Whistler,

Granted the traditional housing of bark and branches you allude to is cheap and could be supplemented by the occasional cave. Any particular designs you prefer?

http://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/housing.shtml

However I doubt it is the sort of housing that is being requested. Your idea of making them wait because the equal rights republic comes first is a bit much wouldn't you agree?

Just being practical and applying some common sense, the wisdom of Solomon is not needed to figure that one out.

Whistler,

Oh, dear. Presuming that your proposed Senate and your proposed House of Reps (why the difference ?) will be deliberating over the same issues, what happens when they come to different resolutions ? Another couple of houses above them, to sort out the mess ? And so on, ad infinitum ?

Or are you suggesting that a women's legislature would deliberate over women's issues, and a men's legislature deliberate over men's issues ? How do you tell them apart ? Why separate them ?

On housing: I wasn't aware that tradition and government-supplied housing went all that well together. One or the other - what would you recommend ?

Personally, I would support Aboriginal people's right to access standard housing in standard ways - i.e. if you own your own land, then you get a bank loan to build your own home on it, without a dollar from government. In the cities, Aboriginal people don't get houses built for them PRECISELY because they don't own any land there. I guess, he that hath shall get, he that hath not shall not, is that it ?

Joe

Whistler,

Meanwhile, Aboriginal people are getting on with business in the urban areas: there are currently more than 25,000 Indigenous university graduates, with record commencements and enrolments (check out DEEWR's higher ed statistics website for first half-year 2009 data) and probably record graduation numbers in 2009, 1500 or more: that's an average of four each day. In the 'settled' areas of Australia, Aboriginal people surely copped a lot worse than anybody currently in the remote communities - would you disagree ? - yet they are picking themselves up and getting on with it, not waiting for perpetual handouts from governments, and blowing their royalty cheques - which urban Aboriginal people can't get.

So, by 2020, there could be 50,000 Aboriginal university graduates - and their families - overwhelmingly in urban areas, while my bet is that people in remote communities will be way-back, still wallowing in self-inflicted despair and violence.

As a long-term self-determinationist going back forty years, I have to conclude that self-determination and the whole Coombs agenda has been such a total disaster that I really don't think that northern communities will recover - apart from individuals, they are stuffed. And it has been all their own doing, there's nobody else to blame: nobody forced them to stop the missionaries' vegetable gardens and orchards and chook-yards, etc., nobody forced them to drink, nobody forced them to stop sending their kids to school: they have done that themselves, nobody else. They will have to wear the consequences of their poor decision-making and THAT is why they will need outside help, for a hell of a long time to come, IF they ever decide up there to want to turn their lives around. It's up to them.

One contributor wants to protect women but sees no merit in empowering women while another is a bloke who reckons he's also a women and appears to have an opinion but no comprehension of how the parliament in Canberra works. They both offer Aborigines housing in the form of a third world laboratory comprised of junk packing boxes foraged from the local tip rather than housing which Aborigines might prefer whatever that might be.
The author of the article under discussion suggests Labor may be complacent in the provision of Aboriginal housing but Labor would appear brainiacs in comparison with what else is available.
A special tax should be struck for citizens who waste taxpayers money with support for solutions which fail to even attempt to win over the hearts and minds of those intended as the subjects of their solutions.
After throwing billions of dollars at a problem over several decades and achieving very little it may come as an awesome revelation that the problem is with the thrower not the throwee, but it's no big deal, could happen to anyone.
As to how many more billions will be wasted on this paternalist nonsense, bring on the referendum.

Cornflour,
I suggest you do a bit more research, there are quite a few documented journal entries (by european explorers) of stone houses. There was a village of stone houses that an explorer did a detailed town map of, and was believed to have housed up to 700 people.

Stone houses were found along the bottom states of Australia, in NSw, Vic, SA and WA.

How is it that you are keen to recommend shipping containers but have not taken the thought to ask why there are only 7 new houses after all this time.

Before you ask, I am not including a web page, as this information is readily available if you are interested, or if you care to look.

Finally, there is men's business and women's business and there are areas that require both men and women to address certain community business.

Why is private home ownership in remote communities so difficult to contemplate ? Surely community councils would have the wits to envisage the allocation, perhaps a long-term lease, of a house block to each resident family (and others who qualify for residence, by affiliation), on which they can build a house which would be theirs to pay for and maintain ? Surely conditions of non-transfer to outsiders could be written into any lease agreement, and other objections overcome easily ?

How would they pay for it, you ask ? A couple of months back, one newspaper story pointed out that, at Mutitjulu for example, each household receives about $ 14,000 per year in royalties from the leasing out of Uluru to the NT Conservation commission. $ 14,000 per year would help to pay off a house - land would be no cost, remember. My imperfect understanding is that Aboriginal people in the NT (and perhaps in the North generally ?) receive mining royalties, amounting to some thousands of dollars per person per year - some body surely can correct me on this.

So why can't those royalty payments (now and into the future) be committed into the future, as re-payments for people's privately-owned houses ? If you like, that future income from royalties be assigned to lending banks in repayment for loans to build those houses ?

In this way, housing (at least in the NT) could be taken out of governments' hands and - in the spirit of self-determination - put back into the hands of the people themselves, the people who are going to be living in those houses, the people who are going to be responsible for their maintenance.

Problem solved.

Joe