“I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land,” declared Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott as he delivered the keynote address to the Australian-Melbourne Institute on the 3rd of July, 2014. Settler colonial projects share a common terminology, as in the Zionist refrain describing Palestine as ” a land without a people for a people without a land”, the subtext being “a land without a European people for a European people without a land”. There is no membership in the new colony nor any human rights for natives who aren’t there – whether the colonised land is settled or scarcely settled, the indigenous presence is irrelevant to the settler colonial project, and insofar as the native population presents a problem for settlers, the essence of that problem is simply that they are there.
Read more in The Guardian, the newspaper the Prime Minister described in another context as a “left-wing British newspaper”, unwittingly self-describing his own Government in the process, which nevertheless received 8.2 million unique visitors per month in May, 2013
