Loudmouth

You left out the part where I said 'However, as with Whites ...'. A lot of Whites also have trouble achieving success in the White world.

I always fail to see why reeling off statistics on how many people have attained degrees is some benchmark of success. Nowadays, a degree is for many the base qualification to join the workforce. It's no longer a benchmark of high achievement.

Even if it were, it's based on the false premise that high achievement under capitalism will set you free. That could apply to most people, if capitalism hadn't been hijacked in recent decades to further the interests of the rich and to push everyone else into a lifetime of debt.

Remote Indigenous communities have a very different socio-political environment from those in urban areas. If you had read my previous comment, remote Indigenous communities are up against very different barriers to those in urban areas. Generations of bureaucratic White benevolence and the geographic position of remote Indigenous communities in regard to mining and pastoral agendas ensure that they are set up to fail, and thus, to keep them welfare dependent.

This is not just an Australian problem. It's a well-documented global issue that Indigenous peoples have to deal with worldwide.

Hi Killarney,

Thanks for your comments from Olympus. Yes indeed: "Nowadays, a degree is for many the base qualification to join the workforce. It's no longer a benchmark of high achievement."

As for Whites, suffering the slings and arrows of capitalism, my heart goes out to them. There is a good article in this week's TIME magazine on intergenerational unemployment in the US Appalachians, i.e. the hillbillies. As an escapee from there describes it, life sounds very similar to that in remote communities here, and similar to what Oscar Lewis called the 'Culture of Poverty': family instability, serial partners, truancy, violence, no deferral of gratification, living for the moment, short lives. Time for a reassessment of Lewis.

Aboriginal people in remote communities are not chained to posts, Killarney: they can physically move around, and of course they do: research might show that many 'remote' people spend a huge amount of time in towns and on the road. Go to any remote community and I'll bet you'll find many vacant houses, some empty for years, while other houses, mum's or granny's, are over-crowded by transient younger people. Often not so transient.

Your disdain for 'southern' people, for Indigenous people getting off their arses, is typical of the pseudo-Left, so I forgive you for it. But any positive development in Indigenous affairs will come from them, not for Cargo Culters, who are more like dung beetles waiting at the rear end of the last dying diprotodon.

And if anybody in a remote community tried to set up a vegetable garden, say a mile or two out of town, I don't think it would be some international mining company which would sabotage it: the dynamic of a work-less community is that nobody can be seen to be working, it spoils the show for everybody. Pity the children ......

Joe

Well, look at all the same self-important opinion givers doing just that and barely a fact between them. And certainly no real knowledge of the degradations and deprivations foisted upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people since invasion. When your cultures are destroyed and lost it leaves a void that may never heal over. When your children are targeted by authorities you learn to hide them and your identity. When you face racism on a daily basis that leaves scars and shapes attitudes. I wonder how many of those self-important opinion givers have been refused a taxi ride because of their skin colour. Oh yeah, probably none...and doubtful they'd actually know any Aboriginal people anyway. We are the 'other' and easier to have overblown opinion than actually find out about us.

Hi Minotaur,

Thanks, but I'll stick by what I've written, since it's the only truth I know. It may not be pleasant, but there it is. I don't believe that people are victims now if they ever were: they have made, and are making, their own choices. What you see is of their own creation. Their future is up to them on the whole.

Still, forty thousand university graduates is surely something to be proud of ? A good start ? Or do you think those numbers have been fabricated ?

Cheers,

Joe

@Loudmouth, Tuesday, 13 September 2016 4:20:44 PM

Hi Joe. I was particularly interested in your comment (in part):

"...I don't believe that people are victims now if they ever were: they have made, and are making, their own choices. What you see is of their own creation. Their future is up to them on the whole."

I agree, but I respectfully urge you to remember that your perspective here is very broad - clearly a great deal more so than that of Mr. Haig, and others of a like mind.

So when for example we consider the actions of certain Aboriginal persons - whether the result falls upon themselves, family members, or upon their communities - as demonstrating,

say, no workable knowledge of cause and consequence, some commentators may be inclined to say: poor buggers, they don't know any different; or, they have never had a chance; or,

everything is stacked against them, and so on and so on. I think that such comments are totally unhelpful and ignore the fundamentals at play here.

We all remember the old saying: "Where there's a will, there's a way". What if that applies to what Mr. Haig refers to as: "Aboriginal despair and hopelessness."

We can argue - ad infinitum - over what may be the underlying causes of this "...despair and hopelessness.", but it seems that approach gets us no further to any workable solution to Aboriginal disadvantage. Likewise, throwing more money at the problem, even with the best of intentions, appears not to be the answer - though it may assuage the conscious of some.

[Continued further]

[Continued]

What if the "answer" (in so far as there is one) lies with Aboriginal people themselves?

Again, we can argue - ad infinitum - over why some Aboriginal people appear unwilling to help themselves - clearly they are not stupid, so what factors are at play here?

I note that Mr. Haig in his introduction refers with some contempt to those individuals and organizations who apparently have: "(a) fixed belief that Aboriginals cannot handle money."

What if "grog" is substituted for money in the above reference?

Would he be likewise contemptuous of those who suggested this?