well if I ruled the world I would do the following:
Ask communities about their priorities and map a plan of action around those priorities
Lift the quality and accessibility to health services inlcuding mental health and drug and alcolhol rehabilitation services and cultural healing and recovery services
Provide safe houses for children and protective parents
Embed literacy and numeracy programs in culturally significant activities rather than insist on the western style industrial era of schooling
Develop career pathways for young people in communities and resource them
Require local government and state governments and federal governments to provide entry level jobs and skills development for young people from remote communities
and so on....enabling empowering

Hi Mog,

The problem is that that jumble of proposals has been substantially in place for the last forty years. Which of them hasn't ?

And can't you see the contradictions in your wish-list:

'Embed literacy and numeracy programs in culturally significant activities rather than insist on the western style industrial era of schooling
'Develop career pathways for young people in communities and resource them
'Require local government and state governments and federal governments to provide entry level jobs and skills development for young people from remote communities ....'

What skills do communities need ? Pretty much the same range of skills as any town, and given the small scale of communities, if anything people need to be MULTI-skilled. Don't communities need teachers, nurses, access to doctors and dentists, mechanics, electricians, etc. etc., just like other towns ? How do people, any people, train for those skills ? Either at university or TAFE colleges.

So entry-level employment is hardly the way to go, unless the community is forever going to be dependent on outsiders, usually non-Indigenous, for their higher skill needs. Is that what you want to perpetuate ?

So, how do you ' ...Develop career pathways for young people in communities ... ' unless the young people voluntarily move away to study and train - but for this there are prerequisites:

1) the kids can understand English,

2) the kids can read and write, and are familiar with the specific knowledge up to the entry-level for their particular course of study.

[TBC]

[cont.]

Part of the problem for small communities is that, even if everyone was skilled in some specific field, there still may not be enough people to provide all of the skills required. That's if EVERYONE got skilled. As well, there may not be enough work to fully occupy ANY skilled person, except perhaps a teacher or nurse. So if anything, either people need more than one range of expertise to utilise in a particular community, or they have to make their living, moving around, serving more than one community.

In other words, communities can be too small to be viable, in terms of the skills they need to function.

Mog, there has been a wealth of experience over the past forty years, across a thousand communities: please do not think that you are the first to invent the wheel. Thousands of very dedicated people have tried, and have spent probably millions of sleepless nights trying to figure out what can be done. It can take a lifetime to realise the awful truth about the real potential of remote communities.

Meanwhile, in the cities, one in six Indigenous adults is a university graduate. So what is working ? What isn't, in spite of all our romantic dreams and wishes ?

No, it's not all beer and skittles in the cities either, it's a two- or three-generation struggle, but people certainly have far more options there: certainly, that third-generation does, they are the people going straight on to university, not as an elite but as a large fraction of each age-group.

The poor buggers in remote communities haven't even begun that struggle yet, and nowadays don't even have the basic means to start it, thanks to muddle-headed dreamers like Coombs and Nicholson.

Joe

I think the good judge should go and spend a year in a community and then form an opinion. Until then he can resume sipping lattes and reading the SMH.

My wife and I's last job - 3 years ago - before retirement was caring for indigenous children removed from remote communities where violence and abuse was the 'norm.' This ex-judge prattles on about Rights but nowhere does he talk about Responsibilities, in fact, he make false claims about indigenous 'culture'.

In every tribal group we had dealings with (Wik, Burrenji, Karra, etc) the culture 'rule' is "you make the child, you responsible for the child' - the opposite of what Nicholson claims in this article.

His article is little more than Liberal bashing as he'd had run-ins with the Howard government and is a well known ALP functionary along with his mate former Federal Court judge, Marcus Einfeld with whom Nicholson often worked and socialized.

Oh, that's right, not friends with Marcus anymore because Marcus is a guest of Her Majesty, doing time for corruption, perverting the course of justice, forgery, etc. You can tell what a person's like by the friends they keep.

Still on-topic :)

There's a brilliant little book just published by Doubleday: 'Disintegration: the Splintering of Black America', by Pulitzer Prize-winner Eugene Robinson, in which he details the fracturing of the US Black population by class and aspirations since the civil rights struggles of the fifties and sixties.

Of course, there are differences between the two situations, but a similar process - of some seizing opportunities and leaping ahead, while others seem to be oblivious to them - seems to be occurring.

On reflection, a similar shake-out is happening in New Zealand too, rural vs urban, under-class vs middle-class vs elite class.

In all three countries, a large section of the population is being left behind, not getting much of an education, dependent on welfare, characterised by all of the usual negative statistics. Meanwhile, another section of the population, perhaps a majority, struggles to stay in work and get their kids a good education: their ethic is radically different, even though they may come from the same families as welfare-dependent people. For some, effort should (and hopefully will) equal reward; for many others, effort is pointless.

Different outlooks, different outcomes.

So, for a large Indigenous population, yes, their kids are going to go to university, they are going to get good jobs, they are going to own their own homes.

For another population, urban as well as rural, they will do what their relations have always done, scrabbled, depended on each other, sought better deals from Centrelink and housing authorities, tried vainly to stay out of trouble, tried to keep their kids off the streets.

Like it or not, the Indigenous population is differentiating along class lines. That process is likely to accelerate in the next ten and twenty years. The train has left the station, and it doesn't come back. Who gets on and who doesn't - that's one question. How to help everybody that wants to onto the train - that's a bigger one :)

Joe