Indigenous Legal Issues: Commentary and Materials 4th ed

Indigenous Affairs continues to be a controversial and fast moving area of public policy and law, the latest issue being whether racial equality needs to be dispensed with in order to protect Indigenous children.

This edition, as with previous editions, will cover the full scope of Indigenous legal issues with considerable depth, including extracts of key primary materials. Readers from all walks of life and professions will find the new edition a useful introduction to Indigenous legal issues and ideal reference textbook for the workplace.

Among the significant developments considered in this edition are:

The abolition of ATSIC and recent moves towards establishing a successor body (or bodies) to represent Indigenous Australians;

The continuing need to ’close the gap’ between the socio-economic conditions of Indigenous and other Australians;

The federal Government’s ’Northern Territory Emergency Response’ intervention in 2007;

The change of national government later that year followed by the Commonwealth Parliament’s 2008 apology to ’the Stolen Generations’; and

The Palm Island case.

The final Part contains a new chapter on International Law developments, and concludes by surveying a number of outstanding issues on the agenda of social justice and reconciliation. The authors share the belief that the law has contributed to the disadvantaged position of so many Indigenous Australians, but that the law also has a key role to play in the search for solutions and reconciliation. Readers are encouraged to assess the progress, or lack of progress, that has been made towards these goals in the past few years.