Old news Loudmouth. Lift your tone, you're sounding boorish.

3. Equal rights governance rebadges the Senate a women's legislature with members elected by women and the House of Representatives a men's legislature with members elected by men, each with exactly the same powers to initiate, review, amend, accept or reject legislation enacted with passage through both.

4. A Cabinet of equal numbers of women, appointed by a majority of the women's legislature, and men, appointed by a majority of the men's legislature, reconciles the business of the Parliament and provides leadership.

http://2mf.net/amendment.htm

Joe,
that's bloody rich! You accusing Poirot of twisting "your" words!

My full sentence that you conveniently take a snippet from was:
"I don't think aborigines should be striving to be like us. They should see Western culture for what it is and reject and and go beyond it".

I was clearly criticising out Western culture that you appear to celebrate.
It goes without saying that we all live our lives according to our lights. I don't profess to tell anyone what to do.
I wish aboriginal people well and merely expressed the rhetorical hope they might be better than us. I don't "expect" anything of the kind.
Nor do I like the idea of segregation, but as I've said above, they already live under ideological apartheid.

Hi Squeers,

I'm sure you would agree that dialogue is preferable to shunning the opinions of others, or abusing them. Thank you for that :)

You did write "I don't think aborigines should be striving to be like us." and seem to reinforce that with: " .... they already live under ideological apartheid." Indeed, but only if sections of the extreme Right and Left have their way.

So ...... somebody cops a boot up the freckle for 'assimilating' indigenous people [don't you just love how people use the active voice for the actions of non-Indigenous people, and almost exclusively the passive voice in relation to what 'happens' to Indigenous people [e.g., they were 'assimilated] ? Fascinating !] and them one in the nuts for forcing them somehow to live under apartheid ?

If you mean, being forced to live in remote areas, with poor, and declining, education and therefore drastically reduced opportunities, then yes, you are right, people find themselves living under a form of Apartheid. Is that what you had in mind ?

The great majority of Indigenous people now live in urban areas. They have chosen to do so. They seek opportunities, education and work, in urban areas. They seek the means to live lives which are as secure, productive and comfortable as yours or mine, and they have every damn right to do so, the same rights as you do. And I'd defend your rights to those benefits, just as I would defend the right of every Indigenous person to those benefits, if they chose to access them.

One thing that has struck me over half a century of involvement with Indigenous people is how active they usually are in their own lives, how they are more likely to spit in the eye of an abuser than touch the forelock to him. They make their own calculations about options - at least, the people in urban environments - and good or bad, right or wrong, those are THEIR decisions. They don't dance to anybody else's tune.

[TBC]

Loudmouth,

You are not only loud, but you run a particularly snide line of reply which distinguishes your argument in the negative.

....however, I'm sure you're cognizant of the essence of my post, which was partly concurring with Squeers that Western culture is base and awash with avarice and excess - and perhaps our indigenous brethren would do well to incorporate the superior values of their own culture in an effort to rise above the detritus of ours.

Of course they are welcome and capable of joining the party, but don't fool yourself that their culture will not be dissolved in the process.

I know you consider yourself to be an authority on this issue, but even with the aid of your sneering superiority, you aren't the font of all wisdom.

Most Australians have long since moved on from the primitive culture of wretched paternalism which washed up on the shores of the continent two centuries ago, having almost entirely assimilated into the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tradition of equitable governance between women and men, as acknowledged in the Federal Court by Justice John von Doussain with the view he was "not satisfied on the evidence before this Court that the applicants have established on the balance of probabilities that restricted women's knowledge as revealed to Dr Fergie and Professor Saunders was not part of genuine Aboriginal tradition" [Chapman v Luminis Pty Ltd (No 5) (21 August 2001):400]; in ethnographic studies, as with Diane Bell's seminal "Daughters of the Dreaming" (1983); by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples themselves, as with the proposition the 'men never used to boss over the women', "We Are Bosses Ourselves" [Fay Gale (ed), 1983]; and through the affirmation of a heritage of matrilineage, as with Professor Larissa Behrendt.

Why did Australians ever bother with granting women franchise soon after Federation if, as Gary Johns claims in his publication Aboriginal Self-Determination: The Whiteman's Dream, "tribal Aborigines had no real understanding of how the world worked". Australians have overwhelmingly decided by democratic process on many occasions with the progressive achievement of equality between women and men that it is themselves who need to change their behaviour, that taking personal responsibility for their own actions rather than blaming the victim, is the way forward.

There remains reform of the instruments of governance which would have particular impact in contact with traditional communities. Reform of the nation's federal and state constitutions to provide for governance by agreement between women's and men's legislatures, courts and corporate committees would promote genuine dialogue. There is no other enduring solution.

[contd.]

[you'll have to take your turn, Whistler]

Squeers,

So can we come to an agreement that we will never again - unless it's impossible otherwise - use the passive voice in relation to what Indigenous people are doing and how they may be thinking, and what may be their options ?

So, to every dreadful evil that may have been done, instead of weeping our Walrus-and-Carpenter (aka Pilger) tears about how powerless people are, [with the implication either than nothing can ever be done (how dreadful), or that they should wait patiently for the Anglo working class to liberate all of society, including them,] let's try to find out what people have done about their predicament as they saw it, how did they respond, how did they bounce back, if they did, how did they push back against the tight constraints imposed by policy and circumstances.

Poirot,

Yes, I have to apologise, I shouldn't demean you or anybody: you're as entitled to your opinions as I am. As you say, I'm not the font of all wisdom as I sometimes pretend to be.

But I'm still not sure what actually was the essence of your post, unless it was an attack on the Enlightment, democracy, the rule of law, equality, solidarity and liberty, freedom of expression and assembly, the rights of individuals to make their own choices. To me, the mundane reality of the Enlightment and what has followed is that it is the culmination - and repudiation - of thousands of years of bitter experiences, inequality, injustice, ignorance and despair.

As a residual Marxist, I follow Marx in rejecting feudalism (and by implication, pre-feudalist ideologies such as traditionalist ideologies and Islam and Christianity), and the excesses of capitalism, seeing capitalism and democracy as prerequisites to a better society.

His colleague Engels took this account further back in history, explaing how savage and barbarous societies evolved, over thousands of years of brutal twists and turns, into State systems based on forced labour and slavery, which in turn evolved - over thousands of years of brutal twists and ......

[TBC]