New book on how Big Business exploits Aborigines' human and physical resources

New South Wales teacher and Teachers’ Federation activist Lindy Nolan has written a remarkable book on the agenda behind the Business Council of Australia’s (BCA) Indigenous involvement agenda.

There is no mystery about her view: the full title of her 101-page study is Driving Disunity – the Business Council Against Aboriginal Community.

The BCA is the peak body for the Chief Executives of the hundred-largest foreign and local corporations in Australia. Its members sponsor and promote a long list of initiatives under the heading of Indigenous Engagement, including the annual Garma Festival in the Northern Territory.

Nolan’s thesis is that this a deliberate change in approach to corporate attempts to exploit the human and physical resources of the roughly 25 per cent of the Australian land mass now under some form of control by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

It marks a change from when individual pastoral and mining companies confronted Aboriginal communities over issues like the Gurindji walk-off, the Nabalco Corporation’s fight against the Yolgnu People at Gove over the mining of bauxite, and oil explorer Amax’s fight with the Yungngora People at Noonkanbah in Western Australia. This approach was not good PR for the exploiters. In each dispute, growing numbers of non-Indigenous workers, working people and students rallied in support of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.
Such disputes still occur, of course. However, the decisive sections of the ruling class, through the BCA, have openly sought to develop a “new architecture” for Aboriginal affairs, including high-profile, pro-business advocates within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

The reactionary Murdoch media has been complicit in this new approach by publishing and publicising a group of Aboriginal leaders who hold Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities largely responsible for the social problems of unemployment, substance abuse and domestic violence, who support income control and other punitive approaches, who disparage Land Rights and self-determination in favour of assimilation into the capitalist economy.

“Business Council of Australia member companies are helping to create the social and economic conditions in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can prosper and thrive,” says the BCA on its website.

Nolan takes the BCA to task, saying, through a number of case studies, that its policies and practices have damaged Aboriginal communities and seen them lose control over their lands. This is not mere assertion: it is a conclusion drawn from meticulous and detailed research into the BCA and the outcomes arising from the application to several Aboriginal communities of its profit-driven policies.

Nolan also contextualises the racist NT Intervention within BCA and other right-wing attempts to roll back land rights in the NT and open Aboriginal lands to commercial exploitation. She shows how the BCA has driven the Reconciliation movement and its offshoot, the move for Constitutional Recognition. She also amplifies the counter case put by grassroots Aboriginal Peoples for Treaty embodying sovereignty.

This is a ground-breaking study of corporate Australia’s creation of new weapons in their fight to dispossess Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of their birthright. Sadly, certain Aboriginal leaders have put themselves at the service of the most powerful core of the ruling class, in the forlorn hope it will solve the horrific problems First Nations Peoples.

It is an essential resource for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples determined to work together for a just settlement of their mutual relationship. The essence of that settlement was expressed in 1975 by E.F. Hill, founding Chairperson of our Party, when he wrote:
“The black people have resisted and still resist in various ways, the imperialist occupation of Australia. They form an important component of the independence movement in Australia. There can be no independence for Australia without the independence of the black people.”

Nolan’s book, published by the Spirit of Eureka, can be ordered online at: http://www.spiritofeureka.org/index.php/shop
 

Book Review: Driving Disunity by Lindy Nolan
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Book Review: Driving Disunity by Lindy Nolan
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Bringing to the fore Indigenous voices the media ignore

'In reviewing this important - but not self-important - book by Lindy Nolan, I can hardly do better than start by quoting Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Northern Territory Australian of the Year in 2015 and Amatjere Elder, from the backcover of the book: “Such deep and fearless truth.”

'Award-winning journalist Jeff McMullen, meanwhile notes: “This important study highlights destructive strategies in the neoliberal era that undermine Aboriginal progress through the age old tactic of divide and conquer.” ...

'Lindy Nolan is an activist in the Stop The Intervention Collective Sydney (STICS).
This is a small but talented group of people who organise events against the NT Intervention,
now 11 years since its disastrous and fraudulent imposition by the John Howard government. ...

'Nolan has written a book full of Indigenous voices that most people will not have heard, because the mainstream media has been mainly accepting Murdoch’s anointed “leaders”. ...

'I hope you buy or borrow Driving Disunity – and read it.

It is full of Indigenous voices you simply will not hear in the mainstream.'

More of Stephen Langford's review at
www.greenleft.org.au/content/bringing-fore-indigenous-voices-media-ignore

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A must-read – Driving Disunity

'On May 29 this year, ABC TV screened a program from a meeting in Canberra of approximately 250 Indigenous delegates. They were delegates who had previously come from all parts of Australia to meet at Uluru where discussions, deliberations and decisions were agreed upon and from which the “Uluru Statement” was delivered.

'This statement is historic and very moving. I am sure that everyone who heard it that night would have been deeply affected by its message, for it is indeed a “statement from the heart”.

'A key proposal passed by the delegates called for the establishment of a First Nation’s voice to be enshrined in the Australian Constitution. They emphasised their aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and “for a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination”.

'However, towards the end of the ABC program, Noel Pearson was interviewed and admitted that he had been advised in the preparation of the Uluru Statement by some close friends – “constitutional conservatives” as he called them. ... '

www.cpa.org.au/guardian/2017/1789/06-book-review.html

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Driving Disunity:
The Business Council against Aboriginal Community
by Lindy Nolan

'Lindy Nolan’s insightful, well-researched and provocative book shines light onto how corporate Australia is driving disunity among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by pushing for constitutional recognition and undermining treaty, land rights, and sovereignty.

'Lindy Nolan skilfully unpicks how corporations — through the Business Council of Australia (BCA) — have infiltrated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations,
wooed their leaders and worked against them.

The BCA’s real agenda is to get hold of massive tracks of Indigenous land. ...

'This book is an excellent study into the contemporary corporate takeover of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Something all Australians need to read. ...

news.nswtf.org.au/education-archive/education28/reviews/book