by acknowledging our national wrongs and re-harnessing the creative spirit of the land and its first peoples.
“The Labor party is changing. It had no choice but to change.”
“…change can be achieved if the people are taken along also. The ordinary people. We who are ordinary have helped save the world...”
