Gary, I think you deserve a medal for having the patience to read through such a load of irritating drivel.

It's obvious that they're so deep in bullsh!t that they can't see what's starting them in the face.

This Royal Commission will be just as useless – and expensive – as those gone by, and will not do a thing for aboriginal youth. The problems of these aboriginal youths has nothing whatsoever to do with “colonisation”, which happened over 200 years ago, or “loss of culture”, which is theirs and up to them to preserve if they want to, nor “land”, which they have handed back to them in abundance, and which is something not valued by youth anyway.

The same old rhetoric, from the same old suspects, merely entrenches the aboriginal problem and reveals the stupidity of trying to keep a dead, Stone Age culture alive. We are dealing with bad little buggers here, and we are nowhere tough enough on them.

There is no mystery to aboriginal bad behaviour. Just treat them like everyone else.

Does no one ever question the fact that white children growing up in extremely isolated places, like cattle stations, pearl farms etc don't grow up to be criminals, don't have poor health and certainly aren't uneducated, despite the lack of government provided services?
Because if we compare the two groups, isolation and lack of services has to be ruled out as a causative factor.
And as Gary says, loss of land and culture have to be ruled out as well because the group with the worst statistics are those who have never lost their land, language or culture.
Which leaves us with cultural influences and paternalistic government programs, both of which are destructive, while being mutually incompatible.
There are no quick fix solutions, or even easy slow ones, but to me, the very starting point, the very first thing that absolutely has to happen before anything else, is to ensure all aboriginal children go to school every day. Education is the very foundation on which all change has has to be built.
How that is to be achieved is the problem. Do we fine non compliant parents? Do we remove the children? Do we blackmail remote communities into ensuring all members get involved in making this happen?
Solve that problem and we can hope for progress in other areas.

Turnbull conned again by the false misleading journalist and activitist. The Royal commission is a farce. One day someone might think its smart to deal with crime levels.

Hi Big Nana,

I certainly agree with you about the importance of education. Perhaps with-holding any government payments in relation to education, if parents don't send their kids to school, might encourage them. It would put an extra burden on schools to do the accounting for it.

But of course, long before the Royal Commission was even announced, everybody knew what the root causes of high incarceration rates, Don Dale, etc. were, and once it was announced, had a fair idea what it would find. Yes, colonialism, i.e. its effects of those least affected, the loss of land on those who had lost least, the loss of culture by those most connected to it, etc.

It all reminds me of the RC into Deaths in Custody: even before that started to work, the commissioners knew that there was little discrepancy between the proportion of prisoners who were Indigenous (23%), and the proportion of deaths in custody which were of Indigenous prisoners (22%). But they had to go through the motions, and eventually make recommendations which, incidentally, may have improved conditions for all prisoners.

But both RCs will have acted to blow a smoke-screen over the whys and wherefores of why so many Indigenous people end up in custody, why so many kids taken into care, etc.

Best wishes,

Joe

I confess I am a white Australian male, and inevitably, according to indigenous spokespersons, a racist. Yet I predicted accurately that the RC would contribute nothing to lowering incarceration rates. And I will make further predictions : (a) the outcome would have been different if Big Nanna and Joe Lane had been commissioners ( b) this will never happen until the “Indigenous Industry “ is dismantled.