Banjo Paterson,

" .... I am not persuaded that our “dominant Westernised culture” will prove superior to traditional Aboriginal culture in the long term."

It might be time for you to come home, Banjo, and find out what is really going on.

And yes, people are not like sheep - they will choose integration, living with and alongside other Australians of all manner of backgrounds, OR they will try to retain what some might see as personally useful, such as patriarchy, a life on welfare, humbugging their grannies and aunties, dodging work and getting their kids to dodge school, keeping out of sight in hle-in-the-wall 'communities', etc. It's their choice. In fact, it's ALWAYS been their choice. What we're witnessing these days is the consequences of those choices.

Meanwhile people - especially working Indigenous people - in the towns and cities have also chosen: chosen to make their own way in a rapidly changing world, free from the seductive clutches of welfare, doing their best to make sure that their kids do get a good education and go on to trades or higher education (figures for which are improving at about 9-10 % p.a.) and participating in Australian life to the full. And the consequences ? Happier, healthier families, children, young people, with options unavailable in 'communities'. Again, those are THEIR choices.

As Warren Mundine says today about education funding, we have to disaggregate all of the figures in relation to Indigenous progress: as he and many others, such as Anthony, point out, urban, working Indigenous people have indices for health, life expectancy,cetc., very similar to those of other Australians. The figures for remote/rural/outer suburban people on welfare are very different. So to lump them all together is bound to give a very distorted impression.

For example,

{TBC]

[continued]

For example, Indigenous commencements at universities improved by 12 % in 2016 (from 2015, since you ask). 12%. Very little improvement would have come from 'communities' or any welfare-oriented population (perhaps 1 %), and given that the urban-working population makes up around two-thirds of the total Indigenous population, it's possible that the 'real' urban-working improvement in university commencements in 2016 amongst those populations was closer to 18 or even 20 %. That population is moving fast, making choices which facilitate that sort of improvement - while welfare-oriented populations are, if anything, desperately making choices to retain their welfare-oriented life-styles and AVOID ever going down the path of their more progressive urban, distant, cousins.

So which population is booming ? Which population is stagnating, or even declining ? Which choices are positive, life-enhancing, and which are negative, literally life-threatening ?

As Noel Pearson has been pointing out for a decade now, there are, more or less, two identifiably distinct populations, each with different ideologies, trajectories, destinies. If anything, perhaps government agencies need to be able to accordingly differentiate improvements on those Closing the Gap targets, one set of outcomes in relation to the urban-working population, the other in relation to the welfare-oriented population.

My bet is that the KPIs for the urban-working population are improving at a far greater rate than sheer population growth, already very healthy, while the KPIs for rural/'remote/outer suburban welfare-oriented 'communities' and their parasite organisations are going backwards - not at a great rate, but 2-3-5 % p.a. Do any of the five thousand parasite Indigenous organisations have KPIs ? For $ 33 billion p.a., wouldn't setting KPIs be a useful idea to consider ?

I have this image in my head, of a huge warehouse-type building in Canberra, in which hundreds of bureaucrats, every fortnight, stuff money into brown-paper bags and post them out to the five thousand parasite organisations, no questions asked. Obviously, this is a very naive notion: in reality, they stuff money into brown-paper bags and post them to State and Territory agencies, who in turn .......

Am I wrong ?

Joe

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Dear Loudmouth,

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Thanks for going to the trouble of spelling all that out, Loudmouth. It all sounds very familiar to me. It’s a much more balanced description than the one-sided view presented here by the author of the article we are commenting.

You ask :

« Do any of the five thousand parasite Indigenous organisations have KPIs ? »

Not to my knowledge, Loudmouth, unless they keep them to themselves – and if they do, they must be pretty bad, otherwise they would be shouting about them from the rooftops.

That said, if the State and Federal governments did the job themselves, it would probably be worse.

Please be assured, Loudmouth, that I have no doubt whatsoever that you keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on and what’s not going on that ought to be, on the ground, as regards Aboriginal affairs, particularly in South Australia, but also, more broadly speaking, in Australia generally. For the latter, communications are such that the fact that you live in South Australia and I live in France does not make a hell of a lot of difference.

I simply observed in my previous posts that our federal government, like all its predecessors since colonisation, continues to pursue a single objective of assimilation of what the author of the present article, Anthony Dillon, calls the “dominant Westernised culture”. The rejection by the Prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, of the suggestion of any form of autonomy of the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander peoples is a very clear illustration of government policy in this respect.

As regards our “dominant Westernised culture”, I added that I am not persuaded that it will prove superior to traditional Aboriginal culture in the long term. By “long term”, I take as reference the 65,000 years or so of Australian Aboriginal culture. Our “dominant Westernised culture” has only clocked-up 12,500 years so far. It still has a long way to go.

Unfortunately, neither you nor I will be around to see if, in the final count, it is superior or inferior to traditional Aboriginal culture.

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Hi Banjo Paterson,

If, by 'assimilation', that Indigenous people freely and enthusiastically choose for themselves, you mean equal rights and opportunities, then I'm all for it.

In an article in today's 'Australian', the Indigenous author Kim Scott talked about the need for 'classical Indigenous culture and languages' to be at the forefront of policy. But if you ask yourself, 'Which portion of the Indigenous populations is living by classical traditional culture, and which portion of the Indigenous population is suffering the worst in all of the negative indices', you would come to an uncomfortable conclusion. Which portion - the great majority - of the Indigenous population has experienced most from colonisation, and which portion is doing best, in terms of health, employment, life expectancy, etc. ? Another uncomfortable conclusion awaits.

Of course, Indigenous people should continue to practise what they can of traditional culture, but they should be aware of the consequences. And, as well, urban and working Indigenous people should continue to seize opportunities and build healthy and productive lives, with whatever aspects of traditional culture are beneficial and positive - and, in turn, reap the consequences.

Currently, it seems likely that there could be seventy thousand Indigenous university graduates (a measure of 'assimilation' that they willingly accept) by 2020, or one in every seven or eight adults - a level that Australia as a whole attained in about 1992. From patchy memory, I recall that Australia in 1992 was a highly-developed and well-educated country, moving rapidly from a manufacturing to a high-tech and professional work-force. The improvement in those Indigenous university participation rates is about two or three times as fast as for Australia as a whole - in 2016, commencements rose by 12 %. Indigenous home ownership is better than 40 %, even including those 'communities' where home ownership is impossible.

So where is the good news ? Where is the chronically bad news ? How, and when, can the two populations be reconciled ?

Joe

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Dear Loudmouth,

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You ask :

« So where is the good news ? Where is the chronically bad news ? How, and when, can the two populations be reconciled ? »

Personally, I am quite amazed that so many of our Aboriginal compatriots have caught up with us in just 230 years after having fallen behind by 12,500 years. Their ignorance was obviously not due to a lack of intelligence but to a lack of education. That, to me, is the good news.

The bad news is that those who would prefer to pursue their traditional way of life are now unable to do so for the reasons I indicated in my penultimate post, i.e. :

1. British colonisation brutally deprived them of their life source, their land

2. We severely aggravated matters by transforming the ecosystem with our “dominant Westernised culture”

The state and federal governments have never made any serious efforts to restore the sort of natural environment our Aboriginal compatriots enjoyed prior to British colonisation and our use of their land. They have constantly been denied the means of their autonomy and confined to a life of dependence on social welfare when they failed to assimilate our “dominant Westernised culture”.

That can hardly be considered a choice. It’s totally unfair, unreasonable and unconscionable. It’s not a choice at all. It’s a hold-up ! We have taken away their dignity and submitted them to our diktat.

The two (Aboriginal) populations will be reconciled when we create the conditions of an authentic choice in which both options are equally viable.

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Banjo Paterson,

Funny, I've never thought about Indigenous people in terms of a lack of intelligence. And I was just saying to someone this morning that a study should be done, if possible of the reactions in the first one, five or ten years, of Indigenous groups who happened to occupy the country that major cities were later built on, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide of course - that those people, especially the young people, would have come to know town life, Western life as it was then, very quickly, perhaps within weeks and months.

Young people would have realised that, if they had money, they could buy all sorts of stuff, and one way of getting some of it was to offer to work from government people or farmers or on ships. Very quickly, they would have realised that they could work basically anywhere that labour was needed, all over the colony and indeed in all the colonies.

Young people would have been able to understand English within months, and fairly fluently within a year or so. In fact, they may have been able to operate easily in 'Western' society within five years and put their traditional culture on the back-burner, for when they were in the relevant domain.

So your amazement that people could 'catch up' in 'only' 230 years may be a little misplaced, to put it tactfully. Let's not forget that, when Macquarie set up a school for Aboriginal kids in Sydney in 1814 or so, within two years, one girl, Maria Lock, beat all the white kids in a colony-wide academic competition. That's really not so unusual in our 230-year history.

'British colonisation' currently leaves people pretty much to themselves - they can practice whatever traditions they like, while they cherry-pick the benefits of the Western welfare system. In short, people are doing whatever the hell they like, whenever they like, including some pretty stupid things, for which they reap the consequences. 'Communities'

[TBC]