<<Can Australia afford not to be reconciled?>>

Can Australia afford to be reconciled?

If it was just a one-off payment then the offer would be tempting -

Here's $50 billion.
Go away.
Get a job.

The trouble is "reconciliation" could only involve -

existing payments in perpetuity
PLUS
additional payments in perpetuity.

Nice work if you can find it!

Go away.
Get a job.

24-hours are up :)

Thanks Lexi, I'm not all that lovely, really. Don't let internal appearances deceive.

Thanks, Spindoc, no, I'm not Indigenous, AFAIK, Scottish mostly.

Which brings us to Hazza: you write, somewhat incomprehensibly:

"Loudmouth, you've sadly walked straight into my trap- instead of realizing you walked into a blunder trying to pretend my post .... was instead a demand to censor- which you substantiated your entire point around- complete with a little remark snuck in that I "implicitly threaten"? "

Can you please re-phrase that, so that I can feel appropriately shamed, enraged, amused or whatever your aim was ?

Scotland: If I were there, I would vote for self-government, although the first actions of the members of the new house were somewhat discouraging:

1. Give themselves a massive pay-rise;

2. Adjourn indefinitely.

Sounds a bit too much like the last time in 1707.

Scotland a propos the Australian Indigenous situation: Yes, very similar, in that people IN REGIONS vote, not BY RACE: i.e. whoever is living in Scotland, or in any part of remote Australia, Scottish or otherwise, Aboriginal or otherwise, can vote. I am not aware that in Scottish elections, only those of proven Scottish ancestry can vote. Neither am I aware - nor would I support - a situation anywhere in Australia where, in local or state/territory elections, only Aboriginal people could vote, or conversely, where they were excluded from the vote because, after all, 'it wasn't Aboriginal-controlled country'.

Why not ? If only, Hazza, for the simple corollary that, if there were an Aboriginal-only electorate, then there would also be at least one Aboriginal-excluded electorate, so most Aboriginal people could not ever vote, or be represented, in regions where they actually lived - i.e. the majority. Dumb-@rse Michael Mansell has never understood this simple consequence of his idiotic notions of separatism.

[TBC]

[cont.]

I shouldn't be too hard on Mansell [I live in hope that he has one of those slap-the-forehead-Jesus-what-did-I-just-say moments]: my late wife Maria and I were separatists up to about the end of 1972. We made the first Aboriginal flags and were sending them all over the country, and the world. We gave one to Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Native Canadian singer, when she visited Adelaide, and she invited us all to have tea with her. I asked her what she thought of a separate Aboriginal state, like the NT, and she looked at me as one does an idiot and said, 'Who would leave their own country to go there ? And whose country would they be on ?'

That was that: I realised what a dumb, indeed racist, idea it was. And Mansell's dumb and dumber idea of passports has only reinforced my view that separatism is racism.

One other problem with Aboriginal separate government: there is no region in Australia where Aboriginal people are in the majority. Depending, of course, in how large or small one defines 'region'.

And what on earth do you mean by this, Hazza:

"And it would not be like a pro-shariah lobby demanding we surrender ground so they can build a nation on, because they never had one to claim- to them we'd just show them the door to where they can find their long-lost Shariah nation."

Are you having a go at Anthony Mundine ? Dumb, dumber, dumbest.

Graham

//This is not a thread about lapsed priests or whether indigenous practices are acceptable to any particular brand of Christianity.//

You seem to misunderstand. The list of issues I made was typical of what animistic societies do. I mentioned that we encountered such practices in Borneo.

Patrick want's 'reconciliation'..... but what does he MEAN by that?

If you look closely at what such people write, it usually boils down to....money and power. "Self determination" means a country within a country. This is not Scotland and England (Hazza) in any case, the Scots realize that they cannot really go it alone outside the British Union. The aboriginals should also. They (Scots)also happen to have a very identifiable land area. Aboriginal land is ALL of Australia if one wishes to be pedantic.

So... it's DODSON who makes the point about reconciling Christian belief with Indigenous, not me. I simply take his lead and expand on it from the perspective of Christian belief and practice.

On the Political side ? I do wonder..'who' is pulling his strings.
In the absense of specific information, I left it as a question 'who'......

But the idea that such an individual does not operate from a particular ideological base which may well have been influenced by his education and exposure to any one of a number (most likely left) of ideologies is rather naive in my view.

Algore and Loudmouth, I am telling you, that right as we speak, Scotland has its OWN parliament to which are elected members of electorates that reside inside Scotland, by members of those electorates regardless of race. Scotland is in fact a clear definition of a nation- complete with traditional territories and electorates. They are still part of the UK, and they have no army but the same UK army. The UK still has authority to ensure that the constitution is upheld all over the UK.
Granting regional autonomy to a regional nation within our country does not necessarily mean a cut, as you seemed to have been implying.

In other words, it has nothing to do with race or ethnicity at all, but who is a resident of that bit of land we were to agree to extend autonomy to- and that bit of land would need to have previously been an autonomous nation to justify their title- therefore, nobody who wants out can simply raise their hand- they have to PROVE they actually have a bit of land they are entitled to govern, before we negotiate letting them have some more autonomy.

Which should answer your question well Loudmouth- of course, if you'd like to pretend that the above passage was too confusing in your next post and continue to pretend that the constitutional amendments will be racially-based instead of geographically-based: as you have pretended with two posts that I am going to "implicitly threaten to use violence" to silence dissent (which you still haven't elaborated on where I said that); I won't mind- as I won't actually be the one that will look bad by it- because, among many other reasons, it's actually quite a simple concept that is already in practice around the world with little fuss.

Thanks, Hazza, for supporting my interpretation of Scotland's (and, by extension, any Aboriginal) concept of self-rule: EVERY adult in a REGION, regardless of race, ethnicity, etc., can vote in such elections. In Australia, such electorates are called, for example, Lingiari, Casuarina, Solomon, Kennedy, Jagajaga, Bradfield, Bennelong, Eyre, etc.

In Australia, an Indigenous person can stand for local, State and federal government, like anybody else. There are now elected Indigenous representatives in the WA, NT and federal parliaments. There are no 'Indigenous' electorates, or regions without non-Indigenous electors.

An Indigenous government, representing only Indigenous people, in an exclusively Indigenous region, is a racist pipe-dream. The great majority of Indigenous people now live in towns and cities, and are likely to stay that way: an 'exclusively indigenous region' would require forcible deportation: would you be in favour of that sort of thing ?

Now can we get back to real-life issues ? For instance, what are the issues as far as the twenty six thousand Indigenous university graduates are concerned ? In 2020, what might be the issues that concern the fifty thousand Indigenous university graduates ?

As for your 'implicit threat to use violence', if somebody in a pub says to you ' .... my patience is very low ...', would you interpret that as an implicit, or an explicit, threat ?

Just a word of advice: read over what you have written before you post it. Ask yourself:

: 'does this make any sense ?'

: 'is it grammatical ?'

: 'if I were NOT an undoubted genius, but a bit slow, short-sighted, English-as-a-second-language, like those hoi-polloi on OLO, would I gain a clear sense of this gem of wisdom easily ?'

Take some time to make yourself comprehensible: you will find your efforts amply rewarded.

Joe