He asked the court to give “weight to Aboriginal Australians as the first people of what is now the Australian community”. Kiefel queried how Indigenous Australians’ connection to particular land could be extrapolated to Australia as a whole then to the polity of the commonwealth, suggesting there “seems to be a few missing premises” in Victoria’s argument. But justice Virginia Bell that the notion of the Australian polity may have expanded to recognise that Indigenous Australians’ connection with land “might be inconsistent with seeing an Aboriginal person as alien”. Donaghue argued that the common law draws no distinction between whether Australian citizens or subjects are Indigenous or non-Indigenous. He argued that Indigenous Australians became British subjects because Britain exercised sovereignty over the entire territory of Australia, and later generations became subjects in the same way as non-Indigenous Australians.

Source: The Guardian December 05, 2019 04:09 UTC