The problem with the Aboriginal protest movement is not the Aboriginal.
Roll over the stone of stirrers and bingo, out pop the ABC, the Greens, the Labor Party, Clover (idiot) Moore, with her version of a gay North Korea in the heart of Sydney, and a hundred thousand dollars worth of rainbow flags fluttering so proudly from Sydney Harbour bridge.

They have determined that the date of Australia Day needs changing.

“The quaint idea that the intellectual property of Australia, how we came to be the superb country that we are, was somehow created by Aborigines, Anglos and (mostly) European postwar settlers misrepresents the truth. It is tantamount to theft.”

Aborigines created absolutely nothing in Australia – they were Stone Age hunter/gatherers with no concept of civilisation; and, we are no longer the “superb country” that was originally created by the British Empire.

Australia is now a pathetic, Leftist, multicultural cesspit, which would be hard-pressed to defend itself from enemies within and without, thanks to its lack of morals and values, and the PC attitude of what passes for a defence force these days – gender bending, taxpayer-funded gender reassignment and employing females in combat roles they are simply not equipped for.

According to defence writer, David Archibald, Australia was in a similarly weak position at the onset of WW2; only a plane crash taking out the military top brass in one go saw changes that were responsible for our survival to this day.

We need to stop talking about piddling things like “intellectual property”, homosexuality, diversity,and start getting tough. Tearing ourselves apart with homosexuality and recognition of people who no longer exist simply does hot cut the mustard in a very dangerous world.

Deirdre was/is essentially correct, within the limited framework of her thesis.

But not the vexatious mischief Gary seeks to make of it?

Innovation is extremely limited in ultra conservatives like Gary, but vastly more apparent in everybody else willing to try something new/better?

Just not people like (high lord executioner) Gary, trapped forever in a timewarp/artificial world of coal fired steam power and master servant constructs.

Imagining as they view the world from this artificial narrow prism, that the great unwashed horde are jealous of their UNEARNED PRIVILEGES!

You're joking surely? We still make power from steam, made from burning coal! Just as my granddaddy did over 100 years ago!

You're not about advancing Australia, but HOLDING IT BACK or just selling it and our heritage/future prospects to the highest bidder?

And not a rosy picture!?

All while you mumble monosyllabic mantras about the jealousy of the folks who built all we see around us!

Now if you're fair dinkum about innovation and truth? Well, I could possibily be misjudging you?

Then you'll get online and type into your search engine, "The case for thorium." Then when the page comes up, scroll down the page to a 10 star, Peer reviewed documentary, named, Top documentary.

Where the the extremely interesting presenter, Kirk Sorensen and half a dozen or so fellow scientists, will both educate and entertain you, for around an hour.

And you've got all weekend! My bet is, you just won't bother to look, let alone pay rapt attention!

Simply because that latter activity, would hurt brain or burst the confirmation bubble you, currently along with what's left of your mind, you live in? Or the subject matter is beyond your current comprehension level?

And true of most of your fellow backbenchers? Who plainly think, innovation is stuff other folk do as they reject our best ideas and better people?

And after selling anything not nailed down? Their idea of advancing Australia? How innovative!? Or?

Innovation? What's that beside being a bigger word, phonetically, than wheelbarrow?
Alan B.

ttbn wrote "Aborigines created absolutely nothing in Australia – they were Stone Age hunter/gatherers with no concept of civilisation;

Hmmm But their society lasted 60,000 years. Way longer than any other society ever.
I wonder how long ours will last?

mikk,

With people like you in it, I don't think our society will last very long at all.

mikk wrote, "But their society lasted 60,000 years."

Not exactly a society, more likely their subsistence lasted for 60,000 years. But don't get me wrong here, I love and deeply respect Aboriginal people of today - the too few I get to meet in country towns anyway.

Seriously, though, there's not a lot to show for that 60,000 years in Australia. The rest of the world did a great deal better over the same time. It simply goes to show what the results of isolation are.

Don't undersell Aboriginal invention/discovery.

Some of our early settlers owe their survival to their indigenous neighbors, with bush tucker when they starved and bush medicine when they were sick!

And if you ever tried to start a fire, just by rubbing two boy scouts, opps sticks together?

Just surviving at all in a harsh and forbidding wilderness, with nothing more than a few stone implements and the occasional wikiup, commands considerable respect!

Bet your bottom dollar few if any of our current posters nor pompous postulating politicians one and all, could last much more than a week? If left to their own devices/ingenuity, alone in the Australian bush?

Be it our southern alpine regions or the burning desert sands of the centre!

Got any real ticker Gary?

Talk's cheap!

Want to show us how it's done mate, for forty days and nights? As you raise a few, doubled by the day, dedicated dollars for say, more dialysis for remote settlements?

Starting with a day's pay from contributing concerned caring politicians!? Ha, ha, ha, ha!

A man of your quite massive intelligence and undoubted survival ability, would walk it and come back for seconds? Ha, ha, ha! Oh my aching ribs!

Imagine, one of our most talented and internationally famous, blind Aboriginal Singer, died alone on a beach, because of treatable kidney failure!

It really says a lot about well heeled Aussies and really well heeled pompous pontificating pollies? Doesn't it!?
Alan B.

Alan/Mikk,

We all were hunter/gatherers until barely ten thousand years ago, nothing unique about that. But Aboriginal people were in the tragic situation whereby they were isolated, more or less, from interaction with other societies over the last ten thousand years of innovation, of the development of agriculture and everything that followed from that.

Gary touched on something which tends to be neglected in analysis of hunter-gatherer societies in general, that their guiding principles are not Enlightenment-scientific but ritualistic, based on a perception that the magic of the old men brings about nature's bounty: so, thanks to that magic, they perceived that they harvested the products of the earth, but didn't contribute to their development. So, although of course people put effort into finding food every day, especially the women, they did not necessarily PERCEIVE that labour had anything to do with it.

Even Marx would have understood that glaring absence: Gary's emphasis on bourgeois innovation fits in largely with Marx's emphasis on the utilisation by capitalism of human labour, and the creation of value by the combination of capital and labour: each needing the other.

But to Aboriginal society, that equation would have been meaningless: they didn't 'see' their labour, and many haven't even up until today, believing that land alone produces value. Well, of course, it may well do if a group happens to be sitting on mineral deposits and intends to live off its royalties, putting only token effort into keeping the money flowing.

Hence, the communities that I have been associated with, tens of thousands of potentially good land, and during the Mission/government days providing work for all who wanted it, now lie more or less unused. 'Self-determination', it seems, means very different things to people without the remotest work ethic.

Of course, this raises all sorts of issues about the distinction between land use and land ownership that have yet to be played out.

Joe

Oops ! That should have read, " .... tens of thousands of acres of potentially good land .... "

In SA at least, since Aboriginal land can't be sold, and therefore doesn't have a rateable value, and since it is effectively 'owned' by the communities, Indigenous projects don't face the same financial pressures as their neighbours might. As well, in the communities I've lived in, they enjoyed unlimited water licence. As well, with CDEP, labour was effectively subsidised. As well, in those communities, major equipment was provided by government agencies.

But, in the name of self-determination, the community councils ran those projects into the ground. I wish it wasn't so, but it was. Frankly stupid decisions were made, usually in the direction of winding down economic activity rather than initiating anything new.

I suspect now that many of those weren't 'stupid', but calculated to move towards a workless life for one and all. As well, I also suspect that many Aboriginal people believe that the mere 'owning' of land means that the government gives you money, as a sort of reward. Do they see themselves as a sort of feudal class, or caste, the lords of the land, with work the sorry lot of those 'others' ?

That ain't me, babe !

No, you have all got it wrong !
It is all about energy. It is all about the struggle for greater
amounts of cheaper energy.
The agricultural revolution freed up time for further expansion made
possible by more man power from more food.
Mankind, don't get upset ladies, struggled through eons by use
of slaves (cheap energy) and waterwheels (tapping sun energy) to
increase the energy available.
Slavery was an energy phase we had to pass through to get to the end result.
Slow but steady progress was made over the last two millennia until
the the advent of the British Industrial revolution which as you
all know morphed into the coal/oil/gas worldwide amplification of everything.
Economics had nothing to do with it, economics and finance just went along for the ride.