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Aboriginal leader warns that Australia is on the brink

ENIAR media release

October 2, 1998 - Leading Aboriginal spokesperson Marcia Langton has told Britons that tomorrow's Australian elections could have a catastrophic impact on Australian race relations.

"Australians have a stark choice in this Federal election," said Professor Langton. "Voting for more racism or not."

She claimed that a victory for the Coalition Government of Prime Minister John Howard would heighten racial tension and turn Australia into an international pariah.

"A vote for John Howard's Coalition or Pauline Hanson's One Nation will bring Australia into international disrepute as the next South Africa, entrenching racism and deliberately choosing not to make peace with its Aboriginal Peoples."

Professor Langton said that the Howard Government had flouted international law in order to pursue its controversial anti-Aboriginal agenda.

"Howard's Coalition Government has implemented the final dispossession of Australia's Aboriginal Peoples," she said. "The Government has breached international conventions on racism and discriminated against Aboriginal Peoples by depriving us of our property rights."

Professor Langton is part of a delegation of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians who have come to Europe to discuss racial reconciliation. She spoke out this week at a conference in Birmingham.

Professor Langton is currently in Dublin and will be in London between the 6th and 9th of October.

Further reading

• A Treaty Between Our Nations?
  11 July, 2000 - Inaugural professorial lecture by Professor Marcia Langton, Inaugural Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies, University of Melbourne - At the end of the Twentieth Century, the public culture of Australia remains, as it has for the previous two centuries, riven by disputes as to the status of indigenous people in Australian civil society. I argue here that it remains the case that the Australia polity is devoid of a clear and just status for indigenous people within its ambit. Further, this continuing dispute is a loose hanging thread in the web of our civil society.
• Aborigines trapped by dole scheme: professor
  October 5 2002 - The Aboriginal "work-for-the-dole" scheme is widely regarded by indigenous leaders as the principal poverty trap for their families and communities, leading anthropologist and activist Marcia Langton said last night.

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