Articles by: Jon Altman

Author Biography:

Jon Altman has a background in economics and anthropology and is an emeritus professor at the Australian National University. He works on practical issues around environmental, economic and social justice for Indigenous peoples in Australia and beyond with a number of not-for-profits. He has been an active participant in the Arena project for 20 years.

Rupture in Remote Australia

Arena Quarterly no.13

Melinda Hinkson, Jon Altman

Mar 2023

Australians are being asked to vote in support of the constitutional establishment of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament while the work of successive governments, Coalition and Labor alike, has been complicit in the killing of First Nations people.

Booming contributions by First Nations to address Australia’s environmental crisis must be recognised

Arena Online

Heidi Norman, Jon Altman, Bhiamie Williamson, Francis Markham

3 Aug 2022

It is time for climate-change policies and programs at regional, state and federal levels to respond to the productive ‘climate action’ of First Nations people with recognition and respect, and equitable resourcing to allow it to flourish.

Lest We Forget: The Harmful Policy Legacies of the Northern Territory Intervention

Arena Online

Jon Altman

24 Jun 2021

Fourteen years on, one looks back sadly at the devastation and havoc wreaked by the Intervention, with contemporary morbidity—long-term ill effects—experienced by many whom the imposed measures were supposed to heal and restore.

Again and Again: Settler-colonial extractivism and the Juukan Gorge inquiry’s interim report

Arena Online

Jon Altman, Dan Tout

17 Dec 2020

…it seems the First Nations of Australia will be left with another empty promise that governments and mining companies, together so invested in their ongoing dispossession, will act in good faith to ‘protect’ them and their heritage. Surely nobody can reasonably believe this by now.

The Toxic Business as usual Budget will be no elixer for rapid COVID-induced economic decline

Arena Online

Jon Altman

8 Oct 2020

The government has baulked at a desperately needed and once-in-a-generation chance to structurally change the Australian economy to make it more sustainable, greener and fairer.

The Native Title Act supports mineral extraction and heritage destruction

Arena Online

Jon Altman

16 Jun 2020

As spatial coverage has expanded—unexpectedly, following socially just judicial decisions and evolving jurisprudence—governmental and corporate attempts to empty native title and land rights laws of content have rapidly escalated.

The deadly virus delivers accidental benefit to remote Indigenous Australia

Arena Online

Jon Altman

7 Apr 2020

The expansion of welfare payments in response to the coronavirus crisis will have a massive economic impact on remote indigenous Australia, effectively doubling the overall incomes of many communities.
"The 18 May election has ended any sense in which Australia can feel apart from…

Informit: After the loss, what country are we?

Arena Magazine no. 160

Guy Rundle, John Hinkson, Jon Altman, Josh Lourensz, Kay Cook, Maria Rae

Jun 2019

PDF available from Informit

The 18 May election has ended any sense in which Australia can feel apart from the political stresses and upheavals that over the past decade have come to characterise much of the West. Certainly what has been called the revolt against the elites has now been confirmed here. Of course it is a particular kind of leadership that is being rejected, one associated with globalisation, immigration, education and inner-city life-differentiated from, and a parallel universe…
"The government's welfare reforms for Indigenous Australians look like slavery

Modern Slavery in Remote Australia?, by Jon Altman

Arena Magazine no. 150

Jon Altman

Oct 2017

The government's welfare reforms for Indigenous Australians look like slavery
"The Government's welfare reforms for Indigenous Australians look like slavery. On 19 September 2017 in…

Informit: Modern slavery in remote Australia?

Arena Magazine no. 150

Jon Altman

Oct 2017

PDF available from Informit

The Government's welfare reforms for Indigenous Australians look like slavery. On 19 September 2017 in New York, where I happened to be residing temporarily, the International Labour Organization (ILO) released new research developed jointly with the Walk Free Foundation and published in Global Estimates of Modern Slavery. The research reveals that there are an estimated 40 million victims of modern slavery in 2016, with about 25 million entrapped in situations of forced labour. There are…
"In Arena Magazine No. 82, just on eleven years ago, I wrote about the denigration…

Informit: The destruction of homelander life-ways

Arena Magazine no. 148

Jon Altman

Jun 2017

PDF available from Informit

In Arena Magazine No. 82, just on eleven years ago, I wrote about the denigration of Aboriginal homelands in very remote Australia, first by Amanda Vanstone as minister for Indigenous affairs and then by the likes of Gary Johns, then president of the now defunct Bennelong Society, and The Australian's news media in their conservative editorialising. I challenged these negative depictions of homeland living as being both emotive and ideological. Deep down, I doubted that…
"Trump's message is to make America great again. The means to do this, according to…

Trump: Logician to Rhetorician, by Jon Altman

Jon Altman

9 Feb 2017

Trump's message is to make America great again. The means to do this, according to him, is to revisit the twentieth-century industrial capitalism that made America ‘great’ before. It is the legacy of this American Dream of bloated materialism and waste that is now choking the planet.