Mr Shergold is spot on: without skills that translate into work which can boost the dignity of the jobless enormously, no amount of money will help. This is the crux of the problem, and if it can only be translated into government policy, it would be a win/win solution all round. Bravo, Peter!

Problems like this need to be tackled at several levels, including the entrenched and often completely responsible practice of government. For example, much housing for indigenous people is built by state governments, who follow standard practice. They issue tenders, look at quality, experience and price and award contracts to the companies offering the best value. This is what they are required to do and deviation from this practice is very likely to attract scathing criticism from the auditor-general.

Unfortunately, this also means that indigenous people are not given the opportunity to develop skills either in building and/or maintenance. The houses are built, the builders leave and maintenance is carried out another group of contracted fly-in tradies. These practices lie deep in the traditions of the public service. They are difficult to change but change at this level is essential to success for indigenous people.

Peter old mate, you got it all wrong.

As a person who crawled out of the disadvantaged class into the working class, I feel I am qualified to refute your misconceptions.

You seem to be under the illusion that everybody in the disadvantaged class is eager to work. Sorry mate, that just is not true. All of the well intentioned "programs" to get people working is going to fail, because a very high proportion of people have absolutely no intention of working if they can get away with it.

If you wish to reduce our increasingly unsupportable welfare bill, there are only two ways. The first, is to look at immigration, and realise that there are some ethnic and religious minorities who are very disproportionately overly represented in crime and welfare dependency. It is not in Australia's interests to continue to allow people from these groups to continue immigrating here, just to be a burden on the Aussie taxpayer. If that is "racism" well racism looks like great idea to me and my fellow taxpayers, who are footing the bill for misplaced humanitarianism.

The second, is to understand the relationships between unemployment, intelligence, and birth rates. Put simply, Peter, since smart people are upwardly mobile, while the bottom E demographic usually populated by very dumb people. Many of these dumb people do not want to work, breed like flies, and produce a lot more dumb offspring. Dump people do not look after their health, and dumb people clog our hospitals, courts, and jails.

On the other hand, smart people are hardly breeding at all, and this is especially so for smart professional women.

The only solution to long term unemployment, is to pay unproductive dumb people to stop breeding, and to find tax breaks and other incentives to encourage smart, productive people to breed a lot more.

I have seldom, if ever, disagreed with a comment posted on this website more than I disagree with LEGO's comments above.
To categorise some ethnic and religious minorities as being somehow unworthy of what Australia can offer? This is fear of the Other, or racism pure and simple, writ large.
To pay 'dumb people' to stop breeding while paying 'smart people' to have large families? This is eugenics, or racism at its most scary pseudo-scientific edge.
The long-term solution to long-term unemployment is primary education. Then training coupled with job availability.
I keep bringing this up under different guises, but to insist on attendance at primary school is to begin a habit of getting up in the morning to go somewhere to do something. Maybe a lie-in is preferred? Maybe the lessons for the day are too hard or not interesting? No excuse.
This same acquired attitude can later get us to work: Maybe a lie-in is preferred, maybe the work for the day is too hard or not interesting – no excuse.
The future starts with children. So simple and yet seemingly so hard to grasp.

There was a clash of one Productive and Progressive Culture and Traditions and one Non-Productive and Non-Progressive Culture and Traditions.
Our Ancestors existed with absolute minimum possessions.
With no need or desire for anything more.
What's happening today is simply a continuation of this.
This reasoning by “Generation One” that Aboriginal People aspire to the same as Anglo and Other Australians is flawed.
We would certainly desire accept and even expect what they have.
But for us to outlay and to expend the time and effort to obtain them is, "Not Culturally Appropriate".
This is the ongoing issue with Aboriginal employment.
Five to six hundred dollars a fortnight on the Dole is a lot of money to us.
We don't need much more to live on.
With loads of free food everywhere.
Plus Aboriginal specefic accomodation and free support.
It is much easier to just play Jacky-Jacky and act dumb. Aboriginal People have been playing this game for many years !! And it has now progressed to the stage where this is what's expected of us. And it Suits Everyone !!

I agree that my statements are racist, Haldual, but since I am a racist, then don’t see anything wrong with them. If a preference to live amongst my own people , people with whom I share common attitudes, values and behaviour, and with whom I feel safe with is racist, then just about everyone on planet Earth would guilty of that. And if loyalty to my own people, and concern for their welfare is racist, then I am the biggest racist around, and I am proud of it.

I am not sure why you are getting your knickers in a knot about eugenics, just about everyone considering marriage is concerned about the quality of their potential mates. Women especially, are renowned for pursuing successful men, and every women’s magazine regales its female readers with tales of some young floozie who managed to usurp a celebrity husband from an aging wife. Men openly peruse girlie magazines selecting women who are obviously prime breeding material to dream about mating with.

If “Job availability” is the only reason for unemployment, why are there so many people on the dole while petrol companies openly recruit and sponsor staff for their Australian petrol stations form India?

As for education being the great leveler, your opinion is based upon the wrong presumption that everyone has equal intelligence, and so it is a simple matter to educate the E demographic to get jobs. Wrong again. It is a lot easier to educate smart kids than dumb ones. And while education can make people smarter, no amount of education can make a genetically dumb person into a smart one.

Good on you Lego. Halduell you are just trotting out the same failed solutions... more of the same. It has failed before and will keep failing.

Eugenics Halduell? We already HAVE A EUGENICS POLICY. Our system handsomely rewards the least intelligent for breeding ... welfare-dependant can't afford *not* to have many children.

Meanwhile, since everything these days (esp since the ALP got into power) is 'means-tested'. The smarter, working population can't afford to have kids.

The solution is in three steps.
1: Don't to pay the stupid to 'not have kids', but to slowly wind the overgenerous payments back...

2: Reward good behaviour in the middle-classes... make children reduce your tax. A simple way is to wipe out Family Tax A, B, Baby-bonus, child-care benefit, parental leave etc etc ... and sack all the bureaucrats who administer these... and simply make each kid reduce your tax by 10%. If you have 10 kids you need every cent you earn to pay for a big-nough house and food there's nothing left for tax.

A better way of doing this is to have 'household income splitting'. Lets say dad earns $100,000, mum has a new kid and is not working, and you have two kids. Instead of paying a huge tax on $100,000 and then supporting all 4 people on what's left... the income should be divided by the number of people BEFORE the tax is taken...

So in this family has $100,000 to support for four people. So they should pay tax on four lots of $25000. It ends up being a lot less tax.

THis also provides a neat incentive to remain married... This will protect kids and increasd marriage rates. And divorce is the worst thing you can do to your kids.

3: Roll-back feminism. To many men know what the divorce courts do to dads, adn they are simply refusing to become fathers. Men arne't 'commitment-phobic', they're simply rationally afraid. Fatherhood is madness in this feminist country. That's why so many women, especially professional ones, can't get husbands and will sadly die childless and alone

Why is there such overcrowding in aboriginal comunities?

Because they are having so many kids. Many communities have an average age of 15. That means for ever adult, there are 4 kids... that's an average of 8 kids per woman...

That's a lot of babies. All on welfare, all on free meals at school, free health, free everything. And many being supplied with vast extra 'resources' for their leaning difficulties and etc.

THat's a rapidly growing cohort of disadvantage... and the more money that government throws it is, the more rapidly it breeds.

LEGO - you misunderstand why I am suggesting attendance at primary school is so important. In addition to the learning, the habit of getting up each morning with the intention of 'going somewhere to do something', even if other, easier options for the day are more appealing, is a learned habit. And it will carry on into a working life. That habit, coupled with a minimum primary education of knowing how to read and write and count to 100, will give a child the chance at a life not dependent on charity. For some it will open up a path to secondary, tertiary and post-graduate education, and who can say where the next Einstein will come from?
Perhaps petrol companies recruit people from India to man their bowsers (do they really do that?) because too many Australians missed out on a primary education and the work ethic that grows out of mandatory attendance at schools.
You are confusing individual choices in the marriage market with government supported eugenics. They are two different arguments.
And finally I take your point that 'no amount of education can make a genetically dumb person into a smart one.'

Dear Halduel

If a white family had been on the dole for generations, if they were too lazy to feed their kids and make sure they went to school, if the whole family was either drunk stoned, or sniffing petrol, while the uncles hung around trying to screw the children (many of whom were suffering from sexually transmitted diseases) you would judge that family to be white bogan trash possessing low intelligence.

But with aborigines, a different standard applies. Socialists are desperate to prove that all races are equal, because accepting that premise is the very foundation of their ideology, which promises to deliver their socialist multicultural utopia. I would just love to believe that all races are equal in every way, but the facts self evidently refute that.

Past Australians governments simply accepted that aborigines were not real bright, and so they implemented paternalistic programs which were much more effective in helping aboriginal people cope with this modern, complex world we live in. Today, just about the only aboriginals in remote areas who can read or write, do sums or even speak English, are those who were educated on missions, or who were "stolen" by "racist" humanitarian state and federal governemnts, who were only concerned for the children's welfare.

The demands by educated Gucci Socialists that aborigines must be given absolute equality with whites resulted in them getting the right to drink alcohol, and "self deturmination" through thoroughly corrupt aboriginal administrations like ATSIC. And they are the two biggest problems with aborigines in remote areas today. Until we realise that all men are not equal, and that aboriginal people in particular are not real bright, and that they need the protection of decent humanitarian white administrators who will ban them from drinking and give them some sort of discipline again, then you can forget all of the stupid programs now being dreamed up by government pencil chewers.

LEGO - Twenty years ago I worked briefly as a relief store manager on a remote NT indigenous community. There was at that time a man who had come in off the western desert with his family some years prior to my time out there. They were mostly naked at the time of their first contact, and they were known as "lizard eaters" as that was a staple in their diet. They carried few possessions other than spears.
That man, the father/patriarch of that family group, asked me if I could help him. He addressed me in English, and he wanted me to put aside a sum of dollars from his fortnightly dole cheque so he could save to buy a motokar.
I don't know if it's possible to measure such things, but I have often thought that for a naked lizard eater to travel in one lifetime from carrying spears in the desert to learning a new language and to understanding how and why to save money from a fortnightly income would probably put him in the genius percentile.
Your blanket categorisation of all aboriginal people as dumb betrays a profound ignorance.

Of course Lego didn't mean that *all* aboriginies are stupid, just as nobody claims all negros are... look at Obama, got to be clever to get to be the most powerful man on earth.

And as the years go by, and races interbreed, the differences decrease. Obama inherited black skin from his african ancestors, and other things from his white ancestors. He's mixed-race, as are almost all aboriginies these days.

Lego is, of course, talking about on average, typically, by-and-large, in general terms, etc. He is also talking about aborigines on remote communities, not the 'average' aboriginal, not the professional or working-class urban aboriginal. So he is talking about remote ones.

And here is the rub... with free and compulsary education, those who shine at school, ot even those who do OK, get taken under the wing of teachers, community leaders and see the opportunities they have... the opportunities that their less intelligent classmates don't have.

They do well at school, and so they enjoy school, so the attend and do their homewirk, they finish school and perhaps go to uni or TAFE... They move out of their remote community and become urban.

They get out.

Those left behind are the least intelligent of their year. These then respond tot he over-generous welfare payments that means that they can't afford *not* to have many many children. THen the bright ones of these children get out, leaving only the most stupid behind.. generation after generation.

...continued..

...continued...
The community gets more and more stupid, generation after generation. We have a Government-imposed eugenics breeding program. Welfare-dependant people are paid to breed, middle class people have to pay for their own kids, and pay taxes for other people's kids... That's why our society is getting more and more inequitable, because there are more and more burdens and fewer and fewer people to carry them.

We also have a series of incentives to create worse and worse ghetto-isation. The dumb breed. THe smart get out. Then the smart can't afford to have kids and too many die childless.

Add feminism to this, where professional men have all seen what the divorce courts do to dads and see how kids are destroyed by having their dads stolen by the lawyers... and so many professional men just don't want to become dads ever.

Men aren't commitment-phobic... men are rationally afraid of commitment, fatherhood and divorce.

One solution is to make children reduce your tax, by allowing household income splitting. So professionals can afford the kids they want, and provide some reduction in the incentives that push people to divorce

Halduell, all human beings can be relied upon to think rationally and sensibly, once every possible lame excuse to explain away the failure of their cherished ideology is discarded. Because it is only when things get so bad, that people are finally prepared to think critically. I can see that you are still in the denial stage about the fact that most aboriginal people are not real bright, and you still seem to think that education can remedy that.

If you want to know how bad things can get, according to an article written in The Australian magazine by Helen Hughs, the Australian government spends on average $18,000 dollars per person on education, welfare, health, and other government services. But for the 75,000 remote area aborigines, the figure is $100,000 per person.

Most of that is eaten up by a bloated aboriginal bureaucracy, who of course were apoplectic when the Howard governemnt ignored them and instituted direct rule on aboriginal communities. A cynical man like myself, could presume that the the aboriginal leaders were seething because they could see the rivers of gold flowing out of their sticky hands.

Remote area aborigines cost $30,000 per child to educate, as opposed to $8-10,000 for all other Australian children. The result of this fantastic and largely wasted expenditure, was that 90% of remote area aboriginals failed their NAPLAN tests, (as oposed to 10% everywhere else), which is hardly surprising, since so many of them refuse to go to school, and many others were born with Feotal Alcohol Syndrome.

Meanwhile, there has been an explosion in aboriginal numbers because of increased benefits being paid to aboriginal mothers. Mal Brough noted that there were now 23 year old aboriginal grandmothers in some aboriginal communities. Now, extrapolate forward, and ask yourself how long will this go on before the country goes bankrupt? And how long will it be before you admit that increasing the funding of aboriginal education is going to do nothing more more than increase the superannuation coverage of aboriginal leaders?

Let's be clear - there are two fairly distinct Indigenous populations, one existing on lifelong welfare, one working. The working population has indices very close to those of non-Indigenous working people, similar incomes, housing ownership, health. The welfare-oriented population has indices which are drastically different from those of BOTH working Indigenous people and working non-Indigenous people. Youth suicide rates are ten and fifteen times higher for one population than the other. Life expectancy is probably thirty and forty years shorter for one population than the other. Offence and incarceration rates are probably a hundred times worse for one population than the other.

Self-determination - which my wife and I were absolutely besotted with, and tried to work towards, for forty years - has been a total failure, a fraud, like so much else on Indigenous affairs. Bourgeois as it may be, developing a work ethic and integrating into the rest of Australia may be the only successful way that Indigenous people can remain Indigenous AND healthy, prosperous and happy individuals. The only way.

That may be incredibly hard for people to come to terms with but urban living and working for a living seem to be the only successful current options. Twenty six thousand Indigenous people have graduated from universities (with many more to come) and I'll bet that their offense, incarceration and suicide rates are a tiny fraction of those of the non-working welfare-oriented population. If any Indigenous academic had the courage to do a proper study, I'm sure they would find that the health and longevity of working Indigenous people is strikingly better than that of the welfare-oriented population's. Yes/no ?

Time for new paradigms.

Joe