CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Ten years after a landmark court decision gave indigenous Australians property rights over land snatched by European settlers, the nation’s Aboriginal leader said Monday that his people’s plight remains hopeless.
The life expectancy, health, education and job prospects of Australian Aborigines are not improving, said Geoff Clark, elected chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
Aborigines’ communities “are crippled by social problems, substance abuse, domestic violence” and internal disputes, said Clark, whose commission distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in government funds to programs for indigenous people.
Clark was making a speech to mark the 10th anniversary of a historic court decision which gave native property rights to Aborigines, 200 years after European settlers pushed them from ancestral lands.
In 1992, Australia’s High Court recognized native property rights predating British colonization, and overturned the centuries-old legal fiction of “terra nullius”—a doctrine that said Australia was unoccupied before Europeans arrived.
Aborigines, who make up 400,000 of Australia’s 19 million people, are the poorest, least healthy and most frequently jailed members of society.
Not even recognized as citizens until 1967, thousands still live in squalor on the fringes of towns, in remote deserts, and in inner city slums.
Many had hoped the so-called Mabo decision of 1992—named after native fisherman Eddie Mabo who fought a 10-year legal battle for rights to the island his people had inhabited for countless generations—would offer Aborigines more respect, recognition, and hope for a better future.
