Billions are ‘missing’, overflowing fat pockets should be visible in some way shape or form because so much money is involved. I think you will find many consultant at $100 and more an hour would get more closer to the total of ‘aid’ that never arrives.

In Australia, indigenous and non-indigenous receive social security money already but they live in cities and towns where food from wild life is no longer readily available and free. Dole money is often not spent on food. Rent if applicable takes a huge portion, then alcohol amongst the troubled ones, black and white.

Alcohol is a fundamental cause of lower intelligence even starting in the womb.
Alcohol drains money from families instead of being used to buy nutritious food for balanced meals.
Malnutrition is rife amongst alcohol addicted people, also amongst the poverty stricken.
No money to buy gas or firewood for cooking and warmth can mean floor boards and even timber from walls will be used for a fire. Settlement areas are usually denuded of naturally available firewood.

The pension and dole are never enough to get ahead, neither generally are take home wages. There is usually only enough to survive and that is the situation for some whole Pacific nation economies.

As for squandering and useless projects, many projects were put together on restrictive budgets from the very start. Other projects were impacted by world inflation.
Banks were eventually stimulated but accounts of ordinary people and small business received no stimulus, just increased costs.

Genuine Aid and social security money in any case, flows into and through economies.

Statistics tell what is wanted to be told, government economic advisors are never wrong and can even spin new taxes with invisible gas.

Government in Australia is somewhat dysfunctional, especially because there is not enough money for each department. One department is often not on working terms with others, there is competition for budget allocation.

Meanwhile there is a crisis in the Pacific and CHOGM focus is now on poverty. So PM Abbott should reinstate full and proper due Aid, without ‘consultants’.

JF - I do know of 'consultants' - indigenous people engaged to identify and advise on sites of indigenous heritage on a proposed dam site.

A relative, who'd lived in the area 35 yrs, with property there and working on preliminary exploration told me these 'consultants' came from a couple hundred kms, wrong direction, away and majority, if not all, weren't descendants. They came - late model Landcruisers in convoy, most with drivers who were family members, most as sole passenger. As only person with intimate knowledge of the area under investigation, my relative was "Tour Guide".

Cutting the story short - he claimed 'consultants' not only had zero knowledge of the area, they rarely left their air-conditioned cars bar when the billy was boiled, even when suspected 'sites of interest' were pointed out. Process dragged over several weeks with multiple days the 'entourage' simply failed to show. One day, over 'smoko' he asked what they got paid for this 'work' and said he nearly fell off his log. Consultants - $100/hr, drivers $50. The cars? Belonged to or hired by the 'Corporation' - an Indigenous Business Unit as far as he could understand. Relative said until then he'd felt very well paid at about $42/hr - for actually working and using his own vehicle.

Cost must have been enormous and being met by Dept of Natural Resources aka the taxpayer. Not a single site of significance was identified.

Guess the indigenous people involved were 'employed', and money going into their pockets but reality is the exercise was a wasteful farce.

Otherwise as far as "Aid" is concerned - for the able-bodied Australian of working age any sort of welfare support is meant to be a stopgap measure - not a way of life, and that goes for indigenous as well.

Agreed LEGO - poverty and idiocy walk together but I was trying to point out difference between 'natural' and 'acquired' low intellect. Many 'aboriginals' are predominately caucasian and/or other race anyway so hard to tell if the 'dumb' is indigenous, otherwise or both.

divine-msn,

I was not even thinking about 'consultants' out in the bush, but yes I have seen the new 4WD's, $500 Ricaro seats sometimes, due long distance they tell me, all day musterers don't get seats like that. My bum was sitting on springs at the time in a scrub bull wrecked Toyota.

'Consultants' that never leave the departments and those who work from home or office, are the one's I was thinking about?

It's billions of dollars that are not being seen in development, or justifiably accounted for transparently.

Billions.

Put it this way, Ms. Divine.

Those ethnicities that have developed civilisations have had to acquire skills that needed certain levels of intelligence. The need to plan the plantings of crops and the best time to harvest necessitated human beings developing abstract concepts like "tomorrow, next week, next moon, or next year".

Aboriginal people were kept on a stone age time warp when even the Africans had reached the iron age. Since Australia has no native food crop (other than macadamia nuts) that could be planted and harvested, and no herdable animals that could have provided aboriginal people with a stable food supply, they were reduced to the lowest level of human existence, hand to mouth.

As such, aboriginal people had little concept of abstract thoughts such as 'tomorrow" and concepts such as "next year" had little meaning to them. Not needing to develop high intelligence, they evolved only enough intelligence to survive. That does not mean that with the benefit of a couple of thousand years of civilisation and selective breeding they could not be the equal of whites and Asians, but at the moment (with some exceptions) they simply do not have enough intelligence to function as equals in the modern world.

Do we have a duty of care to these people? Yes we do. But what this author demands is absolute equality which simply will not work. The biggest catastrophe for aboriginal people was the granting of full equality which gave them the right to drink alcohol. This stupid policy was instituted by well meaning left wing fools like this author, and opposed by "racists" such as myself. It looks like the racists were right all along.