I am Bess Price's husband. My wife has been in mourning for her sister-in-law, murdered on a town camp, her brother's step son who died accidently and avoidably and a 14 year old niece who suicided, during the period of this highly public bickering. We have been amazed and appalled by the public attacks on her for the simple act of expressing her opinions on the deep distress her people are suffering. They began with Prof Behrendt's comment and other obscene attacks on anti-intervention web sites and have been continued locally by the Greens and their supporters in Alice Springs. I was delighted to read your article. We agree completely with your balanced analyses of the main issues. It has all been worth it if more sane voices like yours are heard as a response to the hysteria. We also want the voices of the most marginalised, vulnerable and distressed, those drowned out in the public bickering, to be heard. We want to be done whatever can be done to effectively relieve their distress and we want a genuinely bipartisan effort by governments at all levels.

Prof Behrendt's attitude is typical of those leftist academics who are far removed from realities. Anyone working with aboriginals in remote places knows first hand the atrocities and suffererings still going on today. What Prof Behrendt shows is like many of the leftist spewing out their hatred is that they are far more interested in protecting their dogma rather than helping people.

Spot on, Runner.

I'm not so sure that Behrendt's vicious attack on Bess Price was a sign of a petty feud: I think it was very much a sign of the distance between people in remote settlements, living in desperate welfare-dependence, and the urban elites, the self-styled leaders. Pretty clearly, as far as the elites are concerned, the people in remote areas - excluded, uneducated, unskilled, unemployed - are on their own.

I must also take issue with Professor Thampapillai's assumption that " ... Indigenous Australians are poorly represented in higher education .... " Consider:

* Indigenous enrolments are at record levels, and have risen every year since 2005. In the latest year of data, 2009, they were already some 43 % higher than they were in 2000, and have probably risen by another 15 % since then;

* the equivalent of two young adult age-groups are currently enrolled in university courses, overwhelmingly in mainstream courses. The backside dropped out of enrolments in Indigenous-focussed courses, Aboriginal Studies, Aboriginal Health, etc., in 2000-2005;

* Around fourteen hundred or more Indigenous people graduate each year - that's equivalent to about 18 % of the 22-year-old age-group;

* total graduate numbers - really after only about twenty years - are now more than twenty six thousand: that's one in every nine or ten Indigenous adults;

* By 2020, thanks to a massive increase in the birth-rate after the mid-eighties, enrolments and annual graduations could easily double, and total graduate numbers could exceed fifty thousand.

[TBC]

[Cont.]

In fact, if we put these two aspects of the Indigenous condition together - that

(a) about a third of the entire population, remote, rural and urban, are encapsulated in lifelong welfare and unlikely to participate in university education [but see below], and

(b) university participation by Indigenous people has been substantial over the past twenty years, involving around eighty thousand people in total,

then the actual rate of participation is little short of amazing:

* Indigenous women's participation is at about 65 % of the non-Indigenous women's participation rate. They are currently at about the same level of partiicpation as non-Indigenous women were in 1997-1998;

* Indigenous women (aged between 20 and 600 are commencing university study at a slightly better rate (2.2 %) than non-Indigenous men (2.06 %);

* The number of Indigenous men commencing university study rose by a massive 18 % between 2008 and 2009, i.e. in one year.

If we take socio-economic class into account as well as distance, rurality, etc., then it is all the more amazing that the participation rate of urban Indigenous people is so high. It is probably a hell of a lot better than the rate for NON-Indigenous people, men especially.

[TBC]

[contd.]

The upshot of this is that Behrendt, as head of a Review of Indigenous higher education, will not be able to fall back on the common stereotypes about non-participation, in other words, "blame the victim", and effectively come up with no new ideas, no initatives, nothing to assist Indigenous people - the same old, same old that the elites are so good at.

If she knows anything at all about Indigenous student support - and more so if she cares about it, since she comes from the rival teaching/research/conference area - she should know that, while the major problems of recruiting urban students have been dealt with, the tertiary education sector in general and Indigenous student support in particular, have a massive and historic task in front of them:

* to assist the people from remote areas, and from the welfare-oriented population generally, to enable them to work their way from their current desperate state, gradually and with enormous effort and courage, to university study.

It has to happen sooner or later, after all: remote communities need vast numbers of skilled people, and people there deserve a similar range of opportunities that the Behrendts of the world take for granted.

Is Behrendt the person for the job ? We'll see: one thing is for sure and that is that she will not get a free ride - there will be people looking over her shoulder from now on.

Joe

Correction: above I lazily wrote that ' ... the equivalent of two young adult age-groups are currently enrolled in university courses."

On recent rates of growth, it is possible that there are about 11, 500 Indigenous students enrolled at universities this year (perhaps as high as 12,000). Their median age would be around 25-26. In each of those age-groups, according to the last Census, there were about 7,000 people.

So there are the equivalent of about ONE AND A HALF median age-groups of Indigenous people currently enrolled at universities across Australia.

Sorry :)

Just by the way, Indigenous commencements this year are probably around 5,500, of whom about 4,500 would be first-timers: the others would be mainly post-graduate students. Indigenous participation at universities is not some fly-by-night, one-off, inconsequential bagatelle, not with the equivalent of more than half of the 20-year-old age-group enrolling, every year, year after year. Get the picture ?

Joe