The dialling back of Indigenous rights will be high on the agenda for Invasion Day rallies this year, according to protest organisers who say it's a global "phenomenon" also happening to overseas colonised nations.
"New Zealand and in the US, their governments have voted in the right wing, and it's becoming quite scary," Gunditjmara Yorta Yorta Bindal and Meriam protest organiser Tarneen Onus Browne said.
"It's really important for us to get organised as a community and to fight against this."
Also on the agenda for the Melbourne event, they said, will be Black deaths in custody, rising sea levels, mining, the high levels of child removals, the Israel-Gaza war, the cost-of-living crisis and the healthcare system.
At the Sydney rally, Australia’s first-ever Maori policewoman Jo Maarama Kamira will highlight what she calls a global theme of withdrawing Indigenous rights and "the rise of the far right".
Ms Kamira, who is in her final year of her PhD 'The History of Maori in Australia' at the Department of Critical Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University, is worried that what happens in Aotearoa (New Zealand) will have a knock-on affect for First Nations Australians.
"Maori are held up as the poster children for Indigenous First Nations rights worldwide," the activist and historian said.
"If Te Tiriti (the Treaty of Waitangi) falls, then we see the falling of native title, we'll see the falling of treaties on Turtle Island (United States), we will see the falling of treaties worldwide."
Across the ditch last year, legislation that sought to reinterpret the 184-year-old Treaty of Waitangi sparked nationwide protests of more than 40,000 people.
"These rights are being eroded and it becomes more and more important for us as First Nations people worldwide to band together."
A global trend
A group of academics and health experts say there is a growing "resistance and retribution" from the far-right which they argue is perpetuating "intergenerational harms" and "compounding the health and wellbeing challenges faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities."
Over the past year there has been an upsurge in policies that are "dehumanising Indigenous peoples, denying Indigenous rights, and silencing truth telling", according to a Lancet Regional Health — Western Pacific editorial written by ANU academics and the Black Dog Institute.
"Very recent evidence of this is the 'adult crime, adult time' legislation that's been introduced into Queensland," said the editorial's senior author and ANU Professor Ray Lovett.
Since the state election the LNP has repealed the Queensland Truth Telling Inquiry, scrapped the Path to Treaty Act and enacted harsher penalties for juvenile offenders.
"We were having a good conversation about age of criminal responsibility, particularly for the Northern Territory, which did change, but they've reverted back," Professor Lovett said.
"Those changes will overwhelmingly affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people."
The Queensland Government told the ABC that Queenslanders voted for the plan that the LNP took to last year’s election “which included discontinuing the Path to Treaty Inquiry and instead expanding home ownership, improving health services and boosting education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Queenslanders.”
Progress has also stalled on treaty and truth-telling at a federal level, with the Prime Minister appearing to back away from a Makaratta Commission in August, although the Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy has since said the government remains committed to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Outside of legislative change, Professor Lovett said the increasing polarisation around acts of societal action that recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as sovereign people — such as Welcome to Country ceremonies or incorporating the Aboriginal flag — was a form of "regressing Indigenous rights."
"We seem to have to fight tooth and nail all the way to enact basic rights like political representation, a say on political matters, including policy," Professor Lovett said.
Professor Lovett argues that when Indigenous people seek the same rights that the wider community already possess and that First Nations people have historically been denied, they are accused of being "divisive or dividing the country by race".
"Indigenous peoples have specific rights that they are able to enact, and in Australia, we've agreed with that by signing international covenants.
"We're simply asking for rights that the state has signed up to."
