ABSTRACT
Despite the existence of international instruments to safeguard fundamental human rights, specific rights of Indigenous peoples worldwide remain inadequately protected. Governments have practised enforced assimilation and varying degrees of ethnocide and genocide, including massacres, child removal, and eradication of culture, spirituality and languages (Havemann 1999a: 2-6; Tickner 2001: 2). Indigenous peoples are still severely disadvantaged according to social indicators such as detention rates, homelessness, unemployment, health, life expectancy, alcohol and substance abuse, domestic violence, discrimination and exploitation (University of Minnesota 2003). This chapter interrogates these issues in the Australian indigenous setting focusing on interconnections between cultural diversity, heritage and human rights. The first section addresses the terminology. The second provides a brief comparative background on British settler societies. The international human rights context for Indigenous peoples is then charted, before the discussion moves to the Australian experience, especially since the 1970s. Finally, it examines Australia’s response to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly in September 2007. Arguably, the change of national government in Australia in November 2007 ushered in a period of qualitatively different relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
