Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands and the descendants of these peoples. Indigenous Australians are distinguished as either Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders, who currently together make up about 2.5% of Australia's population. The Torres Strait Islanders are indigenous to the Torres Strait Islands, which are at the northern-most tip of Queensland near Papua New Guinea. The term "Aboriginal" has traditionally been applied to indigenous inhabitants of mainland Australia, Tasmania, and some of the other adjacent islands.
- The realistic timeframe that should be considered to achieve outcomes for Indigenous people equal to the rest of the community is to focus on the outcomes that should be expected for the children to be born in 20 to 25 years from today.
- Too much emphasis is being placed in the current debate on providing opportunity for indigenous kids in very remote Australia for imagined futures as 'lawyers, doctors and plumbers'…and too little for futures as artists, land managers and hunters living on the land they own.
- We have to get rid of the passive welfare mentality that has taken over our people. Our traditional economy was a real economy and demanded responsibility (you don’t work, you starve). The whitefella market economy is real (you don’t work, you don’t get paid).
- Noel Pearson, Up From the Mission, (2009).
- The law as far as the Aboriginal law stands, violence on an Aboriginal woman is not really terrible but a mild one. You can work around it.