'If I were Turnbull or Scullion, I would be assessing every program funded through tat thirty billion dollars, and immediately scrapping every one which has not shown the slightest improvement in the past year or so. I know a couple that they could start with .....'

coe on Loudmouth you know that Turnbull/Rudd is all about spin and little substance.

Hi Paul,

Aboriginal people in remote areas are usually on their own land. Often, they've never been off it, or have ever been aware that somehow they weren't on it. The land has always been theirs, it is still theirs, and they are still on it. So what's the cause of their 'deepest sense of demoralisation' ? What is traumatising them ?

Meanwhile, people in the cities are often forging ahead, despite all of those dreadful historical forces that you cite. How come ?

Could it be the infantilising effects of lifelong welfare, the segregating effects of decades of policy, that are demoralising them ? Could it be that the ghastly effects of being stuck, powerless, in hole-in-the-wall settlements, with violence and abuse accepted as normal, have traumatised them ?

So what to do ? Surely, work, effort, gainful employment, has to be part of the solution ? And if so, then education for the children, the young people of tomorrow ?

Question: does anybody have the right to do nothing all their lives, expecting the outside world to support them in the manner to which they have become accustomed ?

For a short time, I lived in a community, and it struck me that, although almost all of the men worked (it was a while ago), almost none of the young women had ever worked, or would ever work, a day in their lives. The older women, the grannies, had worked for years when they were young, picking peas and oranges and cutting apricots.

Most of the young women are gone now, and so are a lot of their kids. Their one and only lives, finished. Their only contribution perhaps was to create the next generation, to do much the same as they had done. Some truly beautiful people, content not to do anything much but raise kids, and grow old at forty. So much potential down the drain.

[TBC]

[continued]

Perhaps you are at least partly right - that must be a demoralising life. Perhaps it's the residual Marxist in me that says that work can liberate and give meaning to lives. But one doesn't have to be a conservative to believe that there is too much, far too much, waste of human beings in remote settlements. Should the next generation go the same way ? And the next ?

Joe

Loudmouth, I appreciate a serious effort this time, but the phenomena you are decribing also is impacting on many blue collar white communities, it is not a race issue in some ways.

Thing is, if we have driven out a generation or two onto welfare while jobs are automated, offshored or fed out to 457 visa workers, while revenues fall because the ultra rich tax dodge instead of paying their dues, where are local workers, or people of any race, to go?

Where exactly are people who have lived their lives in small hamlets or communities heading? The cities will kill them as quickly.

I think the problem even though it's had billions thrown at it, are aboriginal elitists, who are sure they know best!

And given their involvement and outrageous nepotism, we still see children that are not only not safe; but returned to the very same environment time after time, and then we wonder about the high suicide rate amongst aboriginal minors!

Throwing money at the problem has resulted in housing which can cost four times the accepted norm in rural and regional Australia?

I've had enough of the endless excuses, and the point blank refusal of some folks to own their own behavior, but try to sheet it home to white colonists who arrived here over two hundred years ago!

If what you are doing isn't working, you need to stop doing it.

There is not a black way or a white way, just a right way.

And that needs to instil a notion in parents that they are primarily responsible for the way their kids turn out, and attend school etc!

As for the high incarceration rate, and mostly for petty crime, why haven't we persisted with diversion programs and boot camp type strategies.

For our indigenous Australians, why not make it like walkabout and the instilling of traditional knowledge around survival.

Always providing it doesn't include traditional buggery or pedophillia!?

And that has to mean some filtering to eliminate persons of less than good and trustworthy character. We just don't need folk being damaged or brainwashed about the evil whites and their past practises.

Times have changed and inherent attitudes and blame shifting needs to change with it. Doing what you've always done and expecting a different result is insanity!
Rhrosty.

O sung Wu and Paul Walters are right. Many Indigenous people, and other poverty stricken people too, don't have the education or the up-bringing to even be able to seek out a job, let alone stick at it.

And let's be honest here, how many jobs for indigenous people are out there, even after they have had a Uni education Loudmouth? Unless they are going for jobs at the Aboriginal Medical Service, or the Aboriginal Legal Service, they wouldn't get a look in against non-Aboriginal applicants.

So what do we expect them to do?
They aren't going away, and they are fellow Australians who need help, so why isn't that happening? Education and support is needed by this government to create jobs for these and other long term unemployed, otherwise nothing will change.