Rainier you are an abusive,lying bully but I will still offer you a word of advice.
Presenting your arguments in a circuitous strangulated way with lots of long words which you think makes you appear intelligent, does not! Change your nick to Merchant banker as this would be far more appropriate for you and your actions.

JBowyer; another profound and deeply moving contribution to discussion here, you're simply awe inspiring, how long did that take you to think up..mmm?

Rainier,
It would be greatly appreciated by most of us here on OLO if you could actually put forward your views on how you would start to make the indigenous self managing & shortening the life expectancy gap between them & every other people.
How would you go about enticing indigenous people to get employment in fields which would benefit their own communities. What employment do you suggest ? Why do you think so many indigenous do not appear to perform their work on a regular basis.
Is it because they don't feel it necessary or is it because they have different values, what is it ?
I'm somewhat puzzled about the different values side because I witness a lot of desire for western commodities but these desires do not mirror the western practice of earning the desired commodities.
I know you'll be tempted to just call me racist but just for once I would appreciate it if you could put integrity before indignation & give us your solution/ideas for either good self management or successful integration for the indigenous of Australia.

Tony,

[to continue]

I'm only a one-trick pony, Tony, focussing on the contributions that university-level education can make to the overall Indigenous employment picture. Each of us can perceive only a particular part of the elephant, (my bit is at the back, half-way down) but I try to think of higher education as a sort of surrogate for Indigenous success and skills-development generally.

As if happens, the growth in employment for unqualified Indigenous people seems to keep pace with that of qualified indigenous people, of professionals and trades (although I suspect that there aren't anywhere near as many of the latter as there should be.)

I don't think there is much future in remote communities, so I don't really think much about them any more. They're not beacons of hope, but sinks of despair, in my view [come on, Aka, come out fighting!]. The sooner people voluntarily get out them, the better for them.

As far as I am concerned, the future for Indigenous success AS INDIGENOUS PEOPLE lies in the cities, in the full range of urban employment. That's where the great majority of the Indigenous population will be in the next decade and that's where they will stay.

The cities belong to Indigenous people, as much as to anybody else. So people need the appropriate range of skills, not rubbish, not phony skills, but real skills, for real jobs, in the real world. And they're getting them at an increasing rate. In spite of the various racisms from Left and Right.

Cheers,

Joe

Individual,

Good questions, but don't forget the luxuries of powerlessness - the self-defined powerless don't have to come up with anything, all they have to do - in their powerlessness - is to bitch and whinge, and demand that others solve their problems. After all, they shouldn't have to do anything for themselves: terrible things happened to their great-grandmothers.

Rainier,

Speaking of bitching and whingeing, I'll repeat my questions:

".... what's the alternative ? To pretend that there aren't any opportunities to break out of one's situation, to curse the world and cry into your beer ? To play the victim ? To let the Man win ?"

Yes, you might be right about my being something of a misfit, but I wouldn't have it any other way. If it wasn't for ratbags like me, who would you have to rip into ?

Yes, you're right, better education opportunities are inevitably creating a much more varied Indigenous class structure, that goes with the territory. And as for 'plowing their skills back into the grassroots where they are badly needed', let's not forget that those 'grassroots' people are their own relations, with similar opportunities to get off their backsides and do something for themselves, for once. [Come on, Aka!] There aren't two separate species of Blackfella.

And as some of us have written over and over again, what jobs can many Indigenous graduates do back in small communities ? Not to mention the disruption that they would represent to existing power structures.

And why should it be their responsibility for whatever either history, or the people themselves, have done to get them into their predicament ?

[TBC]

Thanks, RObert,

In relation to the fields of study of Indigenous university students: at least here in SA, Indigenous-oriented courses have always attracted only a minority of Indigenous students. Their heyday was in the nineties, but I wouldn't be surprised if nobody commenced study in such courses in SA this year: it is rumoured that the numbers were already well down back at one nameless university back in 2007-8, when 'continuing' students in one course code were shuffled into a different course code and called 'commencing' students in order to give the impression that the courses were still slightly popular. But I couldn't possibly comment on the veracity of that rumour.


On skills needed in communities: there is a childish assumption that the smaller a community, the fewer skill needs it has. But think about it, no matter how big or small a community is, it needs a wide range of essential skills. In fact, here's a hypothesis: that the smaller a community, the more skilled and versatile each adult needs to be.

And even if everyone in some communities was skilled, someare just too small to be viable. Not only because there might be too few adults, but how on earth does each 'expert' get an income ? Who would fund a mechanic or plumber with two jobs a week ? Or a teacher with only five or six kids ?

There are maybe a couple of thousand Indigenous 'communities' across the country, 90 % with population under fifty. i.e. completely unviable. Somebody smarter than me should be calculating threshold numbers for different services, say -

[TBC]