...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