Have we ever seen the like of the Pro-Wik movement? The nation-wide urge to make an historic reconciliation with the Australian Aboriginal people and restore land rights and sovereignty to the original owners of the land once for all? The upsurge of outrage against the Howard government's attempt to roll back that movement? Have we seen, in recent times, such a widespread and deeply felt social movement which aimed not to solve any economic or social problem of the participants, but to defend the national rights of another struggling, oppressed people?
Comparison could be made to the anti-war movements of earlier periods, but this phenomenon is surely something unique. After 200 years of participation and complicity in the robbery and murder of the Australian Aboriginals, the white-Australian nation has at last said "Enough is enough!". After 200 years of struggle and resistance, the Aboriginal nation has come into existence and can now see a glimmer of the possibility of victory on the horizon.
The defeat of the Howard Government's anti-Wik legislation in the Senate was a basic and fundamental defeat for its whole program. They cannot avoid a double-dissolution some time in 1998, to gain a majority in both Houses and force through its policy of extinguishment. They realise however, that they would be defeated on this policy. A majority of all Australians, not only in the cities, but in the rural areas as well, is determined not to allow this legislation through! They have had no choice but to find another battleground on which they can inflict a defeat on their opponents and generate the ground for a double-dissolution election battle.
If Howard defeats the Wharfies, there will be a double-dissolution election and the first outcome of a conservative victory would be the passage of the Robber Bill and the final expropriation of the Aboriginal people in favour of the pastoralists and big-farmers - the same people, of course, as those backing the National Farmers Federation at Webb Dock! On the other side, if the broad social movement which rejects the Robber Bill musters enough votes to defeat Howard later this year, then the trade unions will share the benefit of this defeat and be spared the scorched earth that would follow a Howard victory. Could anything be clearer!
Is this momentary coincidence of interests between the workers' movement and the Australian Aborigines something accidental and momentary?
Well, it certainly cannot be taken for granted. Australia is after all the country of the "landed proletariat". In no country in the world is there anything like the level of land-ownership enjoyed by the working class in Australia. And this gain for the Australian workers is based on the theft of an entire continent in the colonisation of the country in the 18th century and its subsequent settlement. In every crucial crisis in its history, governments have been able to ease off on the land-ownership valve in order to release social pressures. Distribute a bit of stolen land, and settle things down, so to speak.
In the 18th century, international law and British Colonial policy was quite clear. Australia was not the only territory being carved up by imperialist powers. Policy and law explicitly held that land (as opposed to sovereignty) could not be simply annexed, stolen. The historic lie of terra nullius was essential to perpetrating expropriation of land owned by the indigenous people of Australia. The British did not extinguish land title in India. Even in the Americas, the colonialists were obliged to go through the farce of "Treaties" with the leaders of the tribes they were murdering, Treaties which to this very day are the subject of the legal defence of Native American Title.
What the British did, in the main, was let loose dispossessed, landless and lawless people on the Australian continent and turn a blind eye to the robbery that followed.
Up until this century, the robbery went on with hardly more than tacit disapproval from a small minority of city people who "disapproved". This complicity in the robbery and murder of the original owners went hand-in-hand with a universally approved-of policy of exclusion of "orientals". Anti-racism was a "No-No" in the Australian labour movement until the appearance of the IWW early this century.
In fact, it was only the Australian Communist Party in the mid-1920s. under the strict, centralised discipline of the Communist International, that once-for-all committed the vanguard of the Australian working class to a policy of reconciliation with the Aborigines and an end to the White-Australia policy. It was this policy-line, imposed on Australian workers from Moscow, as it happens, that created the basis for people like Frank Hardy and Fred Hollows to build a real material bond between the Aboriginal people and the Australian labour movement in more recent times.
But there is a deeper reason for this convergence of interest which lies behind the historically emerging alliance between the Aboriginal people and the working class (and the environmental movement, too, but that is another question). There can be no liberation for the working class without abolition of private property in the means of production, and this includes the land, insofar as it is available for farming, mining, grazing, transport, and so on. Socialism essentially and absolutely pre-supposes the abolition of capitalist land-ownership. But in Australia, the supposed ownership of land still recognised under White-Australian law is based on a legal fiction, it is based on theft. Given that the Aboriginal people have never ceased to contest this theft, have never abandoned or signed-away their ownership of the land, bourgeois law inevitably must confront the fact that Native Title not only exists, but is a fundamental form of land-ownership which cannot be extinguished in law without the total overthrow of bourgeois right, something unthinkable for any capitalist state. They cannot get away from it. It won't go away. It is coming out.
It is very clear and simple: the entire continent of Australia belongs on a tribal basis to the descendants of the people that were living here in 1788. Native Title is a form of land ownership, but it not the same as bourgeois private property. Native Title cannot be bought and sold as a commodity; it cannot be signed away. You can kill the descendants, but you cannot buy it. You can choose to let other people use the land, but you cannot sell them the Native Title to it.
Finally, there is the unresolved national question, or rather the two unresolved national questions of two nations which have emerged from the colonial settlement of this continent. There is an inexorable "logic" to the debate now under way on "The Republic", which inevitably will throw up all these questions for resolution. Such questions can be delayed, postponed, but they cannot be removed from the agenda of history.
Our policy must be to recognise that the entire continent is the subject of Native Title. How that question is brought forward and resolved politically is primarily and above all the prerogative of the Australian Aboriginal people. It is the role of Australian workers to support the program of the indigenous people and win to their side the majority of the white nation.
The immediate challenge in front of us (and this is close to being a do-or-die question) is to defeat the Howard government: to defeat them on the docks and to defeat them on the land.