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The Australian Labor government is planning more assaults on the rights of Aborigines. It plans to extend for another ten years onerous conditions on income quarantining, education, alcohol and land rights. And moves to dump nuclear waste on Aboriginal land have advanced with a deal between  government and opposition.

Planned laws have been attacked as divisive and racially discriminatory by leading jurists, human rights activists, churches and a former prime minister.

A former chief justice of the Family Court of Australia says transcripts of government consultations in indigenous communities could be used to wage a High Court legal battle.

A group called Concerned Australians has released transcripts recorded in the Northern Territory as part of consultations about what the government calls “Stronger Futures” legislation. They say the transcripts could prove the government breached the Racial Discrimination Act because consultations were not done properly.

They say the transcripts show the government ignored Indigenous people’s complaints and left them out of their reporting.

Another threat to the lives of Aborigines is a plan to dump nuclear waste on their land in the Northern Territory.

A former conservative prime minister, John Howard, more or less invited all nuclear countries to dump their waste in the area.

A railway line, built by Haliburton, a company once headed by former US defence secretary, Dick Cheney, already exists from Darwin on the north coast to the area where the dump is to be.

Australian IndyMedia has covered both issues extensively.

For the new intervention law see http://indymedia.org.au/2012/02/18/macklin-exposed-nt-consultations-may-....

For the nuclear dumping story see http://indymedia.org.au/2012/02/17/labor-and-liberal-join-forces-scullio.... For more on earlier developments on that issue google for “Muckaty”.

You might have seen tendentious TV coverage of or read about the Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, being roughly dragged away from an Aboriginal demonstration by her bodyguards although she was not threatened, much less endangered. For the real stories about that go to  http://indymedia.org.au/2012/01/29/a-put-up-job-that-boomeranged.