VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
On 26 January 2026, the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) greets First Peoples on the front line against invasion for 238 years.
Together we celebrate resistance, mourn losses and speak truth.
Truth first
US imperialism long ago displaced British colonialism and imperialism as ruler here. Like Britain, the US benefits from colonial relics to enforce its domination – a constitution and parliaments which embed foreign allegiance not independence, states and territories based on original colonies to divide and conquer us, and a violent capitalist state apparatus that criminalises and kills First Peoples for their lands and waters.
US corporations demand unfettered right to profit from every key sector of our economy – from resources industries to real estate – on First Peoples’ country.
US imperialism’s drive to war against its Chinese rival dominates the world, and this country. Its attempts to export US economic crisis is marked by systematic division and lies.
US bases on First Peoples’ lands bring thousands of US troops to Garramilla Darwin. Its military housing projects steal and destroy Larrakia land, while Long Grass Peoples are harassed by private security contractors.
Pine Gap on stolen Arrernte land chooses human targets to guide bombs and drones to kill Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Iranians.
The new NT Administrator says the truth out loud. He described First Peoples as criminals. Darwin’s mayor says, ‘We are the city that serves the oil and gas industry.” Not the people?
Federal parliament convenes early for laws that aim to outlaw hatred of imperialism and Zionism. First Peoples face hate and state violence on a daily basis. Nowhere worse than in custody. Yet still they fight to get even the easiest Royal Commission recommendation implemented, the removal of hanging points from cells.
The national deaths in custody report by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) released in December 2025 showed 33 Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people died in custody in 2024-2025 – the highest yearly death toll since the AIC began keeping records. There have been 617 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991.
It’s the same murderous song across the country.
More truth
There’s always money for imperialist war.
Exhausted grandmothers, grandfathers, parents, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles struggle to hold families, communities, languages together unpaid or begging for grants that disappear just as they begin to work, to save their people especially their children.
First Peoples know what they need. They know what their young people need, because young people have told them.
We say, redirect the billion dollars spent each year to imprison children ($1.12 million per child!) to support their families, communities, their, culture, health and education.
We say, stop spending $30 million a day on AUKUS subs, which is just the tip of Australia’s subservience to US imperialism.
We mourn
There is no need to lacerate First Peoples with tales of their suffering.
First Peoples know their land is destroyed for corporate profits, often government-subsidised.
They know the toll of Sorry Business, sometimes eight funerals in a month or two. Suicide is a part of every family. Some are children.
They know child removals are at the highest rate ever, with children left alone in motel rooms instead of with their families, of ten-year-olds jailed in every state and territory except the ACT where the age is 14, but which has the second highest rate of child removals and lowest rate of returns to family in the country.
First peoples live with genocide. We mourn with them.
We mourn division and lateral violence. We mourn those hoodwinked with lies to join the US ruling class ‘sovereign citizens.’
We mourn those First Peoples who have been convinced by immense ruling class power to wield the invaders’ weapons.
But First Peoples themselves will deal with their people who profit from collaboration.
Resistance
Armed resistance spread like wildfire from Sydney, the first point of invasion, across the continent. Brilliance in guerrilla warfare, mastery of strategy and tactics.
Holding colonisation back between 10 to 30 years in each new area till 1931, when Arnhem Land was pronounced Aboriginal land because the invaders saw its terrain and climate, the determination of opposition, but didn’t yet know of its massive mineral wealth.
Decades of intolerable hardship. Yet First Peoples survived. They whispered language, organised quietly and sometimes loudly, till, as workers knowing their own collective worth and dignity through numerous struggles (some as communists, many led by them) they birthed the land rights movement. They created unity across this continent and its islands. They told their truth. They gathered immense support.
In 1988, united, they thundered, ‘We have survived!’ In 2000 a million Australians marched in support.
The ruling class fights back
Capitalism regrouped. Reorganised new ways to break resistance, to thieve more.
The Business Council of Australia’s 38-year quest to divide and conquer First Peoples has prised open lands for exploitation. Its member corporations are overwhelmingly foreign owned. Their most frequent ‘significant shareholders’ are three US finance houses – State Street, Vanguard Group and BlackRock.
Like its US member corporations, now the BCA demands hard tactics.
It works with Zionism, to win over some First Peoples.
Parliaments bow before US domination. Minns won favour with NSW police-state-powers.
On November 1 in Sydney a State Street sign towered above a Deaths in Custody protest. 55 police, six on horses, outnumbered protesters. Yet less than a handful of police were at Bondi, despite their own warnings and rants about the rise of antisemitism. They show exactly who their enemy is. They show who they serve.
Police tried and failed to stop Black Lives Matter and Invasion Day protests in early Covid times. They failed. Despite new laws and the NSW Police Commissioner’s bluster, he knew they would fail again. So, they equate Invasion Day in Sydney with March for Dividing Australia.
If violence occurs on Invasion Day, its 500 NSW police will cause it.
Justice for all
Protests and Survival Day celebrations will take place around the country.
First Peoples are on the sharpest end of imperialist attacks here, because alongside the labour of workers, their lands and waters are the source of capitalist
wealth.
We must rebuild the unity of 1988 and 2000.
We have the same enemies.
Justice will only come – for all of us – when we kick out the real criminals, US imperialism and its Australian collaborators.
We say to First Peoples, the peoples of this continent and its islands learn from your resistance as they learn from their own experiences in struggle.
Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.