Where does one start ? This article is full of so many lies that it seems pointless to try to refute them: every sentence would have to be deconstructed.

In the last thirty years, Aboriginal people have asserted themselves, seized opportunities, created more than 25,000 university graduates, halved the gap in home ownership (all such bourgeois measures ! Sniff, says Pilger) and participated in Australia's open society. Yes, there is a population immured in welfare-dependence, perhaps a third of the total Indigenous population, suffering the worst health, imprisonment and suicide rates - but this is precisely the population which the Pilgers of the world would tout as exemplars for the rest: living in remote areas and on the outskirts of cities, unemployed and unemployable, alienated - and dead in the water.

Save it for your gullible overseas readers, mate.

Joe Lane
Adelaide

There I was thinking we had incompetent governments who bumbled around while trying to satisfy all the (self) interest groups and patrolers of the borders of political correctness (keeping ever vigilant for sources of offense and grievance)

Now I find it's all a conspiracy by a newspaper mogul who doesn't even live here, and seems to have little or no record of publicly addressing what the author is mildly hysterical about.

Who gains?

Well the interest groups have a lot to gain, and also seem to be the source of most of the myths.

What would Murdock gain?

Pilger gives one example of this campaign - that of Andrew Bolt's court case and suggestions that one of the aboriginals involved is not, in fact, a recognisable aboriginal.

But Pilger has long been guilty of wild, activist-style overstatement of any case he might have, recognising only facts that suit him, and proving immune to any criticism, reasoned or otherwise. In any case, the world has long moved on from Pilger's heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam war is over, the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago.

The best way to treat Pilger, fellow posters, would be to simply ignore the man altogether.

Mr Pilger is right.

Remember Australia is on Aboriginal Land that still hasnt been paid for.

Ih Nohj,

Yes, you're right, in many ways, at least in relation to the five-sixths of Australia which is not under Aboriginal control. But the $ 3 billion p.a. over and above services (Pilger neglected to mention this) don't count for anything ?

One could easily go down the track of asserting that neither did Aboriginal people pay for the land, and they had fifty thousand years of use out of it, gratis, and just like every other human group, helped to modify the landscape fundamentally in that time. But I don't wish to go down that track: conventional legal systems recognise prior landholders as the legitimate landowners, and that's fine with me.

I'm not as interested in manufacturing a past history of loss and oppression as in what Aboriginal people are doing now, and can be enabled to do, to get themselves out of situations of aimlessness and exclusion - how they are using their sense of agency and how can that be enabled and promoted. On that last point, Pilger even has the hide to suggest that, somehow, locking people out of the economy and parking them off, powerless, in remote communities is fine but enabling people to move to cities and work and join in with the rest of Australian society is 'apartheid'. Doesn't he even know what the word means ? Exclusion ? Segregation ? Forced separation ? Disempowerment by distance ?

Aboriginal people have rarely been passive victims of history, and the great majority are fighting against it right now, with no thanks to the Pilgers of some distant planet, prattling to a distant audience.

Joe

This is the left-wing version of an Andrew Bolt article. Long bows drawn with half-truths and loaded with exaggerations.