Gwenda Stanley, an Indigenous Australian of Gomeroi descent, organises belongings in front of a historical image of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a site of protest since 1972, at the same site in Canberra, Australia, picture taken on May 4, 2022.CANBERRA - Activists at one of the world's longest-running protests for the rights of indigenous people are not pinning their hopes for change on Australia's May 21 general election.
The site was first occupied 50 years ago to protest against Australia's treatment of its indigenous people, who trace their roots back 65,000 years before British colonialists arrived. Denied the vote until the mid-1960s, indigenous people face a 10-year gap in life expectancy compared with other Australians and makeup 30 per cent of the prison population. Aboriginal deaths in police custody have been a problem for years despite a Royal Commission looking into the issue since 1991.
The ruling coalition had promised in 2019 to hold a referendum and allocated $160 million for the process but little came of it.The opposition Labor Party, however, has promised a referendum, a demand first enshrined in a 2017 Uluru Statement at a convention that brought together more than 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders at the sacred monolith in central Australia.