The issues facing the Australian population in terms of national cohesion is not a foreign concept. Colonization affected relations between indigenous people and settlers due to the self entitled methodology European settlers adopted as they took over the rest of the world. In Australia, the concept of terra nullius, the idea that before Europeans arrived the land had been owned by nobody, was used by settlers to push native populations, or Aborigines, from the land to new locations. The rationality for this was that Aborigines were foragers and therefore did not need fertile land to live upon, while settlers were improving the state of the land with their ownership. Racial profiling and a mentality that the Aborigines were a dying race also played a part.
Just as in the United States, the suppressed group was pushed out of their native lands and cut off from resources by settlers with an ethnocentric belief that said groups did not need nor properly use the land they inhabited. Modern Australia has been trying to solve these historical issues by writing laws to help Aborigines regain their lost lands and incorporate more culturally encompassing legislation and symbolism for the country. There has been a lot of criticism of these attempts, as with many heated points of contention, with every step forward two steps are taken backward.
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