With very few exceptions (there are miscarriages of justice in the system) jail inmates are in jail because they deserve to be there. They are not in jail because they are indigenous, have newly invented syndromes or have suffered an awful childhood; they have committed offences deemed unlawful, many of them against innocent, law-abiding people. They don't want to be employed, they don't want to be normal and they certainly are not normal. They are absolute scum from whom the rest of us need protection. Naive waffle is not going to change anything.

G'day Sara,

You got in ahead of me: "Unemployed Indigenous people are 20 times more likely to go to jail than Indigenous people who are employed."

Yes, exactly. The incarceration rate of Indigenous working people is probably no higher than it is for non-Indigenous working people.

There are currently around forty thousand Indigenous university graduates across the country, most of whom - not without some difficulties - find work. That number is growing rapidly. The great majority, I suspect, came from working families.

So what employment-oriented pathways can be opened up for Indigenous people in remote, rural and outer suburban areas - i.e. apart from pathways that are already open, but are rarely taken ? And why aren't they being taken ?

After all, what incentives are there to persuade people to get off lifelong welfare and make some effort to get some education and then employment ? Because as long as a large section of the Indigenous population believes that it will never have to work, their children and younger relations will take it for granted that they will never need any sort of education: in fact, could it be that getting any education may be seen as a threat to that lifelong welfare career path ?

Why shouldn't able-bodied people work ? Is that too much to ask ? If they should, then how can they be 'persuaded' to do so ? Perhaps the application of standard employment-search requirements ? But that would need a minimal level of literacy. Hence the avoidance of the threat at school level, by non-attendance.

And that shows how far many Indigenous people have been allowed to get behind the starting line, over the past forty five years.

Sooner or later, to avoid that Gap between working and non-working Indigenous people growing ever larger, the non-working population will have to make the leap. The working Indigenous population is already there.

Forty thousand graduates ? Yes - all on an Indigenous Higher Education Database on my website below.

Almost all data from the Education Department website: https://www.education.gov.au/student-data

Joe
www.firstsources.info

To Sara.

You are a compassionate and well meaning person, so I hope I do not offend you by saying that you got it all wrong.

It was once correctly taken for granted that full blooded aboriginal people had very low intelligence. And that they, as a race, were in need of both protection and guidance. This did not suite the socialist idealists who believed that all human beings were equal in every way. They believed that all you needed to do to produce equal outcomes in economic success was to treat everybody absolutely equally. One measure they proposed was to make it compulsory for aboriginal children to gain some sort of life skill, even if it meant forcing them to leave their tribes to get education and training.

This was the so called "stolen generation", which actually did a lot of good. Older aboriginal people remained in their tribal areas where they could be protected from a minority of rapacious whites, who only wanted to exploit them. Many young aboriginal kids were able to obtain employment in remote areas on low wages where the employers (often family run farms) capacity to pay was limited. It was a system which worked pretty well.

Then the socialists got creative.

They demanded that aboriginal people have full equality with white people. Those who knew the aboriginal people were horrified and pointed out that this would be catastrophic for the aboriginal people, as it would give them the right to drink alcohol. But the Socialists did not care. All they cared about was the principle of racial equality.

The biggest problem with aboriginal dysfunction today is alcohol, and we can blame the socialists for that. With aboriginal dysfunction plainly evident, the socialists then successfully shifted the blame. They claimed that aboriginal dysfunction was entirely the fault of white oppression, and they claimed that the removal of aboriginal "children" (meaning young teenagers) to gain employment was an example of that oppression. Even though they were the ones who originally proposed and supported it.

Continued

Continued.

Now, criminality is a form of human behaviour, and behaviour is a caused by two factors, nature and nurture. The first is nature. 95% of the people in jail are males. That factor alone should tell you that genetics most definitely plays a part in criminal behaviour. Criminals tend to be people with low intelligence, poor socialisation, and genetic predisposition to impulsive and violent behaviour. That pretty well sums up the entire full blooded aboriginal race.

The second is nurture, and well socialised people know how to behave themselves. I have in my possession a book where an Australian serviceman on Bathurst Island in 1942 marvelled at how well behaved the aboriginal children on the catholic mission were. He said that the nuns enforced discipline easily, because the ultimate punishment for bad behaviour was to be sent back to the tribe.

In the past, state and federal governments wisely realised that full blooded aboriginal people were not equal to whites, and they enacted paternalistic policies that were better than the ones we have today. I propose that there should be two classes of aboriginal people. Those that wish to remain in some sort of tribal time warp should be allowed to do so. Their welfare should be the responsibility of the government, and benign supervisors should have the power to control behaviour on aboriginal reserves.

Those that demand equality with whites should be allowed that privilege, provided that they accept equal responsibility.

The present situation of trying to pretend that all aboriginal people are equal is simply not working. If 66% of the NT education budget is directed to aboriginal education, with the result that there is a 90% failure rate in NAPLAN testing, then something is obviously wrong with our assumptions about aboriginal racial equality.

Intelligent people when confronted by an intractable problem put aside their assumptions and prejudices, switch on their objective reasoning circuits, and use logic to find a solution. If the solution violates human rights, then something is plainly wrong with the principles that define human rights.

Hi Lego,

I don't know where people get this idea that 'full-blood' children were ever taken into care - unless you mean the missions ? With the parents just over the hill ? Kids getting fed, schooled and going 'home' on the weekends ? That's not really being taken into care. And it's certainly not a 'stolen generation'.

If by SG, you mean the children taken into care up to about forty five years ago (when the single mother's benefit came in), then there seems to have been three major and distinct groups:

* kids at mission homes like Colebrook in Oodnadatta and later Quorn: the children of Aboriginal women who had been working on cattle - not sheep - stations, and perhaps had been in common-law marriage relationships up until the recurrent droughts, and who had been, like their partners, put out of work by the droughts. They couldn't take their kids back to the patriarchal environment of the 'tribe', where the kids would be considered fatherless, therefore family- and clan-less, with absolutely no protection. The partners had to take off to find similar work elsewhere in Australia. The women had to put their kids on the police station or mission door-step, 'for the time being'. Neither those women nor their partners could know how long a drought might last or how extensive, so of course people expected to get back together, pick up their kids and carry on. But life intervenes. But you can call those kids 'Stolen Generation' if you like.

* at the beginning of the War, early 1942, all white and half-caste kids in the Top End of the NT were evacuated south, to Adelaide and Sydney. Some didn't get back to the NT for 10-12 years. As far as I know, no 'full-blood' kids were evacuated: they would have been left to the mercies of the Japanese. Should you count those 'half-caste' kids as another 'Stolen Generation' ?

* Like many white families, in rural areas and in cities, Aboriginal families would have been subject to similar break-downs and problems of

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low-wage, large-families, the temptations of the grog, mothers dying in childbirth, fathers shooting through, destitution, etc., etc. Hence many kids being taken into care, usually for short periods.

As well, of course, until the Benefit, single mothers had few financial means to raise kids and had to give them up for adoption or long-term fostering.

It may come as a surprise to many of our younger folk but very many white kids were put into care, for a host of reasons, not just Aboriginal kids. In fact, the largest 'orphanage' in Adelaide, at Goodwood, never had, as far as I know, a single Aboriginal kid, but I could be wrong. My father was raised for years by the Salvos. My mum's mum was taken out of the Hull workhouse and raised by Barnardos, wonderful people. White kids are still being taken into care, after all. Being a useless parent is not an Aboriginal monopoly.

Cheers,

Joe