Individual, to answer your question, I don't have all the answers to all of the complexities and problems that beset us as Indigenous peoples and I'm growing tired of the plethora of snake oil merchants (black and white) that rise to prominence through putting forward yet anothe 'solution to the Aboriginal problem', indeed much of hyperhole around at the momment is more about marketing "self esteeem" or is informed by other spin doctored solutions where t-shirts, slogans, water bottles and badges and one off funding for any number of mindless BS programs. Nothing long term or informed by actual evidence based research, just whatever some PR company dreams up to address 'disadvantage'. The close the gap rhetoric is a farce - everyone knows it is but no one is game enough to declare it so.

I'm from the old school of thought that believes our legal and constitutional rights need to be recognised and that special provision for positive discrimination be included in the Australian constitution. This will be as close as we can get to a Treaty.
Most, if not all debates about policy these days assumes that Australia liberal democracy is rigorous and flexible enough to include our rights. Self determination was never really given the legal or political clout required over the past 40 years. Instead what we got was "self management" of government designed programs for access and participation. So for me there is a big picture story and narrative that needs to occur, until then we will be debating little fish stories forever.

the smaller a community, the more skilled and versatile each adult needs to be.
Joe,
Thanks for that statement, it's precisely what I have been trying to get across but you came up with the words, cheers.
There are such people in the communities but idiotic bureaucrats keep insisting on their idiotic policies on idiotic selection criteria which 99 times out of a hundred burdens the communities with idiots utterly unsuitable for building up the communities.
Idiotic consultants who only award jobs to people from outside rather than from the local pool. Their excuses are that locals don't meet the standards. Who's standards I ask. I have yet to see these bureaucrats showing enough cajones to let the locals strut their stuff. The reason they don't is that they're too crap scared to be upstaged.

".... 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 ?"

Loudmouth / missionary bean counter:

Give me your email, find out who I am, learn about my work history and then you might STFU.

[contd.]

Sorry, lost it.

Rainier,

When you write,

" .... Self determination was never really given the legal or political clout required over the past 40 years. Instead what we got was "self management" of government designed programs for access and participation .... "

surely you would be aware that those were precisely the policies that people asked for ? People got what they asked for ? And that those 'communities' have gone comprehensively belly-up ? Barely a single vegetable garden in two thousand 'communities', when people are supposed to be crying out for fresh vegetables ?

Self-determination + vegetable gardens = fresh vegetables ? or did I get that wrong ? What would a piddly vegetable garden cost, say half an acre ? A half a dozen shovels and forks, a truck-load of fertilizer, and away they go, for maybe a thousand bucks. Most settlements have water laid on - they have flush toilets, after all, and it's only the white fellas who have to pay for water usually. And electricity. As they should. So should everybody.

I'm not saying that people are innately lazy, or parasites - they seem to have misunderstood what is meant to be in the modern world. Do people in remote settlements and out-stations think that all Whites, for example, get free houses ? Free cars ? That they also never have to work ? In other words, is it the case that they have no idea what living in the modern world requires ?

The best article I know on all of this deals with Wadeye, a comparatively large 'community' of three thousand, a 'community with 'scale':

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2008/12/wadeye-failed-state-as-cultural-triumph

This article is from Quadrant magazine, which is edited by Keith Windschuttle, so it doesn't pull any punches. Read it if you dare, Rainier:)

Hetre's a suggestion: if people are so close to their hunting and gathering roots, why not give people the option - they are often on their own land, after all - of re-embeddingthemselves in a hunter-gatherer economy and give up all the Whitefella contaminations like welfare payments, school, etc.

OR

[TBC]

As a easy example to explain the diff between self determination and self management, if I held free hold title to my Traditional lands I would not need government hand outs, indeed my whole family would now be as wealthy as the Rineharts are now, or very close. Access to the real economy was never going to be handed over by successive governments in the form of substantive land rights. The history of policy of Self determination was bereft of any real commitment to reparating the economic foundations for us to compete equally in the market place as land owners. In other words, the effective expression of Indigenous self-determination is intimately connected with decolonisation as a general political condition. The actual process of decolonisation requires significant institutional change. The relationships created between institutions of the nation-state and us as "Indigenous peoples" have been forged within the context of a colonial political process and a colonial ‘mentality’. More recent and current debates about self determination failing rely on a very flimsy understanding of the history of Aboriginal policy develop from the Whitlam years onwards. Self Determination (as per UN rights and definitions) was an aspirational and guiding perspective of our autonomy and thus a view held by many of our leaders from the Whitlam days onward, it was never actually declared as a legal, economic or political right based on Aboriginal soveriegnty. Howard and now Gillard rely on this popular and convenient belief that self determination failed because it justifies their own retreat from justice.

if I held free hold title to my Traditional lands I would not need government hand outs, indeed my whole family would now be as wealthy as the ......
Rainier,
I have thought of this a lot. How much land is presently in indigenous titles & how much of it is freehold ?
How could island communities support themselves the way aboriginals could ? I am made to believe that DOGIT was brought in by Joh before he was ousted. He did it to protect the indigenous from exploitation such as tempting them to sell off their land.
Native title is still overruled by housing & infrastructure departments.
What would you do if you could have it your way ? Perhaps the bureaucrats could learn something from you.