Let's dumb it down and exclusively blame white government...

Pilger's Christmas Carol?

Most of the problems in aboriginal communities started with Whittlam, & his fool policies, pandering to the socialists academics.

Since then those same academics have come up with so many stupid ideas it is not funny, especially for the subjects in their living experiments.

Come on academics, you've got to go back to the original bargain, you are not honoring your end of that bargain.

You were given those ivory towers to live in, with very generous terms & conditions, but only on condition that you stayed there, & shut up. We don't let the inmates of other asylums out among the populous, who pay for them, & you must be the same.

As long as your pontificating is contained within your own circle, we will keep paying for you. However if you want to come out & mix with the real people, you'll have to start to pay your own way.

When less than one in ten of you have ever had a useful thought, most would find that hard.

“But Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, of course, never see this 'Indigenous' funding.
More than 55 per cent of the $5 billion goes to the salaries, profits and expenses of the bureaucrats, consultants and contractors who comprise the 'Aboriginal Industry.' The Department of Finance concluded that $3.5 billion Indigenous funding was wasted annually.”

Helen Hughes,

Bureaucracy marches on a stomach that expands to fill the time and the resources assigned to a task (Parkinson’s Law) and if our bureaucrats use only 3.5 billion out of the five billions budgeted by the Government, is not all that bad considering that any other ‘Charity’ can only deliver 6 t0 7 percent of the funds collected.

Rodents, on the other hand, are ever-present where man is thrown intoo misery

Helen Hughes ? Typical “Crap” from a board member of the “Aboriginal Victim Industry” ( AVI ).

Hasbeen ? Brilliant !!

Arthur Bell ( aka bully ! hi ! )

Batchelor is a typical NT aboriginal town. Back in the sixties when it was run by Territory Enterprises to house the workers from the nearby Rum Jungle uranium mine, it was kept neat and tidy by those who lived there. Now it looks like nobody lives there, the streets are untidy and the houses look a mess. Why can't the aboriginal inhabitants look after it like we did? Surely it is not that hard, after all, plenty of them have time on their hands. Don't blamee the whites.

David

Let's dumb it down to a point where most of us can recognise and point at least some blame at many of us for our own apathy.

Keep at it Helen, I hope you'll have success one day.

Thanks Helen, it's a relief to hear from someone who knows what she is talking about.

It baffles me why Aboriginal community councils can't figure out ways to recognise long-term leases over housing blocks, leases exclusively to Aboriginal people, for say, ninety nine years. Once a community member had leasehold rights to the land they are living on, they could build and own their own home, a right that we take for granted elsewhere across Australia.

And why can't royalties accruing to Aboriginal people be used to pay off a house in this way ?

Helen puts her finger on another related issue: Aboriginal communities are connected to the outside world by public roads, and provided with a range of publicly-funded services. By law, publicly-funded services are available to the public, all of it, Aboriginal or otherwise, therefore not requiring permits to visit such communities.

In the twenties here in SA, the Aboriginal Protector tried to bar travelling hawkers, mostly 'Afghan' and Indian, from entering Aboriginal settlements. But the Education Minister pointed out that all public schools had to be accessible by public roads, and anybody could use public roads, including Afghan hawkers, including roads which ran through Aboriginal settlements.

Are Aboriginal communities more segregated now from the outside world than government-controlled settlements and missions used to be, in the bad old days ?

Thanks again, Helen.

Joe

There has been many brand new houses built in Regional Centres for Aboriginal housing. Within a couple of years (at the most) many of them are totally trashed, are filfthy and not at all looked after. The occupants often sleep outside. Life skills are needed to be taught from a young age before more money is wasted.

We Europeans came to this continent, pushed its inhabitant out of their land and, with it, out of their basic sustenance and their social and spiritual parameters.

Is there one of the posters or repliers or users of this electronic publication or, for that matter, anyone in the world, that can deny this fact?

After such a plunder, at a distance of only two to three hundred years we now want them to be well adjusted and happy with their misery.

My fellow contributor to Online Opinion, do please keep in mind this little piece of history before you attempt any pronouncement about the people who were here before us.

Also remember that it all happened only two or three hundred years ago and, while three hundred years are too many to remember by one whose life cannot go that span, it is very short a time not to influence the behavior the ones who are part of a race.

Hence we cannot ask them to behave ‘good and proper’ in the same way that we cannot ask an injured person to behave like a healthy one.

We plunged them into misery and it is our duty to pull them out of it by restoring their trampled dignity and offering them leverage to rise to what we expect from them.

I have read some of us say ‘They haven’t yet learned our ways’ while I was musing at what we have lost by not trying to learn their ways.

Yet, we can rejoice that Aborigines are still with us. The Americas cannot boast such treasure.

Aboriginal people in remote areas are often very mobile, moving from community to town or out-station and back, and to another community and back, over and over. This gives the impression of temporary over-crowding in many houses, while others are vacant.

'Traditional' rules demand that travellers are put up by relations, whenever and for as long as they want. So the resources of a house - kitchen, bathroom, toilet - are over-utilised. And if you are the renter, why clean up if you expect yet another mob to land on your door-step at any moment ?

So here's a crazy idea: provide one- and two-bedroom houses for very small families, couples and single people. After all, a one-bedroom house still has one kitchen, one bathroom, one toilet - adequate for a few people. But if it has only one or two bedrooms, then fewer people can cram in and over-use the facilities.

Alternatively, recognise that larger houses are going to house lots of people occasionally, and put in extra-large kitchens, double-bathrooms and -toilets.

Alternatively again, allocate funds (from royalties?) for white people to come in and clean up houses, say once a week. Perhaps they could clean up the yards and streets while they are at it. To the untrained eye, this might look like paternalism, but it might be what many people in communities would like the government to do for them, so clearly it is self-determination in action. Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, the great majority of the Aboriginal people in the cities are getting on with their lives, looking after themselves, making their own way. University enrolments are at record levels. Total graduate numbers could reach thirty thousand by the end of next year. If anything, the 'Gap' is widening.

So what's working and where ? And what isn't working, never has, and where ? Should we keep throwing good money after bad ?

Joe

skeptic

'We plunged them into misery and it is our duty to pull them out of it by restoring their trampled dignity and offering them leverage to rise to what we expect from them.

Fair point especially when we introduced alcholol to them. However you offer no solutions except to deride those who seem to have a lot more contact and experience. So your solution is? Besides blaming those wicked whites. It certainly was not rosy before Europeans arrived by anyone's measure.

Skeptic,

There is a certain arrogance in how you phrase your comment, about the all-powerful whitefella and what he has done to the [passive] helpless Blackfella.

I don't think relations were ever that black and white, so to speak. Aboriginal people made choices, often within tight constraints certainly, but choices just the same: do they come into these new towns or do they stay away ? What are all these strange things, tobacco, all sorts of food, alcohol, garments ? And you can travel all over the place with these cart things, and on horses, and on huge ships. What do these whitefellas want us to do, why do they need us, to get some of those things ? Work ? Okay, no problem.

And often whitefellas didn't get it all their own way. Very often, especially in the early days, they had to rely on Aboriginal people for guidance, for labour and for sustenance.

By the way, it wasn't illegal for Aboriginal people to drink alcohol in the earlier days - but it was illegal to supply Aboriginal people with grog.

I used to believe that, as the frontier moved out, Aboriginal people moved away, further out. I didn't have any evidence of that of course, it was just a gut feeling, something apocryphal, it seemed logical. It probably wouldn't be difficult to prove it one way or the other, from early ration records.

But now I do suspect that the reverse was true: as the frontier moved out, people from further out still came in to the towns. In the 1840s, Aboriginal people in Clare, for instance, could have come from god knows where, out towards Broken Hill, up in the Flinders, from the West Coast, the Murray: few if any were 'Kaurna', from Adelaide.

So, in about 1950, instead of fifty thousand 'tribal' or 'wild' Blackfellas still being out there, 'beyond civilisation',

[TBC]

[contd.]

..... there were probably only a couple of thousand, and in the remotest deserts - there weren't crowds of people from all sorts of tribal groups crammed in with each other, all trying to escape the whitefellas: the deserts were usually emptied of people who had already headed off to the towns.

Before the War, even Mr Neville in WA was in favour of pushing people back out into the desert, so the notion of tens of thousands still 'out there' might have been wishful thinking.

Perhaps the current policy of building up communities in remote areas has been a doomed attempt to reverse this flow ?

Joe

Perhaps we are going about housing the outback people the wrong way. We should be recognizing that after all, they are nomadic people, so we should be providing them with tents which are easily transported. When the area in which they are camped gets too grotty they can just pack up and shift. We could also provide them with a couple of motor bikes so that in the mornings a couple of the young ones can go out and pick up the road kill while it is still fresh and before the wedge tailed eagles get to it. The amount of bureaucracy required to administer such a scheme should be minimal.

David

I am fed up with this poor aboriginal crap.

They choose to live that way, drink, smoke gamble, abuse their wife and kids, it's their choice.

Housing, now there's a joke.

They get new houses then burn anything that is wood. in fact, there was even a time when the government, curtiousy of we, the tax payers, built houses for them out of concrete, even the benches. Of cause, they trashed them as well.

Instead of a slab of VB, or even a couple of goon bags, why not buy some rat sac, or some cleaning products, even a new matress, or sheets.

At the end of the day they choose to live the way they do.

Quarantining of their welfare is the only answer in my view. They can't look after themselves, so we must take away the one thing that supports thier way of life,

CASH!

No cash
No splash!

It sounds to me like a whole lot of rethinking is required.

If governments ultimately don't want anyone living in remote 'settlements' on a permanent basis, then they should say so and make other arrangements, after due consultation. And, such consultation should be swift, not like the drawn-out, going nowhere consultations of the past. It would also seem that traditional land councils need a good kick in the butt.

I'm sorry Professor Hughes but I think you've got it wrong. I can't help thinking it would be better if all were housed in town, and that settlements were primarily utilised for celebrations and just visiting, with long houses, ablution blocks and maybe information centres constructed to suit such occasional use (possibly with souvenir shop manned on a volunteer basis, and possibly with eco-tourism potential) - primarily to accomodate 'travelling' or walkabout crowds seeking to 'reconnect' and for larger celebrations of heritage (camping ground style).

The exception would be in the likes of the larger established, and reasonably stable Arnhem Land communities, or similar, where all facilities should be provided (schools, medical centre or hospital, indigenous affairs and Land Council combined offices, commerce, industry, jobs), and including individual home ownership or leasing from the Land Council, with minimum outside interference in Council affairs excepting for auditing to ensure fair play and effective governance - after all this is Australia, and everyone should have to play by the rules.

In town, all will have access to all normal facilities, can buy or rent their own homes, have access to jobs, education, health etc, and can have a local indigenuos affairs office with legal and counselling etc services specifically catering to their needs.

Out in the bush, out of sight, it is entirely understandable that all will be a rabble and a rubbish dump. Time to change all that, and dispense with the failed formula.

Land councils are also obviously defective in the main, and need a complete overhaul - to get rid of the bureaucratic wastage and target actual needs. Let's get moving, Australia, and let's get real - it's long overdue.

I too have seen many new houses built by and for some Aboriginal people, on their own land, then proceed to completely trash the houses over a short time.
They then start complaining that they are living in third world conditions, and need new housing, and it all starts over again.
The mistakes of the past should not be repeated.

We can't keep throwing buckets of money at this housing problem.
Many Aboriginal people of the current generation can only continue on as they have always acted.

We need to put all our resources into the new, younger generation of 'at risk' Aboriginal people. Their parents should have some of their welfare payments kept aside for the children's physical and educational needs.

Maybe if this new generation are given access to the same education as all other kids in our society, then they may stand a chance in society.

If this means the 'at risk' Aboriginal kids should stay in boarding schools during school terms in order to ensure the best chance of a proper education, then I think that will be money well-spent.