This is not how the mainstream media reported his speech. Shame on them!

Tony Abbott says, "Australians’ sense of guilt about the past and naïve idealisation of communal life may now be the biggest single obstacle to the betterment of Aboriginal people." The biggest single obstacle? Come on Minister! How about the almost complete lack of sustainable economic opportunity? How about lack of employment opportunities in isolated communties (and elsewhere for that matter)? How about the lack of infrastructure in Indigenous community? How about demoralisation brought about by continuing paternalism? How about the lack of political representation in national and state level decision making? How about the massive number of well-researched reports and practical recommendations that sit in government offices gathering dust? How about the periodic wringing of hands every time we re-discover the same old problems? And so to sleep again when it all stops being front-page news!

I liked what the editor from 'The national indigenous times' said,

"Asking Tony Abbot about indigenous affairs is like asking George Bush about quantum Physiscs"

Because of course the North Shore of Sydney is rife with Aboriginal social problems.

How much work, effort and honesty will it take to change entire lifestyles? So far nothing has worked perhaps because of the sheer hugeness of the job, vested interests and a people's culture that was rooted in a nomadic existance where nothing was regarded as permanent.Every part of life was seasonal. How do you change that instinct to bricks, roofs,horticulture?
The only way to go is to begin at the beginning and that is education,education,education.
The people need housing, the youths need work. Combine the two.
The Howard government promised Technical colleges, why not put them where Aboriginal youngsters can board and learn to do anything but hang around idly and in trouble. No youth,black or white,male or female should be permitted to drift into nothinginess.

The Hon. Tony Abbott reels off the statistical horrors of aboriginal social dysfunction and blames their ‘culture of directionlessness’.

His statement, “Modern Australians are understandably embarrassed about our forebears’ failings towards Aboriginal people”, emphasises his exclusionary thinking.

Aboriginal Australians are neither ‘understandably embarrassed’ nor (necessarily) descendants of ‘forebears’ who so failed Aboriginal people. They are, however, implicitly excluded from the Minister’s concept of what it means to be a modern Australian.

And yet he argues, “In the long run, however, modernity - with its benefits as well as its excesses - has been as inescapable for Aborigines as for the rest of us.”

How is exclusion reconciled with inescapability?

At the time of colonial settlement, Aboriginal Australians had sustained a relationship with the natural environment, through the traditions and practices of the oldest surviving human culture in the world; hardly a culture of directionlessness. Through their dismissal as mere fauna, the British Crown established sovereignty as the first discoverers and possessors and yet the 1992 Mabo High Court ruling rejected the argument that the indigenous people of Australia had no possessory interests in their traditional lands.

The record of mistreatment and oppression of indigenous Australians is every bit as alarming as Minister Abbott’s introductory account. His monologue describes in disturbing detail the consequences of actions that ensured his ‘culture of directionlessness’.

Strange how there don't seem to be any aboriginal people being jailed as a result of the 'revelations' about child rape etc.
If I did something disgustingly criminal I'd be arrested and dealt with according to the law of the land but if I happened to have a claim to being 'indigenous' the same people who wanted to tar and feather me would be making excuses for me, and blaming it on 'the white-man'. I saw it myself 20 years ago, a guy called "Black Pete" dragged a young hippy chick into the scrub and anally raped her repeatedly for 3 hours, and some of my friends where trying to let him go. Crime is crime and to make exceptions based on race or part thereof is the ultimate in racism.