Victoria to ‘Share’ Wealth With Indigenous Folk

This is Lily D’Ambrosio. She has been a Labor Party member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly since 2002 in the safe seat of Mill Park. She is the Minister for Climate Action, Energy and Resources, and the State Electricity Commission. According to the Guardian, she is also a prominent member of the Socialist Left faction. Last year, it was alleged that her branch of the Labor party had forged the signatures of deceased people. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. She recently gave evidence to the Yoorrook Justice Commission saying that it is “horrifying” that Indigenous people have been shut out of independence and prosperity.

The Yoorrook Justice Commission is Australia’s first so-called “truth-telling” body. Apparently up until this point, we haven’t been telling the truth. “It's time to tell the truth about the impacts of colonisation on First Peoples in Victoria.”

This is Professor Eleanor Bourke, Yoorrook Justice Commission Chair. According to SBS’s National Indigenous Television, Minister D’Ambrosio said that Traditional Owners will receive profits from renewable energy projects. NITV stated that “Environment Minister Lily D'Ambrosio told the Yoorrook Justice Commission that active efforts were being made to steer revenue streams to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” They mistakenly referred to her as the Environment Minister, which is actually a completely different person, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of truth-telling.

The Australian correctly referred to Ms D’Ambrosio as the Energy Minister, but also stated that she was flagging some kind of Indigenous wealth sharing arrangement. She said, “I acknowledge that my portfolio has had, and continues to have, a role in the continuation of practices that dispossess First Peoples of their traditional lands, waters, and other natural resources. As a result of that dispossession, the state has upset important natural and spiritual balances in the relationship between First Peoples and Country. We have to acknowledge that … traditional First Peoples cannot possibly be able to secure what self-determination means for them without having an embedded and reliable source of revenue for themselves.”

Hmm, most people get a reliable source of revenue from a job, don’t they, you know, hard work? I think even the Labor Party believe in, you know, labour, don’t they? Well, at least they used to.

She continued, “Either through processes that I hope to deploy through renewable energy processes, what the future might be in mineral extractions, and also ultimately through treaty. In terms of the potential for wealth sharing, we are very much looking at embedding, in a legal sense, benefit-sharing arrangements from infrastructure projects around transmission infra­structure, but also renewable energy zones and projects that are built. My commitment is to seek to apply the same approach to future extraction of resources.”

So basically, she’s admitted that the government are planning to give away income that belongs to all Victorians to a select few based entirely on their ethnicity. They don’t have to work for it. They just have to be of the right ancestry. Is this not wrong?

MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn