It is good to hear about university numbers however one wonders about the destination of graduates, presumably many go into the public bureaucracies and academia.

What many would most likely want to hear about is the number of men and women successfully undertaking trade apprenticeship and other trainee programs, where all levels of government and private industry have assisted opportunities in place, along with a the usual range of mentors that one finds in Aboriginal education. To quote from a government source, skills shortages continue to occur where there is a mismatch between available skilled people and the current and emerging needs of industry, resulting in critical short term and long term problems for Australia's economic health and the quality of life for Australians.

As is shown by the continuing demand for skilled migrants, industry is crying out for more young people to take up apprenticeships and traineeships. To take a rather obvious example, millions have been squandered on indigenous housing programs that result in few houses and those that are built are rarely if ever seen as suitable. What an opportunity for young indigenous women and men to learn skills that are strongly in demand and address a problem that so far has resisted solution?

Frankly it is elitist to concentrate on university education and if government is to believed, the throughput for many courses already exceeds requirements. Certainly many graduates experience difficulty in finding work that makes good use of their education. Arguably more attention should be paid to addressing the critical skills needs identified by government. Better to be building Australia and seeing some results on a daily basis than putting a gloss on a clerical chair for forty years.

In the last week, we had difficulty getting a roof tiler, a plumber and an outboard motor mechanic. If the clock was would backwards or forwards several years the same shortfalls of skills would similarly be unavailable. Those are just a few skills that we could not source under a fortnight's notice, if then. As for lawyers, they chase ambulances don't they?

errr....how many of these 'aborigines' are even slightly black??
Mind you, with abstudy, why look a gift horse in the mouth?
One rule for them and one for the rest.
Come back Pauline, Oz needs you

This is one of my biggest gripes. Education but for what ? To create an even larger group of unproduceables to stick their gobs into the feeding trough provided by those whom they consider to be lesser ?
This is the area where the Unions have failed us so miserably. Where is the incentive to work physically when all one does is to provide a cosy position for public servants.
Education should mean exploiting intelligence for the better & not creating an ever growing society of hangers on.

Of COURSE it's a great thing for Indigenous participation...why should it not be ?

The bleeding obvious here also, is that they are quite CAPABLE of doing such study.. in which case.. they should be welcomed into mainstream Australian society.

It probably makes it hard though, to revert to wandering the desert carrying ya boomerang and nulla nulla chasing a wallaby or goanna for tucker.

So.. given a Uni education should fit them for modern life... GREAT... I recommend they simply slide in to life as well educated "Australians"...NOT as "Indigenous" people.

And for those who just spilt their coffee (decaffinated of course) all over your keyboard.. I hasten to add "Just like WE ..the Scots, Irish,English and Welsh and many others who come to the Aussie national party as "AUSTRALIANS" and not wearing our kilts, or whatever cultural acretions we might if we wished to promote our 'cultural/ethnic' background.

I don't often agree with Algoreisrich, but on this occasion i think you make a very valid point. Most of these "Aboriginal" graduates are already in mainstream society, that is why they have become graduates. Unless they push the point, mainstream society does not see them as aboriginals at all and it is time the government stopped giving them extra priveleges because of their aboriginality.

The real aboriginals still live in the bush and unless there is a major change (I'm not too sure what) then they shall forever remain poor and destitute except for those in Alice Springs who can spend their government handout on the pokies in the Alice Springs casino.

That's great, Aboriginal people deserve to be treated as everyone else is treated, fairly! Good on them for achieving their dreams!
I am a woman and have achieved my dreams in the design industry and feel very proud of myself, they should be too.

Andrea

Logoland Australia
www.logoland.com.au

"By the end of this year there will be a total of nearly twenty seven thousand Indigenous university graduates across the country" With these overwhelming statistics there is, Nothing Wrong with the Education System in this Country !! Sure it may need some tinkering with. As it always will. But the Education Experts Chris Sarra and Tiga Bayles off on their, Don Quixote like Crusades Are Wrong !! I have viewed the Chris Sarra and “Stronger Smarter”website. A lot of it is out of touch and Crap. Yes he did accomplish something at Cherbourg. Due mainly to the dynamics of Cherboug itself. And the People. And history. Because of this he could Never Replicate it Elsewhere. A seemingly well intentioned sort of bloke. But we All know about Good Intentions and Hell. As for Tiga Bayles and the “Murri School”and their private, “Education Experiment”? We will just have to hope that his “Aboriginal Victim Industry” Agendas of Continuous and Unabated Blame Apportioning isn't part of their Curriculum. Though there is no doubt it will affect the kids attitudes. The mere fact that they are there. But there is Certainly a Concern seeing that Tiga is a Serial “Misrepresentation by Omission” Offender. With his finger in “To Many Pies” Becoming To Much of a “Personality Cult” Issue. posted by Arthur Bell.for more info, www.whitc.info

Thank you for those comments, I will try to respond to those worth responding to.

Thank you, Andrea, your support is very inspiring.

You're right, Bully, separate schools don't seem to get all that many kids onto either TAFE or university. In fact, they seem to do a much worse job than the average public school. I think you are a bit hard on Chris Sarra :>(

AGiR, it makes me very uneasy to agree with you, but there you go :) Of course, I don't think anybody has chased a wallaby or goanna with a spear for decades, except perhaps starving kids.


VK3AUU, no, you are way off the mark. Indigenous graduates are usually NOT in the mainstream before they begin their studies, they often come directly from unemployment - they certainly may be when they finish and get employed, but that's a long, hard grind for most of them: they usually don't have families to comfortably support them through their studies. And ABSTUDY has been equivalent to ordinary AUSTUDY for decades.

And what do you mean by 'real aboriginals' ? It's not your call, in the first place, and in any case almost nobody is living in the bush, unless you mean on remote communities ?

Individual, I can appreciate where you are coming from. But remember that the great majority of Indigenous graduates findwork in the mainstream, not so often in the Indigenous industry these days - those jobs usually go to unqualified members of powerful families rather than graduates. Keep your eyes peeled - notice if there are any new graduates getting any of those BS jobs: the people who do will almost invariably be related to some 'big man' or powerful family.

In any case, about 45 % of new graduates are either teachers, nurses or medical professionals - not much room to loaf and bludge there. And a very high proportion of the rest are spread across all sorts of mainstream fields, from archaeology to podiatry to vet science.

[TBC]

On top of that, Individual, given that funding for BS organisations is being wound dowm, there will be far fewer jobs even for the relations in future, let alone for unrelated graduates, so they will spend their lives in mainstream employment, not wasting their skills in those do-nothing organisations.

Cornflower, thank you for a passionate contribution: I have thought long and hard about your references to elitism and the role of TAFE, over many years. With one in nine adults already a graduate, I don't think that there is much scope for an elite. With the equivalent of about 20-22 % of each young age-group graduating these days (26 % for women), there is ever less need for an Indigenous elite at all, or their minders.

What is remarkable, in comparison to situation in other countries, is how little influence the old Indigenous elite actually has on younger people, even on younger graduates. Indigenous-focussed courses have wound right down at universities, so apart from some dedicated Indigenous student support staff, there is little contact between Indigenous students and Indigenous academics at universities. Elitist bodies such as the IHEAC have as little to do as posible with students.

As for TAFE, yes, I have thought for many years that it - or at least Indigenous TAFE - has been a fraud for Indigenous people, channelling them into rubbish certificate courses which they could enrol in year after year, getting them nowhere. The numbers of Indigenous students in genuine courses has been pitiful, perhaps fifteen hundred across the country, with only a handful of graduates in trades each year. I would love to stand corrected :)

But you can't really blame beef for not being lamb, Cornflower - Indigenous people at universities do their thing, people at TAFE do theirs. Indigenous people make their own choices, sensible and stupid, just like other people.

I wish there was somebody around who has been analysing Indigenous participation in TAFE, but I don't know of anybody. Maybe one of those thousand Indigenous academics doing research could look at it :)

Good one Joe, Maria would no doubt approve of this piece.

Thanks Rainier, yes, she's always on my shoulder :)

Loudmouth. You make some interesting comments. From the general tenor of them, one wonders why we actually need to give todays' urban aboriginals any different opportunities than the rest of the community. As it is, we are continually reinforcing the victim mentality that has been thrust upon them by the do-gooders of the community.

I have just come back from a trip visiting some of my old haunts in the hinterland and believe me, the real aboriginals still actually exist and they are still squandering our taxes.

David

David,

Thanks for your comment. 'Different opportunitis' ? No, I don't think so: all people are asking for is to be able to access the same opportunities.

First, let's remember that social policies have very long legacies, and solution may have very long lead-times. In almost all of Australia until the fifties, primary schooling was dumbed down so that kids could never really finish and go on to secondary school. Why ? Because secondary schools were in towns and cities, and Aboriginal people were not allowed to live in towns and cities, on the whole. A move down here in Adelaide in 1950 to set up a hostel for Aboriginal women in the city was knocked on the head, and Dr Duguid had to fight like hell to be allowed to set up a home for Aboriginal kids at Eden Hills, in those days outside the city, but now in the south-eastern suburbs.

So, apart from the Lutherna school system here, no Aboriginal kids could get any secondary schooling until the early to mid-fifties. The Lutherans had their mission schools in the far west andthe north, and their own boarding schools in the city, Concordia and Immanuel, but I wouldn't mind betting they also had trouble getting permission to bring kids into the city, which they were doing from theearly forties.

So, no mystery, almost no Aboriginal kid had finished secondary schooling before about 1962. Even through the sixties and seventies, those who did usually werefostered out to white people during their secondary years. The upshot was that very few kids, even into the eighties, had parents who could advise them about secondary education, let alone successful completion of secondary education, let alone going on to tertiary education. Those decisions had to be made by the person alone, with no real encouragement, usually quite the reverse.

[TBC]

[cont.]

Well into the nineties, most Aboriginal people enrolling at university came from families where successful school completion was rare, where they were striking out very much as individual and lonely pioneers - often not just the first in their family to go to uni, but perhaps the first to finish secondary school.

In SA, Year 12 completion numbers have massively improved over the last ten years, up about five or six times, partly thanks to the efforts of independent schools, especially the Catholics.

Yes, inequitable policies have long tails: the people who left the missions in the forties and fifties, usually dragging their kids with them, often from town to town, to work at whatever they could find, with few skills thanks to a dreadful education system, and their kids who stuck it out whatever it took, can rest in their graves in the sure knowledge that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are now tasting the fruits of equality. Three or four generations later. Yes, for some, it has been the lucky country.

So where, on that time scale, are the people in remote communities ? I fear that they are not even on it. There are many exceptions but on the whole, they have hardly begun the journey, or perhaps have been persuaded - often by the Left, to its eternal shame - that they don't need to take it. Meanwhile, the train is moving off into the distance. Is it too late ? I don't know. Perhaps not for some of their kids.

Joe

"So where, on that time scale, are the people in remote communities ? I fear that they are not even on it."

Well, they are starting to get onto it, but in a different direction to the ones who live in urban areas. There are, in the Northern Territory, many cattle stations whose leases to white settlers have not been renewed and these properties have been handed over to the local Aboriginal community. Some of these seem to be successfully training their people how to manage cattle and run the the property. There are often a few thousand head of cattle to be looked after, in some fairly rugged areas so it isn't an easy job, but the kids seem to be taking up the challenge. As in the white community, there are a lot of non academic jobs which need to be done and the fact that these jobs are local bodes well for the future.

On our recent trip to Darwin we were also intrigued by the fact that in many of these places there was a restriction on the sale of alcohol, surely a sign of people taking more responsibility for their lives.

David

Joe,

With respect I reckon your criticism of the TAFE system skirted around the question I was asking, but maybe someone else has an answer. Here it is again,

"What many would most likely want to hear about is the number of men and women successfully undertaking trade apprenticeship and other trainee programs, where all levels of government and private industry have assisted opportunities in place, along with a the usual range of mentors that one finds in Aboriginal education. To quote from a government source, skills shortages continue to occur where there is a mismatch between available skilled people and the current and emerging needs of industry, resulting in critical short term and long term problems for Australia's economic health and the quality of life for Australians."

Thanks, David, but how does that square with your comment that:

"I have just come back from a trip visiting some of my old haunts in the hinterland and believe me, the real aboriginals still actually exist and they are still squandering our taxes."

I had faith in community development, primarily economic development, for close on forty years, studied for it, planned for it, day-dreamed about it. Even when we lived in one community for four years udring the seventies, we remained true to the illusion that it would blossom and strengthen: instead, it went down the drain as the Aboriginal council to decided to stop wheat production, sell their sheep, pull out their grapes and stone-fruit, dig up their lucerne, and replace the lot with almonds, employing two men instead of eighteen and owing the ADB a million dollars. Oh, and a $ 5 million yabby farm, now deceased.

When we had a chance to go back to another community in 2003, one with amazing potential on 12,000 cultivable acres, we were frankly disgusted that so few people wanted to actually either work or study. A brand-new dairy had to be staffed by a couple of old f@rts, me and my brother-in-law. It lasted five years before being dismantled. Successfully dismantled, I should say, since any viable enterprise threatened the security of CDEP income. That community now has nothing but a bit of cattle-raising, again for two people, a white manager and his mate. Many times, we made the comment that 'if only you could get a thousand Vietnamese to work here, they would transform those 12,000 acres in a year.' Make of that what you will.

So I wish those remote communities good luck with their cattle raising, but I'll reserve my applause until I hear about sustained effort.

Joe

Joe, "So I wish those remote communities good luck with their cattle raising, but I'll reserve my applause until I hear about sustained effort."

Joe, that is spot on from my experience on the land and as an observer through regular travel.

Hi Cornflower,

24 hours are up :)

You were asking:

"What many would most likely want to hear about is the number of men and women successfully undertaking trade apprenticeship and other trainee programs, where all levels of government and private industry have assisted opportunities in place, along with a the usual range of mentors that one finds in Aboriginal education....."

You can find data on the NCVER web-site, for example:

http://www.ncver.edu.au/statistic/publications/2329.html

but usually data are presented in the form of percentages, which is absolutely maddening. However, every so often, they let actual numbers slip through. In one 2002 paper, for example:

"The number of indigenous apprentices and trainees has increased by 75 %, from 4,000 in 1998 to 7,000 in 2002. Over the same period, the growth in non-Indigenous apprentices was 104 %. Indigenous apprentices and trainees represented 1.9 % of all apprentices and trainees in 2002, compared to 1.8 % in 1998."

Total VET enrolment in that year was 79,600, the vast majority of whom were enrolled in low-level certificate I, II and III courses. The numbers enrolled at top-level TAFE/VET courses is - I suspect - not much more than a thousand across the country. Even many of the apprenticeship courses seem to be Certificate III, or even II, but don't quote me on that :)

But even those 2002 figures may have to be treated with some caution: what fields were those 7,000 apprentices registered in ? are there 'soft' apprenticeship fields ? How come Indigenous tradespeople are not anywhere near as plentiful as uni graduates, in the cities, towns or at remote communities ? Of the few Indigenous apprentices who I know of who have completed their training, few if any are working in their fields.

[TBC]

[contd]

I also suspect that TAFE - i.e. at its lowest levels - is seen by many in the Indigenous community as the appropriate level of education for indigenous people, not university: 'university is for whites, TAFE is for Blacks'.

So, for the past thirty years, TAFE colleges have allowed the development of Indigenous enclaves, empires, and for BS courses to be written up as 'Aboriginal TAFE' courses, and Indigenous people have been decanted into these courses, which they could do over and over again, and which got them precisely nowhere.

As a result, many who have been through this experience decry education in general, especially 'Western' education, since the years of TAFE study got them nowhere: 'we are the most over-qualified people in Australia,' one guy said to me. Well, yes, in purely crap courses.

I studied as, inter alia, a TAFE teacher, but turned instead to working in the tertiary sector, and I've certainly never regretted it. I liaised with many Aboriginal programs at TAFE colleges - many have large numbers of Indigenous students, happily studying for ten and fifteen years on various Cert I, II and III courses, often the same course year after year.

One guy I know has been studying at TAFE colleges, and at Tauondi, the Aboriginal College here in Adelaide, and finally on to universities, since 1973, when Tauondi started up. Clever b@stard, he got the state to pay him Study Grant for 35 years [he could still be studying at 56, I don't know], a total of around half a million dollars.

So he skimped and scrounged and tried to raise a family on poverty wages all that time. What could he have made in that time if he had gone straight through into uni and onto employment ? Two million ? Yeah, a real clever b@stard.

What the VET sector for Indigenous people and communities could be doing if it lifted its game ? Unimaginable !

Joe

I suspect the causes are simpler, for instance that expectations are set in primary and secondary education by well-meaning but ignorant teachers. It is the same for girls and all in the name of 'equity'.

On the other hand the young chippie who did most of the work on our recent duplex development comes from a local indigenous family with a tradition of being in employment. He has plenty of work and is doing well. Ask him and he will tell you that teachers tried to school him towards cultural studies and university but he "held out" and was "lucky" because his uncle Mick has a small earthmoving business and "stood up for him", putting him onto a builder he knew.

In fact it is hard for indigenous kids who want to work with their hands to be treated seriously, encouraged and supported. The same is true for the general population.

Cornflower,

Either way, uni or TAFE, professional or trades skills, that's the way to go. And I am very confident that that is what rapidly growing numbers of young Indigenous people will be doing in the next ten and twenty years. At least, that will be the case for young urban-based Indigenous people. God knows how much longer people in 'communities' will have to stay in the doldrums.

It seems to me that the impetus, the dynamism, the push over the next few decades in Indigenous policy, will come from the cities and towns, not from the most depressed and skill-less communities. How, why and in what forms may be very difficult to articulate, but I really do think there is no future in rural-based communities unless there are drastic changes in outlook.

In other words, the cities will drive future Indigenous policy. Discuss.

Joe Lane