The Voice referendum is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the younger demographic to shape the future of the nation. Future generations of younger Australians will have to live with the outcome of October 14 for quite some time. If the referendum is defeated, it mean a nation was given the opportunity to recognise its First People and refused it.

I remember the last pandemic to really hit Borroloola. The Hong Kong flu came in the 1960s and changed the way we lived forever. My mum sat us down and said, ‘this flu will come and kill our people.’

The actions of Iwi and hapū have shown that in leading out these protective direct actions for the communities under our care, we can take from the precedents set by our ancestors over time, and apply them in a way that protects both Māori and non-Māori. We will not stand aside and again become a global statistic.

‘We have to be in the faces of these people because otherwise – silence is acquiescence. So I’m going to be in your face every single day, you people are going to know about me every single day. You’re going to be educated every single day. We’re not going away, we haven’t gone away in 250 years, you tried to wipe us away, we come back generation after generation, yeah?’

Climate change presents a unique opportunity to remake society to be more just, more caring and less exploitative and greed-driven. It is in Indigenous knowledge systems that we will find the blueprint for building that society, and it is in the Indigenous struggle that we find the blueprint for dismantling the failing system imposed on us.

Perhaps it is the very ancientness of this space, embedded in the rocks which dominate the landscape, and that manifestation within its people, that brings about this point in time – a watershed moment in Māori history, where one of the largest Māori land occupations of all time threatens the very fabric of New Zealand politics.

My cousin was only a few hours old when Oranga Tamariki – New Zealand’s child welfare agency – came with their court order to take her away.

The debate over Hobart’s proposed cable car – mooted to run from Cascade Gardens and across the Organ Pipes to the pinnacle of kunanyi/Mt Wellington – transcends the stereotypical Tassie-greenie vs. ‘economic progress’ conflict. Local tensions are being ignited by concerns over due process and political transparency, the erasure of Indigenous rights and cultural agency, and short-sighted planning that is viewing the future of Tasmania purely through a tourism lens.

The Intervention’s promise to improve the lives of children and young people in remote Aboriginal communities has resulted in exactly the opposite, and now children are being taken away at a rate higher than during the Stolen Generations. The Intervention era has produced a three-fold increase in children in out-of-home-care in the NT.

It is not the stones Palestinian children throw or their threats to armed military personnel that motivate arrests. Their arrests are a sign of what Israel will not countenance, of why Israel cannot countenance Ahed Tamimi. These are children who have lived their lives under a violent military Occupation in which Palestinian lives are curtailed in every imaginable way. And the message sent in each small act is that they do not accept it; that they will continue to wrest agency from its oppressive and victimising reign.

On the same day in April this year that I arrived at the Terra Livre Indigenous Camp in Brasilia, the various nations present decided to march on the National Congress. Each group gathered under its banners and flowed out into the city’s enormous central avenue. The Kayapo, famous warriors of the Xingu River, at the forefront of every campaign to protect the Amazon since the 1980s, went first.