The Australian parliament yesterday passed a law that holds back Aboriginal land rights, averting a race-based snap election that could have handed the balance of power to the populist politician, Ms Pauline Hanson.
To cries of "Shame!" and jeering from the visitors' gallery, the upper house Senate voted 35-33 to pass Prime Minister John Howard's bill, which reduced Aborigines' rights to claim access to government pastures already leased to farmers. Mr Howard said the law would bury an issue dividing the nation, but angry Aborigines slammed it as a racist land-grab and promised an international campaign of protest.
"Indigenous people will not sit back and allow this to happen," Aboriginal leader Mr Aden Ridgeway told reporters. Mr Ridgeway said Aborigines would campaign around the world to force Canberra to meet treaty obligations to native people. Aborigines and other critics warned the new law would spark a flood of legal challenges, locking up vast tracts of land.
The law is designed to end confusion over Aboriginal land rights after a 1996 High Court decision allowing native title claims on vast "pastoral leases" around the continent. It is also meant to give greater commercial certainty to farmers and miners who earn Australia £29 billion a year in exports.
Independent Senator Brian Harradine, whose last-minute change of heart secured the bill's passage, said he had saved Australians from a race-based early election.
"We were heading headlong into a double dissolution divisive election which would have torn the fabric of our society and set race relations back 40 or 50 years," he said, ending the longest debate in Senate history.
Mr Howard had threatened to dissolve both houses of parliament and call an early election if the bill was rejected for a third time by the Senate. Analysts say such an election would have handed Hanson's One Nation party 12 seats and the balance of power in the Senate, allowing it to block legislation. One Nation won a quarter of the vote in a state election last month after campaigning against Asian immigration and Aboriginal welfare.
The Liberal Party (conservative) prime minister is still expected to call an election by the end of the year, but only half of the Senate seats would be up for grabs, limiting the potential for Hanson's party to wrest control of the house.
One Nation was in bullish mood yesterday, despite a series of media reports questioning its financial arrangements. A senior figure, Mr David Oldfield, claimed in an interview that Asians are "among the most racist people on earth", and said that threats by business groups to pull investment out of Australia are nothing more than cultural extortion. His remarks followed a warning by Hong Kong's Australian Chinese Association on Tuesday that it was considering a boycott of Queensland-made goods and withdrawing investment in protest at the rise of One Nation.
Mr Oldfield said Australians were not prepared to sell their dignity and patriotism to the highest bidder "because the Chinese want to hold you to ransom."
Business groups from Taiwan, however, have indicated they could take a similar stand while politicians here have accused the fledgling party of jeopardising the nation's lucrative tourism industry and scaring away overseas students.
Mr Oldfield, who many believe runs the party using its leader Ms Pauline Hanson as a figurehead, brushed the furore aside, saying Asians telling Australians what to do was hypocritical.
In an unprecedented move, the New Zealand government was ordered yesterday to return more than £2 million worth of land confiscated from its Maori owners more than 30 years ago.