The Victorian Labor government signed a treaty with Aboriginal people on 13 November amid much celebration and back-patting. The treaty is the result of ten years of negotiations between the state government and the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria—the elected body representing Aboriginal people. Under the treaty provisions, the First Nations Assembly will become a consultative body, providing non-binding advice to the state government on Indigenous policies and actions. 
The treaty has been a moment for Labor to trumpet its commitment to Indigenous rights and justice. It will bring “a future built on respect and partnership” and “strengthen culture for generations to come” according to Premier Jacinta Allan. 
But just a day before the treaty agreement was signed into law, Allan and Victorian Labor announced new “adult time for violent crime” laws. These laws will make children as young as 14 face adult courts if they are charged with a range of offences, and if found guilty, given adult sentences. Currently, children cannot receive custodial sentences longer than three years: under Allan’s proposal, they can potentially be jailed for life. Allan’s measures appear to be modelled on the Queensland state Liberal government’s “adult time for adult crime” laws, which increase jail terms for young people convicted of 20 offences. 
Allan and Labor’s celebration of treaty, while simultaneously moving to lock up children for longer, displays the shallowness of their commitment to achieving genuine change for Aboriginal people. This is not a mistake or the result of ignorance that might be solved by greater consultation. The effects of law-and-order policies and increasing incarceration rates on Aboriginal people and our communities are well known. 
Just last February, a federal government Senate report into the incarceration of young Aboriginal people found that young Aboriginal people involved in the child justice system experience poverty, inter-generational trauma and racism. This builds on a report by the National Children’s Commissioner released in 2024, and supplemented a month before Allan’s “adult time for violent crime” announcement, which argues strongly against incarceration of children and highlights the disproportionate effect this has on Aboriginal children and young people. 
Already in Victoria, young Aboriginal people aged 10 to 17 are around 9.5 times more likely to be placed into detention than non-Aboriginal children, according to the Sentencing Advisory Council. On top of this, draconian bail laws introduced last March by the Victorian Labor government have expanded the state’s ability to imprison Aboriginal people for longer. 
The Victorian Aboriginal Legal service has reported that since the bail law changes, there has been a 46 percent bail refusal rate for Aboriginal people, compared to a 6 percent rate for non-Aboriginal people. For young people, VALS reported that their youth legal practice, Balit Ngulu, has seen a 233 percent increase in its caseload due to bail being refused for Aboriginal young people because of the harsh laws. 
Allan’s proposed “adult time for violent crime” laws will only further entrench the over-representation of Aboriginal youth in jails, along with migrant youth who face similarly systematic disadvantage and marginalisation. 
There cannot be equality or “respect and partnership”, in a system that cannot solve but instead criminalises and punishes poverty and oppression. Achieving genuine justice for Aboriginal people would as a start involve measures to improve radically Aboriginal people’s living standards, including massive funding increases to communities and services, the expansion of public housing, improvement in the quality and availability of education and measures to address inter-generational trauma and cultural destruction. But all this comes at the expense of providing subsidies to fossil fuel companies and other business handouts—much easier just to have some advisers in the fold who government can pretend to listen to every so often.
While there should be a treaty and it’s long overdue, the reality is it won’t be enough to challenge the fundamental dynamic and reality of the system we live under. Consultation serves as a smokescreen for government; it is intended to moderate the ambitions and goals of Aboriginal activists and stymie radical demands, the sorts of demands that need to be made and won if the situation for Aboriginal people is to improve meaningfully. And it does not stop government acting in interests opposite to those of Aboriginal people, as the earliest days of the treaty era have already shown.
Ultimately, the capitalist system is fundamentally unwilling to provide the justice that Aboriginal people so thoroughly deserve. Instead, it regularly introduces measures that make the situation worse, and not due to a lack of good advice. We can’t rely on treaty to change this. What’s needed is a united fight against the system.

Oskar Martin

Locking up kids shows Victoria’s treaty is for show

In the nearly eighteen months since the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal, there has been a sharp shift to the right on Indigenous issues in Australia. 
Anti-Aboriginal racism, which had largely been in abeyance since the end of the Howard era, has made an aggressive comeback. Emboldened by the defeat of the Voice proposal, conservative forces have launched numerous attacks on Indigenous rights. In the face of this offensive, the Labor Party has raised the white flag, either joining in on the attacks or offering no resistance to them. 
This racist offensive seeks to undermine the social gains won by Indigenous people and their allies over many decades of campaigning. It also aims to undermine anti-racist attitudes by discrediting or sidelining anti-racist views on Australian history, politics and culture. Any official acknowledgement of the exploitation, dispossession and violence that Indigenous people have been subjected to is being questioned or scrapped. 
This year’s Invasion Day highlighted this shift. For the last ten years, the focus of 26 January activities and discussion has largely been on the day’s significance to Indigenous people and the damage done by European invasion. In 2014, the official Australia Day march in Melbourne was disrupted by anti-racist protesters, and since then Invasion Day protests, rather than flag-waving parades, have gridlocked major cities on the day. In 2018, youth radio station Triple J changed the date of its Hottest 100 countdown as a sign of respect to Indigenous people. Rules for local councils were loosened in 2022, giving them the ability to hold citizenship ceremonies on days other than 26 January without financial penalty, and in 2021, NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian even organised an Aboriginal flag waving ceremony with the cringe-worthy opener that we are “all one mob”. For many progressives, and not a few reactionaries, changing the date seemed as inevitable as same-sex marriage. 
This year was very different. “Australia Day is a celebration of the greatest country in the world”, proclaimed Liberal leader Peter Dutton in a social media video in January, “and we shouldn’t be afraid of celebrating it”. Dutton has pledged that, if he is elected, local councils will be forced to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day or suffer cuts in federal funding. The month before, in an act of racist pettiness, Dutton told the media that he will not stand beside Indigenous flags because multiple flags were “dividing our country unnecessarily”. In 2024, Dutton whipped up a hysterical campaign against Woolworths for allegedly not stocking Australia Day merchandise. This year, the supermarket chain made sure to have its shelves stocked to the rafters with obnoxious nationalist merchandise.
Instead of attacking Dutton and denouncing racism, Albanese’s response to all this was to evade and cede ground. He criticised Dutton for focusing on culture war issues rather than the cost of living, but refused to commit to maintaining the current rules for local councils and reiterated his support for celebrating Australia Day on 26 January. 
The unchecked right-wing offensive has shifted attitudes. Support for keeping Australia Day on 26 January has risen from 47 percent to 61 percent in the last two years, according to a Resolve Political Monitor survey. The fact that a majority of younger people still support changing the date is positive, but it also indicates that the shift among the rest of the population is even sharper. 
The racist backlash has also been happening at the state level. The newly elected Country Liberal government in the Northern Territory has announced it is ending the treaty process that started in 2018. The Queensland state government has repealed the Path to Treaty Act and shut down the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry and the First Nations Treaty Institute. 
Labor state governments have not been much better. After the defeat of the Voice referendum, NSW Premier Chris Minns walked back plans for a state treaty and pushed back proposals for any reconciliation process until after the next state election. The Western Australian Labor government does not support a treaty. Only the South Australian, ACT, Victorian and Tasmanian governments remain committed to any sort of treaty process. 
Treaties, much like the Voice and other largely symbolic gestures like reconciliation, are entirely inadequate responses to the grim reality of Indigenous oppression. More often than not, they provide window dressing for governments more than they help improve Indigenous people’s lives. But the trashing of these forms of recognition has to be understood within the broader context of the racist offensive going on against Indigenous people. The retreat from treaty and reconciliation has gone along with toxic law and order beat-ups aimed at Indigenous youth. 
This has been most striking in the Northern Territory and parts of Queensland. The Country Liberal party won the Northern Territory election last year on the basis of winding back some of the limited reforms to the incarceration of Indigenous youth. The new government has lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 10 years and has reversed the previous government’s decision to ban the use of spit hoods on children. Similarly, the newly elected conservative government in Queensland has had to suspend the state’s Human Rights Act in order to push through a wave of racist laws targeting Indigenous youth, including removing detention as a last resort from police guidelines and introducing mandatory sentencing for 10-year-olds. 
Again, these attacks are not being made only by conservative governments. In Queensland, the previous Labor government suspended the Human Rights Act twice in eighteen months in order to criminalise children who violated bail conditions and to allow children to be jailed in adult watch-houses. Last August, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen walked back her government’s previous commitment to raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14 by 2027. The NSW Labor government introduced changes to youth bail laws last March that stiffen sentences for even minor crimes and has ruled out any changes to the age of criminal responsibility, which is currently 10 years old. 
In the face of all these attacks, the persistent poverty, discrimination and hardship faced by Indigenous people are intensifying. This year’s Closing the Gap report revealed that rates of suicide, youth and adult incarceration, the removal of children by social services and children development for Indigenous people have all gotten worse. Other targets such as the gap between life expectancy of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and income inequality have stagnated. Only five of the nineteen Closing the Gap targets are on track to be met by 2031. 
The conservative campaign against Indigenous people aims to put the blame for this on Indigenous people rather than the racist system and its treatment of Indigenous people for more than 200 years, at the same time as it sweeps under the carpet any understanding and awareness of this history. 
What is motivating the conservative right to do this? Part of the explanation is that the Voice defeat demonstrated the potential electoral advantage of drumming up racist sentiment. Albanese’s incompetence in the face of the right’s “No” campaign only reinforced the point. Given the Liberal Party has little else to offer the mass of voters, this is a valuable weapon in its arsenal.
It also has the obvious advantage of potentially being an area in which cuts can be imposed should the Liberals form government, freeing up money for the military, tax cuts and other conservative priorities.
But it also reflects the changing priorities of Australian conservatism. For years, Liberal talking points in election campaigns revolved around vilifying different racial groups, mostly refugees. While Dutton still takes every chance he can to slander asylum seekers as terrorists, the steam around this issue has dissipated due to the barbaric reality of “fortress Australia”, which has largely stopped refugees from arriving here by boat. 
Dutton has also periodically made appeals to broader anti-migrant racism, most notably in regard to the cost of housing and international students. But there is a tension here because large sections of Liberal Party’s base, including both big business and many small businesses, are heavily dependent on high levels of immigration. This dependency is greater than in almost any other advanced economy in the world. So for the right, attacking Indigenous people has all of the benefits, and few of the drawbacks, of attacking migrants and refugees.
Indigenous people do not form an important sector of the workforce for corporate Australia and are severely marginalised from the levers of economic and political power. Under the influence of the resurgence of the far right in Trump’s America and the long history of racist anti-Aboriginal campaigns in Australia, the conservatives can use Indigenous people as a punching bag and demonise them with little immediate blowback. 
Developments since the defeat of the Voice proposal tragically confirm the arguments made in Red Flag at the time of the referendum: that whatever the limitations of the Voice proposal, a defeat for it was going to embolden the racist right and legitimise a new round of attacks on Indigenous people. They also discredit arguments made by the sovereign or “progressive” No campaign at the time. This campaign argued for anti-racists to vote against the Voice on the basis that its defeat would be a blow to the moderate centrist approach to Indigenous issues advocated by the Labor Party and open the space for more radical perspectives. 
In a statement on her website after the referendum, independent Senator Lidia Thorpe argued that the “result marks an end to the era of powerless advisory bodies. It is a win for the Blak Sovereign Movement and First Peoples” and that there were many people who “voted no out of love and solidarity with First Peoples fighting for justice”. The Black Peoples Union argued in a social media post that “Yes campaigners are out of touch with reality if they think a No vote is going to embolden racism”. 
In reality, an Accent Research Report found that when No voters were asked about their number one reason for voting No, only 1 percent said because the Voice doesn’t go far enough. The most popular reason No voters rejected the Voice was that it “will divide Australia” (82 percent), the key talking point of the racist right. Nearly one in three No voters agreed it would give Indigenous people “too much power”, which was the more openly racist argument of the far right. Rather than opening up radical new horizons for Indigenous liberation, the No vote resulted in the terrain of politics around Indigenous issues moving sharply to the right. 
In line with much of the rest of the world, Australian capitalism is becoming nastier. There is less official concern to uphold values like multiculturalism and reconciliation and more viciousness towards the oppressed and exploited. Indigenous people are facing the sharp edge of this, but the attacks are coming thick and fast on many fronts: the rising cost of living, the climate crisis and the expanding war machine. 
In order to begin to turn this around, we need to be prepared to stand up and fight racism and conservative reaction wherever they emerge. The grovelling capitulation of the ALP and those influenced by it to this onslaught is contemptible and compounds the problem. We need a political approach to all of this that is not centred on winning parliamentary seats and appealing to any backward sentiment to do it, but on uniting workers and the oppressed in a collective fight for a society of genuine equality and freedom for all.

Jordan Humphreys

Racists on the rampage against Indigenous rights

Bushfires have always been part of Australia. Even before the first human settlers arrived around 50,000 years ago, fires sparked by lightning strikes were a feature of the landscape for at least 30 million years.
Reflecting this long history, scientists estimate that about 70 percent of Australia’s native plants need or tolerate fire. Australia’s Aboriginal societies recognised this, and consciously used fire to help maintain ecosystems and create environments more conducive to human habitation.
As detailed in Bill Gammage’s work The biggest estate on earth, pre-1788 Australia was far from being the wilderness that its European colonisers – with their myth of Terra nullius – believed it to be. Tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal settlement had left their mark on every corner of the continent.
When the European invasion began in 1788, there were 750,000 Aboriginal people with 260 distinct language groups and 500 dialects. These people had developed highly sophisticated regimes of land management. “Mere sustainability was not enough. Abundance was normal”, Gammage writes.
Gammage notes that many of the first Europeans to arrive here described the landscape as “park-like”. Particularly in areas along the southern and eastern coastline with a higher population density, there were few of the impenetrable forests that exist in national parks and other so-called wilderness areas today.
“Across Australia”, he says, “newcomers saw grass where trees are now, and open forest free of undergrowth now dense scrub”. Among many examples Gammage refers to is this passage from explorer Charles Sturt: 
“As regards the general appearance of the wooded portion of this province, I would remark, that excepting on the tops of the ranges where the stringy-bark grows; in the pine forests, and where there are belts of scrub on barren or sandy ground, its character is that of open forest without the slightest undergrowth save grass … In many places the trees are so sparingly, and I had almost said judiciously distributed as to resemble the park lands attached to a gentleman’s residence in England.”
Aboriginal people left particular areas alone knowing that some untouched forest was necessary for maintaining populations of certain plants and animal species. But in areas of human habitation, the landscape was curated – hence the analogy in the title of Gammage’s book with the estates of the landed gentry in England.
One consequence of this custodianship was that the intense, destructive bushfires that we’re accustomed to today wouldn’t have been a regular occurrence prior to 1788. The forests and grasslands that surrounded areas of human habitation simply wouldn’t have had the density to fuel such fires.
Post-colonisation
To the new European colonisers – who came from a country at the forefront of early capitalist industrial development – land was something to be tamed and put into the service of the production of commodities for sale on global markets. From this standpoint, fire ceased to be regarded as a necessary and useful part of the Australian landscape, and was increasingly viewed in its potential threat to lives and property.
The colonisers showed no interest in learning the land management practices of the Aboriginal people they displaced. This knowledge, built up over tens of thousands of years, was all but obliterated in the invasion and later war and genocide.
Over the following years and decades, the land so carefully curated by its original custodians underwent a significant change. By the 1830s, wool had become Australia’s number one export. The rapid growth of the industry accelerated the “frontier wars” being waged against Aboriginal people across the continent, as squatters raced to secure prime grazing land.
It also resulted in a rapid transformation of the landscape. The grazing of sheep and to a lesser extent cattle, along with the introduction of rabbits, led to the defoliation of flat and fertile lands. The less easily grazed land on hills and mountain sides was left alone – resulting in a thickening of existing forests and the growth of new forests in areas that had been grassland.
This process, which continued to the early 20th century, resulted in a change in the basic relationship between areas of human habitation and the natural environment. Aboriginal land management practices created a buffer between areas of settlement and uncontrolled forests. In post-1788 Australia, this buffer disappeared.
Uncultivated areas of land were left alone for decades – their fuel loads building up continuously. When fires inevitably broke out, the results were catastrophic, for both nature and human beings. 
The earliest recorded bushfire catastrophe in Australian history occurred on “Black Thursday” – 6 February 1851. Almost a quarter of the area of what is now Victoria was burnt. A witness to the fires, William Westgarth, wrote in Personal recollections of early Melbourne &amp; Victoria: 
“There has never been, throughout Australia, either before or since, such a day as Victoria’s Black Thursday, and most likely – or rather most certainly – it will never, to its frightful extent, occur again, for every year, with the spread of occupation, brings its step in the accumulation of protectives.”
Westgarth was mistaken. The “accumulation of protectives” – by which he meant the settlement and clearing of land for farming – did not reduce the bushfire threat. In the century and a half since, there have been more regular, and more destructive, bushfire disasters.
A CSIRO study found that from 1901 to 2011, 825 people died in bushfires in Australia and more than 11,000 homes were destroyed. And the more “developed” Australian society has become, the more destructive the impact of the fires has been.
The two most destructive bushfire events in Australian history have both occurred in the past 40 years. The “Ash Wednesday” fires that hit Victoria and South Australia in February 1983 killed 75 people and destroyed nearly 1,900 homes. Eclipsing this, however, were the fires that engulfed areas north-east of Melbourne on “Black Saturday” – 7 February 2009: 173 people were killed in those fires, and more than 2,000 homes were destroyed.
The conditions faced by firefighters and affected communities that day were apocalyptic. The land had been baked by a dry summer that included, in the weeks preceding the disaster, a record-breaking spell of three consecutive days on which the temperature in Melbourne reached more than 43 degrees. On Black Saturday, the maximum in Melbourne was an all-time record of 46.4 degrees, with humidity as low as 2 percent and gale force winds from the north. 
The most destructive of the fires began in Kilmore East and was caused by a faulty powerline. (The lack of maintenance of the line by energy company AusNet, which ultimately led to its paying $380 million in damages to affected communities, is another story about the perils of privatisation.) The fire spread quickly. By the time it entered the forests to the north of Kinglake, burning embers were landing up to 40km ahead of the fire front.
Survivors struggled to find words to describe the force of the firestorm. In testimony to the later royal commission into the fires, they spoke of the noise of the fire being “like a jet plane coming straight at you” or “10 to 12 jumbo jets screaming their lungs out all at once”. The commission report quotes John O’Neill, a resident of Steels Creek, near Kinglake: 
“I could hear the approaching fire front … It sounded like 10 or 20 steam trains rumbling towards us at a very high roar. I also noticed that the sky turned red, black and purple … I screamed at my sons to come into the house … Once inside, the fire front sounded like a hurricane. Burning embers slapped into our windows and the rest of the house … It was like being inside a washing machine on spin cycle and full of fire and embers.”
The fire that destroyed Kinglake is estimated to have reached an intensity of 150,000 kilowatts per metre (kW/m). One kW/m is roughly equal to the energy released by a small bar radiator. Controlled burns are usually kept below an intensity of 500 kW/m. Only bushfires of an intensity less than 2,000 kW/m can safely be fought by firefighters and machinery working at the fire front.
Capitalism and land
From the earliest days of European colonisation, the capitalist nature of the economic system has stymied the potential for governments to manage the bushfire threat. Private ownership of land, combined with the imperative to suck every last drop of profit from the resources it contained, meant that anything resembling the systematic use of controlled burning by Aboriginal people was out of the question.
The focus, from the start, has been on the most immediate measures to fight fires. On the fire prevention side, this meant things like implementing fire bans in periods of hot, dry weather to reduce the likelihood of fires being lit accidentally. But above all, it meant establishing forces to fight fires once they’ve broken out. 
The first volunteer fire brigades were formed in centres such as Sydney and Melbourne in the mid-1800s and extended to rural areas over the next 50 years. Urban fire fighting has largely been professionalised. In country areas, however, it’s still predominantly volunteer based. 
The Country Fire Authority was established in Victoria in 1945, bringing together the existing hodgepodge of volunteer brigades into a single coordinated entity. Similar coordinating bodies have been set up in other states.
Given the scale of the bushfire threat in Australia, it’s a scandal that we’re still forced to rely on an overwhelmingly volunteer force. Governments should provide the resources necessary to expand the pool of full time, professional firefighters to take the leading role in bushfire fighting.
The bigger problem, however, is the relative lack of focus on long term bushfire prevention measures. Providing more funding to fight fires will always be the more attractive option for politicians keen for a popularity boost in the wake of a disaster. Funding for longer term, “behind the scenes” fire prevention is an afterthought.
The reality, however, is that no amount of funding for fire fighting, and no amount of professionalisation of firefighters, could have prevented the disaster that hit Kinglake on 7 February 2009. Under the conditions on that day, once the fire ran out of control, it simply couldn’t be stopped. The only thing that might have prevented the disaster, or at least limited the scale of destruction, would have been a regime of controlled burning that could have cleared much of the fuel that fed the fires.
Over the years, governments recognised the value of controlled burning as a fire prevention measure. But there are many barriers to following through at anywhere near the scale required. The biggest is economic. This passage from the report of the royal commission into the 1939 “Black Friday” bushfires is illustrative: 
“The amount of [controlled burning] which was done was ridiculously inadequate. The [Forest] Commission’s officers regard the forest as a producer of revenue and for this reason, and because their education appears to lead them to demand that no tree or seedling be destroyed except in the course of silviculture, they are averse to burning of any sort.”
Since then, report after report has recommended that governments increase controlled burning on public land. The most recent was the royal commission into the Black Saturday fires, which noted:
“About 7.7 million hectares of public land in Victoria is managed by DSE [the Department of Sustainability and Environment] … DSE burns only 1.7 percent of this public land each year. This is well below the amount experts and previous inquiries have suggested is needed to reduce bushfire and environmental risks in the long term.
“The state has allowed the forests to continue accumulating excessive fuel loads, adding to the likelihood of more intense bushfires and thereby placing firefighters and communities at greater risk. The Commission proposes that the state make a commitment to fund a long-term program of prescribed burning, with an annual rolling target of a minimum of 5 percent of public land each year.”
The Victorian government accepted the report’s recommendations. However, since 2010 the target has been met only once. It’s a similar picture in other parts of Australia. No government has implemented a program of controlled burning anywhere near what’s required.
Australia’s forests continue to accumulate fuel loads with the potential to spark destructive, unstoppable fires.
Climate change
Over the past decades, a new factor has emerged with the potential to amplify dramatically the bushfire threat: climate change.
At the time of writing, Queensland is suffering through a record-breaking heatwave and associated bushfire emergency. While Queensland is prone to regular bushfires, the conditions are the worst ever seen.
No single extreme weather event can be straightforwardly attributed to climate change. But the trend is clear: with global temperatures now 1 degree Celsius above the long term average, Australia is already experiencing an increase in the frequency of severe fire weather of the kind that prevailed in Victoria in February 2009.
According to the CSIRO, “catastrophic” fire weather conditions (an addition to the fire danger rating system adopted following the Black Saturday fires) are a 1 in 20, or 5 percent, chance to occur in any summer. It forecasts, however, that by 2050 this will have increased to 15 percent, and by 2100 to 30 percent.
This is bad news for rural and peri-urban communities like Kinglake. CSIRO lead researcher Justin Leonard argues, “The inevitability that a big fire will run on that day is nearly absolute – it just depends where in the landscape it’s going to turn up”. It’s yet another way the government’s refusal to act on climate change is playing Russian roulette with our future.
There’s more bad news. Controlled burning can be carried out only in mild and stable weather conditions, which typically occur in a brief window of five to eight weeks a year in autumn and spring. This window, however, is closing. 
Longer, hotter summers and shorter, drier winters mean that governments’ controlled burning efforts are being squeezed into a period of only a few weeks. Without significant investment in personnel and equipment, the kind of ambitious targets set by the Victorian government in response to the devastation of Black Saturday will increasingly be far out of reach.
Socialism
Our predicament is bleak. If we do nothing, and the status quo prevails, we’re headed towards a “scorched earth” Australia – a land of lethal droughts and heatwaves, punctuated by deadly and uncontrollable firestorms.
That our leaders seem either oblivious, or at least relatively comfortable, with this, shouldn’t be a surprise. The richest section of the population, the fossil fuel barons and others who Scott Morrison and Co. have made it their mission to serve, won’t be the ones who bear the brunt of the impact.
During recent devastating bushfires in California, the rapper Kanye West hired a team of private firefighters to save his $50 million mansion from the flames. Afterwards, he announced his intention to build a “fireproof community”.
Elsewhere in California, people weren’t so lucky. At least 88 people were killed when fire tore through the town of Paradise, north-east of San Francisco.
It’s a glimpse into the dystopian future we can expect if we remain on our current course: one in which the wealthiest few barricade themselves inside well-protected enclaves with their own private armies, while the rest of us are left to survive as best we can on cut-to-the-bone public services.
There has to be a better way. The Aboriginal societies that managed the Australian “estate” up to 1788 maintained a healthy environment and reduced the bushfire threat for 50,000 years with none of the sophisticated equipment we possess today.
The easy answer, it seems, is simply for us to relearn and re-employ the ancient land management techniques nearly lost in the invasion and genocide of the past 230 years. The problem, however, is the economic reality of capitalism, in which long term, cooperative and society-wide measures in any field bump up against the imperative of private profit. Gammage alludes to this in his comparison of Aboriginal land management with modern farming: 
“A key difference between how farmers and how Aborigines managed land was the scale of 1788 enterprise. Clans could spread resources over large areas, thereby better providing for adverse seasons, and they had allies, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, who could trade or give refuge. They were thus ruled less by nature’s whims, not more, than farmers.”
The problem identified by the 1939 royal commission is still the problem today: in our society, things that will not make someone a profit, and things that might threaten someone’s ability to make a profit, will never be prioritised. This rules out the possibility of managing our relationship with nature – in the manner of pre-1788 Aboriginal societies – under a long term, rational plan.
To address the bushfire risk and the impact of climate change, we must break with the profit logic of capitalism, and create a new society in which we collectively and cooperatively decide where our resources and skills are invested.
In Capital, Karl Marx wrote of our “freedom” in relation to the natural world as consisting “in socialised man [sic], the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control … and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature”.
Given the immense growth in population, the change in technologies and so on, it’s impossible for us to return to the way of life enjoyed by Australia’s Aboriginal societies prior to 1788. We can, however, fight to construct a society based on cooperation rather than competition, and on solidarity rather than division.
Such a society is called socialism. The urgency of constructing this society has never been greater.

Locking up kids shows Victoria’s treaty is for show

Racists on the rampage against Indigenous rights

Scorched earth: capitalism, climate change and Australia’s bushfire threat

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