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dazza 03/05/08 10:55AM

Thank you very much, Rachel. It would seem that anything that is not a Grand Gesture, such as the Apology, is quite beyond Rudd’s understanding, and forget Jenny Macklin, she is a waste of space, always has been. Putting her in charge of this fiasco just shows how much contempt Rudd has for Indigenous peoples. Brough and Howard always did have a nefarious reason for the Intervention, nothing to do with the much overstated supposed cause, protection of Children, and Brough still seems to be pursuing his own particular interests, and they are concerned with his own financial well being, not the Aboriginal peoples health or anything else.
But that is mainly past, and now it is in the hands of Rudd and Macklin. Who seemingly do not really want to know the truth of what is happening in regard to the Howard/Brough Intervention/Invasion, and do not intend to rectify the gross errors anyway. No help from the N.T. Government mob. Claire Martin made a total hash of everything, she was only ever interested in assisting the Big End of Town to rape the Territory, and her hand-picked successor seems even less inclined to do a decent job, or is incapable of doing one.
This really is another case of a Country burning, while Rudd and Co. fiddle.
It would certainly seem that Rudd is a carbon copy of Blair in Britain. A man totally wrapped in his own plans, and using spin and PR to manage people. He was never a Labour man, nor was Blair. They are both ambitious people using/used just any old party to further their own agendas. Blair was a man totally without ethics, morality or any sense of fair-play. Rudd so far gives lots of indications of being very similar. But at least Blair had personality, Rudd has absolutely NONE!
Dazza.

rmg1859 05/05/08 10:53AM

The Howard government initiated the Intervention. The new Labor government supports a modified Intervention. Yes, Dazza, there are phenomenal levels of child abuse (sometimes by children, sometimes by idle adults) and domestic violence - this is not some beat-up. Justice Mulligan’s report here in SA is about to be released, documenting something similar, in remote areas, where men have 100 % power and there are no police stations to keep the men in line, and no real work to occupy them. Organisations in towns nominally servicing remote settlements - organisations with poor track records of any success whatsoever - are of course screaming about their loss of control of billions of dollars.

Let’s hypothesise: there is a vast and complex patron-client system across indigenous Australia. It reaches from the top, where the money enters the system, down to the remotest settlement, where some of the money is disbursed. In between, levels of organisation take their cut. In return for that funding, lower levels profess and exhibit total loyalty to the level above, from the bottom to the top. The role of the higher levels (of and Indigenous academics - to their shame) is to protect the lower levels from scrutiny, to prattle about government interference and ‘white’ accountability whenever anybody gets too close to exposing some scam or other.

Meanwhile, many thousands of Indigenous people, mainly but not only in the cities, are getting on wit hbusiness, distancing themselves from the corruption and racketeering that is going on in Indigenous organisations and communities. More than twenty thousand have thrown off the ideology of dependence and graduated through university - there could well be thirty thousand graduates by 2010-2012 (did you know that, Dazza ?). Many other Indigenous people have stood up and battled to get into the working class, to find work wherever they could and hung on to it like grim death. But it is true that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, of Indigenous people have been conned into perpetuating dependent and work-averse life-styles, dependent on welfare, working relations, charities, all sorts of government programs like CDEP, which can guarantee that they will not have to work - if the pre-Intervention situation had prevailed, that would be ‘never ever have to work’. But, no, the party will soon be over, and people will have to work like anybody else. And what can people do on their own land - the possibilities are nedless, if people put their minds to it. But the assumption that people will never have t owork has had a dreadfully corrosive effect on children - because if they will never have to work when they grow up, why do they need any of that ‘white’ education ? Sorry, folks, but they do: adults will have to work until pension age, like many other Australians (like Dazza, I am assuming) and for the better jobs, children will need to get a better education, right through to university. Work and education - they go together like respect and dignity. Marxist rever the dignity of labour, Jewish people and many others rever education - it’s no accident that they go together.

What is the alternative ? We go back to a situation of idle adults, never having to work - and idle children, never having to get an education ? With royalties and welfare payments enough to maintain a thoroughly non-Third World lifestyle of grog, junk food, drugs, porno DVDs, standing over (humbugging) their grandmothers for their pensions, no police surveillance, and no need to exert themselves for any purpose whatsoever, not even feeding their own kids (the ‘schools’ can do that). And, on the way back from the shop, they can tell each other about hunting and gathering.

No folks, work and education - no alternatives ! Just like those twenty thousand Indigenous university graduates who get so much up some people’s noses, not knowing their place, getting a bit above their station, ‘assimilating’. Yes, the Indigenous people of the future, not the dependent past.

Joe

curaezipirid 05/05/08 1:13PM

Well, dazza and joe, I am singularly unimpressed by the politics that you are showing, which is exactly the sort of stuff that the coalition is running in the wake of their Federal election loss.

The coalition seem to be happy to be setting Rudd up into a too popular by half popularity scheme, only so as that they can try to be who argues on behalf of the poor. Its all a bit obvious at street level, with drug users, in the territory and elsewhere, all being encouraged to blame Labor for all the terrible atrocities committed against Aborigines, since that’s how to avoid police attention coming down against drug use these days. And it happens to be the fact that the long grass Aboriginal people are never ignorant to such politics among criminals, and happen to be quite effectively really at making sure that sober law abiding Aboriginal communities are made aware of the situation also.

What I am saying is that both dazza and joe/rmg1859 are making the exact same sorts of commentary that has been witnessed among drug dealers since the election.

Meanwhile in my own homework, I have learned that joe’s statistics (he has often previously quoted in these forums) about the tertiary education level of the Aboriginal population, include those Aborigines who used a tertiary institution to complete year twelve equivalent study, and were funded as tertiary students.

I do not like the hypothesis about the patron-client system, because it completely negates traditional Aboriginal economies which are still alive and well, and for whom the whole of the government infrastructure, is just a sort of really annoying attention seeking device by deviants, who won’t give the food they have which is owing. That is a bit simplistic by also realistic. However it is also real that most traditionally oriented Aborigines are well enough informed to not let on that perception, and can play the system to a degree compatible with access to education.

I have been in the Northern Territory recently myself and have to say that the real facts about access to education are shockingly skewed against traditional people. Even basic access to appropriate teaching of English and in English. No wonder the intervention "store cards" are not making sense.

However, all I wanted to say about the excellent article from Rachel Siewert, is to agree to how poorly organised the whole fiasco is, and what a terrible waste of money has been happening; but then also to ask if any of the assistance being asked for in towns, is in relation to acholol detoxification programmes, rather than settlement? I must assert that for any Aboriginal person, housing, and being able to pay the rent constantly at only one address, is not the necessary pre-requisite for drug and alcholol detoxification programmes to prove effective.

Anybody who was subject to the conditions of the intervention might be wanting to head into towns and put their hand out and ask for whatever necessary social assistance is possible to obtain more of in the circumstance. So we need not assume that the population movement into towns is permanent, but perhaps find out what resources those people are in need of, which they will be wanting to take back out into remote communities with them.

I for one reckon that many traditional Aboriginal people actively want to be given improved information sources about how to safely detox from alcohol and marijuana. The quality of information available to traditional Aboriginal people is shockingly low by comparision to the national average, and these are highly intelligent people, even when they are drunk on the street.

Critically it is often the mode of delivery of information which is preventative. For example, in Aboriginal culture, to access any new story, such as the story of entering into a recovery from alcoholism, a persons needs to be given the story and have a dream which identifies the story as that story.

Perhaps, what is really happening, is that the movement of people into towns, is because many people are dreaming something new in respect of access to government services, which we all ought to be working towards the ALP becoming able to deliver, rather than bagging the ALP out before giving the new government a chance to accomplish anything other than feather preening.

I know that many folk do not believe in the sort of things which go on inside Masonic Temples, but many traditional Aborigines have due regard for such things. It is not beyond the resources and worth of Masons, to cause that those "store cards" come with attachments to dreams of successful rehabilitation from alcohol use.

For those who want to poo poo that sort of way of relating to the situation, it is also not beyond the resources which will be spend in the next few weeks, to be enabling that real stories from real people who are in real recovery from alcohol use, are made much more available to everybody in the Northern Territory. If they can fund advertising instructing everybody how to make sure we wash out hands after changing an Aboriginal baby’s nappy, then they can blood well fund advertising instructing everybody about how alcoholics anonymous programmes work.

I do not know why folk like Joe, and the police in NT, seem so adverse to traditional Aborigines living within traditional culture and at places which they have familial obligations to, but Joe you had want to wise up to the fact that out bush work and education do not need to be regulated by what is defined as a job, a career, or the sort of education which you can get money by. I don’t know that any indigenous university graduates are really getting up anybody’s nose that much, except for when they are likely to agree with you about defining educational and work without being inclusive of traditionally oriented culture.

Once in England a man told me that Aborigines don’t have culture any more because we all use toothbrushes now. He was wrong. Do not presume that Aboriginal access to modern Australian Educational resources defines an Aboriginal assimilation into the mainstream as the model of "Indigenous people of the future" even if "not the dependent past", and as the only model by which Aborigines have always worked together towards common goals for a shared future. Aboriginal culture itself is a party to the play and the process of Aboriginal culture assimilating the invasion, is as much the game today as it ever has been.

If everybody really wants to be effective in turning the intervention around into something which can actively resource the Sorry Kevin Rudd pronounced on behalf of the government of this nation, then think more about what aspects of the traditional Aboriginal cultural perspective you might already know something of, but have always wanted to understand better.

When white Australia comes to the table with having accomplished basic tasks set, of learning to negotiate within the culture and stories of this land, perhaps we will all be moving forward in the same story, no matter how much traditional orientation we do or do not have.

The corrosive effect on children that Joe is referring to, is really that fact of moving into towns, and witnessing that white skin people get paid more money and get jobs more easily, and life is all just too easy for everybody, by comparison to having to hunt for a meal.

Word Sword Sworn
At Hath
That Hat
Inshallah no poetry farce
By Solomon’s Seal will my past
No word not true can last

rmg1859 05/05/08 3:05PM

Hi Becky,

No, I use only DEEWR’s figures for tertiary graduates and they do not count anybody but those from Associate Diploma and above. I don’t know what you mean by ‘those Aborigines who used a tertiary institution to complete year twelve equivalent study, and were funded as tertiary students.’ That’s a new one on me. If there were such students they would not be counted as university graduates by DEEWR. In fifteen years at unis, I never met one. You may be referring to bridging course students, one-year preparation-program, or University Foundation Studies students, but these are never counted as graduates - I set up one such course for Parks and Wildlife degree students but never counted those who finished the bridging course as graduates, only as students who had been prepared to commence degree-level courses, which they duly did and completed in the minimum time of three years and are now out there as conservation managers, not rangers. Three or four went on to post-graduate study, but are still counted as only one graduate of course.

Yes, Indigenous people are succeeding at tertiary studies, the pinnacle of the ‘Western’ education system, and doesn’t it piss some people off ?!? Get used to it without slagging people as having assimilated and other such racist insults.

Please get it through your head: Indigenous people are graduating from universities across the country. They are graduating in the four figures annually. You don’t have to count Year 12 students amongst them to pad the numbers. The latest year of data, 2006, was a record year for graduate numbers (the previous record year had been ther previous year). A lot of people, Black and White, can’t believe it, so you are not alone in doing desperate somersaults to discount the figures. More than twenty thousand (closer to twenty two thousand) have graduated, by 2012 or so the total will be around 30,000 and by 2020, the total could easily exceed 50,000. The point is surely that these graduates are not dole bludgers, skivers, loafers, and rarely child abusers or wife beaters. They can make better contributions than the ycould when the ywere unskilled. That’s what education can do. That’s just how it is. So, contrary to Dazza and others, I say ‘the more the better.’

Now: you may not like the patron-client syste mhich is operating but it is still operating regardless ! No, the people don’t just ‘play the system’, they are trapped in it, and it’s the organisations who ‘play the system’. Nobody lives a hunter-gatherer life any more, Becky, any more than the odd white fella who goes out fishing or hunting in his 4x4 or his runabout on a long weekend and calls it camping out. The hunter-gatherer life, and much of the traditional culture which depended on it, is gone and gone forever. We can regret and lament that all we want, but it is still true. I’ll stick by exactly what I wrote above.

I hope like hell that people WILL a move into towns, because that is where opportunity, training, and eventually, genuine security tend to be. And for that people will need education. No, whites do not get paid more (not for just being white), they get paid for working, and they get paid more for doing more skilled jobs. For which they too needed a better education, on the whole. No, white people do not get houses free, or get their housework done for them free, or get their 4x4s free, or just get given a job for doing nothing. In very small settlements, they get no public services. Try to get that across.

Joe

curaezipirid 05/05/08 4:07PM

a few points Joe

while if there are people still living fully nomadic hunter gatherer lives, we will never know about it, the fact is that even those who only go hunting once a month, still live within the constrains of the belief system of a nomadic hunter gather culture

I was not referring to the life style of hunting and gathering as a daily routine, but even having a one a month experience is enough to know the qualitative difference in work effort required; and what I am referring to is the culture of traditionally oriented Aborigines. Not even the anthropologists are brave enough to speak up and say what that culture is these days, because there is always some black fellow who has the police breathing so heavy down his neck that he is too afraid not to deny what a brave voice might be able to say. So we might not be able to realise what traditional Aboriginal belief is, until we realise that we have begun ourselves to embody aspects of it, because then we will experience traditional Aborigines being willing to communicate with us, (normally after having been waiting patiently for years for us to get it).

White people are more likely to be able to tolerate the working conditions in jobs which other whites pay more money for, and that is a fact, I am not saying what whites are lazy or can’t work or don’t earn our worth, but I am saying that most employers and white, and are still negatively discriminating against darker skin employees when needing to choose who to employ, and that is all the more true in higher paid jobs.

Actually I do not really know of anybody who is really pissed off by Aboriginal success in tertiary institutions, although I can believe that such persons are potentially existant. If they are then its right for them to feel unable to express that sentiment which is my own experience.

As for "those Aborigines" I referred to, I have had a conversation with an indigenous specialist employee of ABS who did not have any information about the rate of tertiary qualification among the Aboriginal population being nearly so high as you define it, and who, after thinking more about it, has suggested to me that it could be that those exact bridging courses are being defined as tertiary qualifications, even if the degree is not subsequently finished. That makes sense because even the Abstudy form mentions that some bridging type studies can qualify for a tertiary students rate of pay from Centrelink.

Joe, was it that your information from months and months ago, before the election, in which you mentioned that the rate of obtaining tertiary qualifications among Aborigines is higher than for the mainstream of Australia, was DEEWR’s? Or were you then using differently sourced data? Because the data you have previously posted is why I began to enquire of ABS.

I am afraid that your hope for everybody to move into towns is more culturally biased against Aboriginal culture than you might be able to realise.

Word Sword Sworn
At Hath
That Hat
Inshallah no poetry farce
By Solomon’s Seal will my past
No word not true can last

rmg1859 05/05/08 6:14PM

With great respect, Becky, what you write about a hunter-gatherer life (why is it that people seem to have totally forgotten the ‘gatherer’ part - all they can do is go on and on about the great hunter) is rubbish. Otherwise, most white fellas could be described as still practising the habits of their tribal forefathers, as still ‘traditional’. Once a month ? The whole idea of traditional economy becomes a bit ridiculous.

No, if you check the DEEWR data (easily available), the ydo NOT count bridging course finishers as tertiary graduates. Tell your friend that, once and for all. Certainly, bridging course students are counted as enrolments, commencements and continuations, but not as graduates. I’ll check, just a minute: the 2006 data is on http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/higher_education/publications_resources/s…

Higher Doctorate 0
Doctorate by Research 18
Doctorate by Coursework 0
Master’s by Research 15
Master’s by Coursework 103
Grad.(Post) Dip. - new area 60
Grad.(Post) Dip. - ext area 28
Graduate Certificate 73
Bachelor’s Graduate Entry 30
Bachelor’s Honours 50
Bachelor’s Pass 789
Associate Degree 57
Advanced Diploma (AQF) 94
Diploma (AQF) 31
Other undergraduate award courses 12
TOTAL 1360

Nope, all award-level courses.

No, I probably wrote that the rate of growth of Indigenous graduations was faster than that of non-Indigenous graduations, which is true: the number of Indigenous graduates doubled in the ten years from 1997 to 2006, but the total number of non-Indigenous domestic Australian graduates did not go up by anywhere near as much. Is this what you mean ?

As well,

1. From 2000 to 2006, annual graduate numbers increased by 32.6 % (all domestic graduates increased by 20%).
2. As proportion of all Indigenous graduates, degree-level share rose by 8.9 %
3. As proportion of all Indigenous graduates, sub-degree share fell by 31.2 %.
4. As share of ALL domestic graduates, Indigenous share rose BY 9.79 % (from a small base).
5. As share of all domestic degree-level grads, Indigenous numbers rose BY 20.54 % (from a small base).
Rose BY, not TO. For example, rose from 1 % to 1.2 %, a 20 % rise,that sort of thing.
6. About two-thirds of all Indigenous graduates are female. Where are the men ?

No, I don’t think that everybody will move into towns: BOTH the drinkers AND the people with desperation and enterprise will move into towns: the pensioners will tend to stay out in the settlements. Perhaps the ‘people with enterprise’ will get on their feet, find employment and/or get a far better education, and then decide that they can make a far better informed contribution to settlement economic activity.

I don’t think I’m biased against Aboriginal culture, I just don’t think it has any answers for the terrible problems afflicting people in remote settlements: people are having to face problems which never existed in the traditional societies that they once formed (but not any more).

Joe

rmg1859 05/05/08 8:43PM

Becky,

I agree with you that the current patron-client system across Indigenous affairs is a very unpleasant and destructive phenomenon, parasitic and degrading. If you are interested in learning more about such systems, there were some very good accounts of how it works in various parts of the world, by wonderful writers like James C. Scott (Philippines, Thailand), Carl Lande, Benedict Kerkvliet, Rene Lemarchand (West Africa), Shmuel Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger (South America), one of my favourite writers Ernest Gellner (on the Mediterranean), and Christopher Clapham and Guy Peters (Britain).

Others have written on how various Communist parties have been corrupted into patronage systems. Of course, others have written just as fluently and properly on how all of American political parties are nothing but corrupt patronage systems - in fact, there is an article today in The Australian which accuses Obama of manipulating the patronage system of Chicago, notorious for its coopting of ethnic groups, Lithuanians, Blacks, Italians, Poles, Irish, into a vast and corrupt system of patron-client systems, from City Hall right down to the local area. Makes sense.

As well, Robin Theobald has written some very interesting articles on patrimonialism - the notion that the person/people at the top of a patronage system ‘owns’ the resources, property, funds, that they dole out down the patronage chain. The feudal origins of patrimonial systems is only too clear.

And all of this is highly relevant to how Indigenous organisations have been developing across Australia over the last forty years. There were some fascinating articles by Michael C. Howard on the development of patronage systems in Indigenous affairs, back in the late seventies and early eighties: one brilliant article, I recall, in Oceania, in about 1983. I strongly recommend all of this to you, (and to anybody else wit ha genuine interest in Indigenous organisations) since you are obviously a person of deep commitment and wide reading.

Joe

Lavinia 06/05/08 11:50AM

Whilst I have every respect for those pollies who actually fly into remote Aboriginal communities to see first hand "what is actually going on" in them, I know it is only too easy to be snowed by those people in existing power blocks who may be at risk of losing that if there are significant changes made. I have lived and worked in these communities and seen it first hand. Powerful men, and some women, who are not working for the interests of the whole community but for their own, or immediate family’s, personal interest. let’s face it, it happens everywhere but here it has devastating consequences for the disempowered.

I strongly recommend we listen to Marcia langton who spoke at length about the matter of bullying by these people and how they have been so destructive in Aboriginal politics in the Griffith Review and recently on the ABC Radio national programme, AWAYE . I think that was the most gutsy and best bit of commentary I have heard on current Aboriginal politics for some time.

My own opinion, as someone who has had a thirty year involvement, with contact off and on with remote Aboriginal communities, is that something badly needs to change. Symbolic politics has had its day, for now. I stood in the creek at Nookanbah and fought for land rights in the early days, at great personal cost to myself career wise. It was a worthwhile cause as people need some security and a place they can identify with as theirs, but not at the cost of extreme poverty, neglect and abuse.

As a realist with some experience of the situation, I can say there are few people who will willingly stay and work in these communities for any length of time and endure the hardships of life in these communities. It is very difficult for the gardia, balanda, wadjila, white fella, whatever, to feel any sense of achievement and sense they are making a worthwhile contribution. The mechanism for positive engagement are just not there with the present service delivery model.

Like others who have been in the news lately, I can see a slow phasing out of the more remote communities with these places becoming places people visit occasionally or retire to while they carry on the rest of their lives in bigger, more viable centres. There kids can stay in hostels; well fed and looked after in a safe and regulated environment where they can at least feel safe and get enough sleep, ready to learn. If they can be bussed back to the communities to keep in touch, so much the better. They may choose to stay in town and do other activities but it should be their choice. It gives the next generation a fighting chance to remain positive about themselves and not just think that their future is just becoming a drinker in the long grass, as my former students have said.

dazza 06/05/08 12:02PM

Joe, you have always seemed to presume that the ‘white’ idea of gaining degrees in Business Management or such like, to make money, and to consume, consume, consume is the be-al and end-all of existence. Does it not occur to you that there may be a better, more sustainable way to ENJOY LIFE than to jump onto the treadmill so lovingly pushed by white society. More and more billions of human beings, getting tertiary education in ‘how to make money’ subjects is certtainly NOT going to save the human race from the mess we have made of the world. The Australian Aboriginal survived on this land for thousands of years, quite sustainability, and the invading whites have managed to almost completely destroy this land, if not to sell it off to the Chinese etc.,in only a little over 200 years! Sure, a good education, and I mean a Good, Balanced one, can make life more enjoyable and nourishing, but the mad push to make every man and woman holders of Business Management degrees, is totally insane. This type of existence is NO LONGER sustainable,and the sooner we all wake up to this the better. Perhaps those people out there in ‘the long grass’ know a lot better way to live and exist than the mad rats running the treadmills, owned by Corporations, mortgaged to the hilt for life, forever grasping people who, Joe, you seem to want to have everyone emulate. Just give them the chance to get back some self-respect, to regain some cultural strengths, and to throw off a lot of cultural bad bits, and maybe we would see that they know a lot more than we do. They may well survive the coming catastrophe, whereas we, the mad ‘rats’, will NOT!
Dazza.

rmg1859 07/05/08 10:48AM

I don’t think that we should impose our Utopian views on Indigenous people, Dazza. If trhey want to go to uni - and since about 1990, the equivalent of half of an age-group has done so each year, and that doesn’t look like changing soon - then that is their right in an open society which professes equal rights. Oops, I keep forgetting -you don’t support equal rights, do you ?

The treadmill of security and comfort, through labour - a lot of people seem to do pretty well out of it and it sure beats sitting on your arse in the dirt waiting for the shop or health centre or tuckerroom to open, after a night of getting knocked around by your bgeloved, or fiddled with by Uncle.

Why are you going on about business management degrees ? They would make up only a minority of those twenty two thousand Indigenous graduates, and not too many of the three thousand Indigenous post-graduates either. They chose what they wanted to do, against the racist attempts to push them back into their ghettos, out of sight, out of mind. Come to think of it, business degrees of all sorts would be very appropriate for Indigenous communities seeking desperately to build up some sort of economic base.

And what is the life spasn of a poor bugger in the log grass - or in the west parkaland here in Adelaide ? I would reckon it is about two years, two ghastly years, on average. So much for knowing a lot better way to live. Utter bullshit, Dazza.

Abnd I venture to suggest that if you ask any Indigenous graduate - out of the twenty two thousand so far - and suggested that they have no self-respect, get ready to jump back quick-smart. People do what they want, to that extent - they do not need anybody, me, you, or anybody, to tell them what to ‘emulate’. It may surprise you to know that they have brains of their own - but of course you wouldn’t believe that. Racists do not hold all the cards these days. Sorry for the bad news, Dazza.

Joe

rmg1859 07/05/08 11:10AM

Lavinia,

Thank you for a most welcome post - I’ve done some years in much easier situations, down here in South Australia, and with Indigneous programs at universities, so I admire you dedication tremendously and wish you every success in where you now want to go. I think you’ve paid your dues, and I think I’ve paid mine. Wow, that should have the armchair Left sitting up !

Best wishes,

Joe

dazza 07/05/08 12:31PM

You are definitely a total nut-case, Joe. Again, as always, when you are losing an argument, you resort to personal abuse, and as always, totally incorrect personal abuse. Do NOT put on me the garbage you are throwing, Joe.
As I have said before many times, the problem out there is that most of these men have no self-respect. Your ‘graduates’ can be what they like, I know nothing about them, and in this case, care less. I am talking about the people who do not get the opportunities.
No commentator wants to admit or even suggest that the root of the child and female abuse by men is a total lack of self-respect, which can only be fixed by the infusion of a massive amount of money and human capital by Government and other agencies.
Over the last couple of hundred years, the whole reason for existence of Aboriginal men has been torn apart. Hunters are no longer a required item for living. Women have been given all the power in indigenous communities these days, they are the ones approached by Media to make comment on anything. The offending men are usually sitting or sleeping under a tree, maybe drunk or stoned, of no further use to anyone, obsolete. How the Hell can anyone expect anything better of these men while this situation prevails, and it will prevail as long as it remains un-acknowledged by Whites and those in Government who do not want to acknowledge it, and spend the necessary money.
It is not only in Indigenous Communities that the lack of self-respect in both women and men makes for very poor situations, where children and men and women are assaulted, battered, abused.
Social values, community values, cultural values and mores have been rendered inoperative by the total dis-empowerment of men in these Societies.
Being as poor as the proverbial Church-mouse, no jobs available, no one will employ them, no chance of getting self-respect, does not make for a harmonious society. Easily available booze, and sometimes drugs, petrol sniffing, does not help at all. This is just trying for mind numbing forgetfulness. This situation can be seen in any slum sections of large Cities he world over. Human beings become cyphers, no longer human. So how can our society expect normal human values to apply! And these days, one has to ask about just what are human values? Seems to be breakdowns on a daily basis, worldwide. Often led by people such as George Bush and John Howard and Tony Blair.
When our Media and our Governments and our Non-Govt. bodies recognize this, and act accordingly, then, and only then, will we see any improvement. The punitive response, so well articulated by Premier Rann, does nothing for anyone except make the Red-Raggers, the Goon Squads in the Media, the women’s groups who are so articulate and loud in condemning the men in these Communities, ALL the men, happy. Generally dumb, but happy!
So what is new?
Dazza.

rmg1859 07/05/08 1:17PM

I really don’t understand where you are coming from, Dazza. You APPEAR to be disparaging Indigenous achievement at the highest levels - achievement by people who have had as much, or as little, opportunity as the ‘poor bugger me’ Blackfellas that you profess to feel so, so sorry for. Since the seventies, Indigenous people have had, and have seized, the opportunity to prepare for and enrol in university courses, from which they have graduated - nowadays in the four figures annually. Why do you keep putting shit on that achievement ? Do you really want people to stay out of sight, out of mind, like good little well-behaved Blackfellas, being no trouble to anyone but each other, losing themselves in the long grass ? Can’t you see that if Indigenous people, like my family members, like the other half a million, want to get anywhere, as individuals and as communities, they will need skills, that communities will need skilled people of all sorts ? Don’t you want the ‘poor people of the earth’ to ever lift their heads ? If not, then we do know exactly where you are coming from.

Joe

rmg1859 07/05/08 1:22PM

Dazza,

‘No jobs available’: funny, I was just listening to Radio National, that extreme Right-wing mouthpiece for Howardists and other fascists like Philip Adams, and lo and behold ! there was a story about the desperate need for 25,000 seasonal workers (such as I have been on occasion: peaches, oranges, apricots, grapes). So brighten up, Dazza ! There are opportunities for those who want to work. Of course, fewer and fewer opportunities for the tiny minority of drop-kicks, your Blackfellas of choice, to avoid work, but you can’t accuse them of not trying.

Joe

dazza 07/05/08 5:58PM

Oh, forget it, Joe. You intend sticking with your foreign planet no matter what, so no chance of anyone ever getting through your thick head. Have you great trouble understanding Australian English? Or are you just plain one-track-minded? Bye!
Dazza.

rmg1859 07/05/08 9:37PM

Well, Dazza, all I am trying to do is put forward a coherent alternative to the mindless and frankly heartless rubbish that Senator Siewert is promoting, to her shame (and I hand out stuff for the Greens !) Terrible things are happening in remote settlements. The hunter-gatherer life was killed off by the extension of welfare rights to Indigenous people all over Australia, and fair enough since they had those rights as Australians. But let’s not bullshit about it - the hunter-gatherer economy, relying predominantly on hunting and gathering for one’s sustenance, died when welfare rights were extended. Fair enough, that’s their choice, that’s how it is. So shoot me.

But surely even you can see that Indigenous university graduates represent some hope for other Indigenous people - there are not tow populoations, one which has opportunities and one which doesn’t, not really, except the division by distance, remoteness: the poor buggers who are most remote are most deprived, most abused, most likely to die early.

So when you devalue graduates, for the life of me, I can’t understand why. Perhaps there is a simple reason.

Joe

rmg1859 10/05/08 11:08AM

And on the subject of the Mullighan report, the figure of 141 cases of child abuse is used, and it is acknowledged that this represents the tip of the iceberg, much less than half of all cases. Now, they also use a figure of a thousand children in the North-West. Checking out the Census for the APY Lands, the total number of children under fifteen is only 577 (down from 700 at the 2001 Census, so where’s the great population boom ?) or 30.6 % of the Indigenous population (down from 233 % at the 2001 Census). On the maths, that means that half of the children in the North-West are being, or have been, abused. There are eight policemen in an area one and a half times as big as Ireland, and with far poorer roads.

But I expect that ‘progressive’ NM readers will stay silent about all that - don’t want to offend anybody, do we ? Let’s keep the myth going that the rightful place for Blackfellas is out of sight and out of mind, out there where they can all practice their hunting and gathering (even though we know damn well that they’re not), just so long as they don’t come into towns and live next door.

Progressive ? I don’t think most Australians have got out of the twenties yet. That’s the 1920s. What a pack of callous, racist bastards.

Joe

rmg1859 10/05/08 12:17PM

That should have read:

‘Checking out the Census for the APY Lands, the total number of children under fifteen is only 577 ….. or 30.6 % of the Indigenous population (down from 33 % at the 2001 Census).’

Why did I say the twenties ? Because that then, there were moves to pack all Aboriginal people off to somewhere up the North, regardless. In 1924, Colonel Genders here in Adelaide set up the Black State Movement, and the federal government was contemplating the idea, setting up ‘inviolate’ reserves in Arnhem Land and the Central Reserve, shit country that pastoralists couldn’t do anything with, and which even in those days supported very few Aboriginal people, except in the coastal missions.

In fact, one mission society commissioned a seasoned missionary-traveller to scour the area west of Alice Springs to assess whether or not it could still support any numbers of hunters and gatherers. He found very few animals (a kangaroo and a couple of emus) across a vast expanse (it had been drought for many years), and concluded that no, large numbers of people could NOT live off the land as they had been used to. So they gave that idea away.

Only to be resurrected by the ‘Left’ in the seventies, long after there was any semblance of traditional economic life. But let’s keep the myth going, it’s the only excuse we have to keep ignoring that simple fact that all Indigenous people are embedded in the Australian welfare and social systems, part of Australia, and forever. No, there will never be any substantial population of hunter-gatherers ever again, and we can lament that all we like. There will never be a Black State, much as the most racist of Australians might wish it. The vast majority of Indigenous people now live in towns and cities, and that’s how it is going to stay.

And yes, Aboriginal people do feel pain, when you cut them they do bleed, when you tickle them they laugh, and when they are abused and beaten they die. They have needs like you and I, and they have agency like you and I. They don’t live on thin air. They have the same failings as other Australians in the same circumstances, no more and no less. They are our brothers and sisters, our neighbours, we are all part of the same island nation, all Australians, there are no more and no lesser Australians.

But I’ve given up expecting ‘progressive’ people to understand any of this.

Joe

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