David Jennings doesn't miss any points. He appears to be the only person commenting who has read Eatock v. Bolt and understands what it is about.

No Runner there is no need for the High Court of Australia to overturn the case. The need is for the likes of Andrew Bolt to ascertain the veracity of facts before publishing them and to write what he writes in non "dog whistle" diatribes.

Is that a restriction on freedom of speech or the exercise of common courtesy by a person who influences the views of many people?

David,

Wow, so many non sequiturs.

When you refer to urban Australia, are you lumping all urban Indigenous people, the great majority of the Indigenous population, together ?

I'm sure you would be aware that within the urban population, there are elites, who circulate from one organisation to another, and the mass of 'ordinary' Indigenous people, who rarely ever get put on committees, offered plum jobs or get to go to annual conferences in Hawai'i or Geneva - those privileges are reserved for a carefully-selected elite. And everybody knows who they are - most 'community' people steer as clear as possible of them.

Indigenous affairs is a political field, in one sense which is overlooked: it requires middle-men, mediators, entrepreneurs, compradors, brokers, to negotiate the strategic goals of the non-Indigenous powers, and so to liaise with the non-Indigenous brokers, and make their goals palatable to the subordinated Indigenous masses. In this sense, the Indigenous elites are the clients of the non-Aboriginal powers who so often control Indigenous organisations and their funding bodies, and at the same time they are the patrons of 'friends' and relatives below them in their particular organisational hierarchy.

Make no mistake: non-Indigenous apparatchiks and academics have never stopped trying to control Indigenous organisations and units, and they seek to do so by propping up 'their' clients. So those 'clients' get appointed not by any mass Indigenous mechanism, and not necessarily for their expertise either, but because they are manipulable. Simultaneously, they have to know how to talk the talk, of course, the more radical-sounding the better.

Forty-odd years ago, my wife and I put together a five-metre banner in the Flag colours, reading "Black Control of All Black Affairs !" We took for granted that this would mean control by people who genuinely represented the masses of ordinary Indigenous people, not johnny-come-latelies, not people vetted and appointed by non-Indigenous power-brokers.

We certainly didn't expect the dreary circulation of the same elites as twenty and thirty years ago, over and over, around and around, carefully augmented with Blackfellas acceptable to the non-Indigenous powers-that-be. Little did we know.

david,

It's hard to believe you are being straight forward with me. Surely I am the victim of a spoof?

...well done. I salute you. It was the part about respecting academics which gave the game away. In any case, I have seen the error of my ways. I shall go directly and play 'I should be so lucky' 15 times as penance.

David, respect is something that must be earned. That goes for blue collar workers, academics or aboriginals.

Unfortunately everything I have seen recently of our citadels of higher education has shown a dramatic decline in standards since I was there, quite a few years ago.

I suppose you have to expect that a sector which experiences such rapid expansion as our universities have must out grow the talent pool on which it depends. The mining industry has that problem.

However every contact I have had with higher education in recent years has left an increasingly bad taste in my mouth.

May I suggest you get the knot out of your knickers, & try to do some house work on your sector.

If you don't see the need for house cleaning in your sector, then you, mate, are part of the problem.

I respectfully disagree with both Dane and Hasbeen, to a small extent, in that there are many academics, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, working in Indigenous student support, who struggle to ensure that the eleven or twelve thousand Indigenous university students are getting the assistance that they need.

Often they work in an unfriendly enviroment, with antagonism from their 'colleagues' in Indigenous units and departments who regard the teaching of Indigenous culture to non-Indigenous students as far more important than the mere enrolment and graduation of Indigenous students.

Although DEEWR funds universities specifically for Indigenous student support, it appears that much of these funds and the efforts of nominally support staff are being diverted to cater for non-indigenous students.

Teaching Indigenous Culture to non-Indigenous students is important, but in my view, Indigenous support funds should be going exclusively to fund Indigenous student support, not to tutoring and marking the work of non-Indigenous students. The lives and careers of thousands are more important than the careers of a few dozen academics.

Indigenous commencements since 2006 have been on a 9.9 % trend-line. I am sure that the up-coming Review will find ways to down-play that. But the truth is that university education has been a mass enterprise for Indigenous people for some time, with twelve thousand enrolling in degree courses alone since 2006.

In 2010, more than three thousand Indigenous people commenced university studies in degree courses, the equivalent of more than a third of the median age-group.

While the handlers of the Indigenous academic elite can manage a few dozen carefully-selected Glorious Exceptions, it's not so easy to manage three thousand more each year. So, for the vast majority of Indigenous students, contest mobility overrides the sponsored mobility reserved for the Few.

And that's how it's going to be in the lead-up to 2020: many tens of thousands of Indigenous people at universities, rapidly increasing graduate numbers and the development of a mass professional work-force. The days of relying on the promotion of a small elite will soon be well and truly over, and I for one can hardly wait.

Joe Lane

To get back to the issue of identification: Maria and I often used to talk idly about a sort of apprenticeship period for 'late-comers': that someone who 'discovered' they had an Indigenous great-grandparent when they were twenty or thirty or forty, should have a 'no-claim' period for, say, five, ten or fifteen years, before they hopped in for any of the benefits. And that, in the meantime, they cultivated a few Aboriginal friends and maybe even relations.

I remember one person who wanted to enrol as an Aboriginal student in the full-degree course which followed an associate diploma which she had finished before I arrived. I asked a lecturer in the degree course about it and he urged me to ignore her request, given that when she was doing the diploma course, he said, she was stridently anti-Aboriginal. In the meantime, she had 'discovered' an Aboriginal great-grandmother and wanted some support to enrol. I lost her request somewhere. Later, she took on an important role in Aboriginal education, as did her son, as AEWs (Aboriginal Education Workers), who traditionally have more clout than qualified teachers and are better looked after by the Ed Dept here.

But it is quite revealing that so many of the Johnny-come-latelies do not have any Aboriginal friends prior to becoming Aboriginal: again and again, they do not know a single Aboriginal person before they 'discover' their new identity.

Incidentally, for all you would-bes out there: don't say that you have just discovered that your grandfather was a 'native': this was standard for Australian-born whites in the late ninetenth century - it differentiated them from those Pommy b@stards, upper-class layabouts, who came out and - prior to Federation - lorded it over the native-born whites. Hence 'natives'. Hence the Australian Natives' Association. All the early Prime Ministers were members.

And if you want to fabricate, say 'grandmother': it is far more believable. And for God's sake, don't say 'part-Aboriginal', that's a dead giveaway.

Joe