Amicus, many Aboriginal people who leave remote "estates" and live in cities don't thrive. Uneducated people often have not had the knowledge injections needed to survive urban social viruses, and often come to grief, via addictions and associatedillnesses, at an even greater rate than those remaining on isolated communities: they don't possess the resilience needed to cope in urban environments.

You claim that "in reality, they are the same as the rest of us."
This is demonstrably untrue: they have had very different childhoods, education, socialisation, culturalisation, life experiences, compared to other Australians. Some may be "happy sad .. [like the rest of] us, [and]need help to get out from where they are", but this doesn't make them "the same" as other groups, any more than Kurds are the same as Sunni Iraquis, Tamils the same as Buddhist Sri Lankans, or Catholic/animist Sudanese the same as Islamic Arab Sudanese. There are significant differences between these groups, making integration based on theoretical equality of opportunity very difficult. We are not helping anybody if we fail to recognise realities. Nor do we help by dismissing everybody who disagrees as being members of "the AVI".

Recognising important differences is not necessarily a formula for seeing Aboriginal people as "special" in the sense of seeing them as "exceptional", or for pandering to their whims. It is necessary for realistic planning and problem solving. It's also important not to allow historic, economic, social, psychological and cultural differences to be magnified into essential racial or mystical differences; and of course people aren't, and shouldn't be treated as, "zoo exhibits", the way that some of their unfortunately infatuated admirers seem to do.

Conditions do need changing where they cause high levels of dysfunction. However, you must recognise that even in seemingly hopeless communities there are resourceful, capable people who contribute to the wellbeing of the wider community. These people must be supported, not destroyed by faraway people in broad brush efforts to solve misunderstood problems. Many do work for a living, are not idle, and are quietly desperate to find ways out of their dilemmas.

Dan you supply all the usual excuses of the AVI .. yes people who move to big cities from rural areas have trouble adapting, but you seem to say that it is only aboriginals who suffer this?

I moved from a small isolated town to Sydney, it was hard, I got over it .. I was 17 when we moved there.

Rubbish, it's just more fodder for keeping them in human zoos, because they are too fragile to leave their wonderful cultured and carefully nurtured estates.

I have rarely read such reasoning to excuse people from self determination.

Everyone has a cultural heritage, the aborigines no more or less than anyone else, stop making them more special than anyone else and face the reality that they are the same.

Of course not culturally, but they can learn and adapt, as everyone does, if they could just escape the do-gooders and excuse makers, who are convinced, like yourself, that they are incapable of doing anything for themselves.

Just treat them as people, get out of their way - stop putting impediments in their way, like withdrawing financial aid if they leave their "estate".

I'm sure you're well intentioned Dan, but I think you are completely wrong in your approach, which is the same as the do gooder approach for years .. it has not worked.

Remove the payments for sitting down, remove the special permits, and if there is no work, do what we are doing for the rest of Australia, if you don't move to where work is, you get cut off.

No one is entitled to have the rest of Australia pay for their lifestyle, merely because they are an object of sympathy, we need to give them some pride back, and stop the torrents of sympathy that does no one any good, except the AVI recipients.

When they are made the same as the rest of us, with no special conditions or anything else, then will they be able to hold their heads up and join society as equals, not like the compensated special treatment they get now.

Dan, forgive me but you write the most outrageous rubbish, as if it's all out of books, all beautiful theory, or you're commenting from overseas. I suspect that you are not even in Australia, or have ever been here :)

Meanwhile, DEEWR has just published university participation data for 2010: Indigenous commencements in award-level courses went up nearly 10 %, to 4,197. Continuations in such courses are up by nearly 8 %. Total enrolments in all award-level courses are up by 8.7 %, to just over ten thousand. At more than one full equivalent age-group, that's what they call mass Indigenous tertiary education.

Data for 2011 will probably show that there are something like 11,800 Indigenous students are enrolled in total, of whom nearly 11,000 are in award-level courses, 10,800 in degree-level courses and above (including about 1900 in post-graduate courses).

Enrolments in degree-level and above (9853) rose by 78 % between 2000 and 2010, from back when the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee (AVCC) lamented inconsolably (at the instigation of the academic elites) that Indigenous numbers were inevitably plummeting, implying that the noble gesture of providing tertiary education wasn't feasible for the great majority of Indigenous people, only for a Glorious Few (who happened to be the academic elite: so fortuitous !)

Of course, it's a bit hard to keep massaging and pampering and promoting a handful of graduates when there are close to thirty thousand of the buggers :)

And we haven't really tapped into the 1980s-1990s birth-rate boom yet ! Even so, fifty thousand graduates by 2020 is very much on the cards. Whether, Dan, they will be miserable and bereft of culture, will be up to them. It will be their call, not yours or mine. My bet is that they will be a damn sight happier than the poor buggers still stuck up in isolated sh!tholes.

Joe

Loudmouth, it is much more difficult for an indigenous person to move to the city than it was for you. The rules of white behaviour are similar in the country and the city. The indigenous rules about how to behave are very different from the white rules and these rules are not easily learned by adults.

I am sure you understand that child brains are more 'plastic' than adults and consequently the best time to learn the rules of your culture is as a child.

Although indigenous brains are not different to yours and mine, the way they think is very different. Their lives, before we came were almost the total opposite to a white person's.

They did not have to work 40 hours a week. So they didn't teach their children about the benefits of hard work. Their society was based on a complex set of rules about responsibility toward other people so they had no concept, never thought of the idea, that people should be resonsibile for themselves.

It is not that they are special or people are making excuses for them but they are so different culturally that it is going to take time for them to adapt to our culture. The parents need to learn the new culture and be able to teach the child.

Surely it is better if they make the choice themselves, to adapt rather than being forced to do it. The forceful integration that was tried early in the century had some successes but overall the results were not good.

One can see that people who want to adapt to our culture do so in a couple of generations. Like the Greeks and Italians who came here. They quickly adapted because their culture was very similar to ours and also because they were motivated to adapt; it was their choice to become white australians.

Our culture is a very hard and selfish culture in their eyes and they give up a lot of spiritual and emotional comfort if they integrate.

Thanks, Mollydukes for having the courage to talk through your hat. Are you actually in Australia, by any chance ?

To repeat endlessly, the great majority of Indigenous Australians live in urban areas, maybe half in metropolitan areas and in large cities, and they have done so for decades. The vast majority of people in 'settled' areas have not practised much in the way of traditional culture for a hundred years and more. Nearly thirty thousand of them are university graduates.

'Forceful integration' ? How do you do that, I wonder. After being banned from living in towns and cities up to the fifties and beyond, most of the Aboriginal people I know were keen to get to the city and find their feet there. If anything, the force and inveiglement has been towards segregation, with policies promising people easy, work-free lives if only they would stay the hell out on isolated settlements.

I'm surprised that even Noel Pearson seems to be opposed to the most basic activities at settlements, with his rubbishing of vegetable gardens in today's Australian (in response to the SA Minister's suggestion about food shortages in the APY Lands). If no vegetable gardens, then what ? Grandiose tourist mega-plexes ? Vast cattle stations ?

If not the most basic economic activities, then what is self-determination ? Maybe I'm still a Marxist, but basic economic activity has always seemed to me to be the cornerstone of any genuine self-determination. Without it, what have you got but indolent, bored, increasingly unskilled people, with enormous amounts of time on their hands and auntie and grandma's incomes to spend on ganja and grog and gambling ?

Loudmouth So what that the great majority live in urban areas? When they get to the city they all live in the same slum suburb and they have few opportunities to assimilate or learn to negotiate the white culture.

And so many see it as being too hard. They tend to be so depressed and damaged that they just don't care about much except getting though each day and they really are killing themselves by neglect. They aren't having a good time you know when they sit around and drink themselves stupid. It's drinking to kill the demons.

And I have had experience working as a psychologist with urban indigenous people in Austalia.

There is little left of their culture, for sure, but the fundamental assumptions about what was important - that there are obligations to country and toward other people - are still passed down from parent to child.

Forcefull integration happened when they were taken from their indigenous homes and placed in white homes. Did you not notice that there has been a great deal of fuss about this issue? Some got lucky and were raised well and assimilated. Others weren't and didn't.

I'm not sure why you find it so significant that 30,000 are university graduates. Perhaps they are coconuts - you know black on the outside and white on the inside? I met many when I was at Uni. I even tutored some indigenous students. Just because they have a degree doesn't mean they know how to solve the problem.

Noel Pearson is just one fella isn't he? I don't understand why he doesn't want them to grow veges, perhaps he thinks it's a communist plot? Because of the terriffic vege gardens in Cuba, I mean.

Self-determination is our word, I found very few, even the people doing degrees, who fully understood white people and what we want them to do.