Australia is now a legal fiction

By Bernard Keane

October 17, 2023

referendum-no-voice
The No vote reduces the constitution to a legal fiction. (AAP Image/Con Chronis)

Australia now occupies a unique position globally. It is the only colonial settler society in the world that not only does not recognise in any way those dispossessed by colonialism, but whose citizens have actively rejected any such recognition.

In doing so, Australians have turned their backs on historical fact. “No” is not merely a denial — it is denialism. It sustains, in constitutional terms, the fiction that no one was here before Europeans arrived, that no one was dispossessed, that the continent was terra nullius.

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