runner,

It's so heart warming to see you continue to espouse
your concerns for the rights of a foetus.
However I'll ask again - if the foetus you save
turns out to be GAY will you continue to protect
its rights?

BTW - just because I don't agree with you does not make me
a "regressive" or a "hater" it just means you can't deal
with diversity as you claim you can.

Dear Paul,

Regarding statistics and documented facts?

I guess we shouldn't say that some people are not very
bright or that they're narrow-minded or biased.
That would be rude.

We can however say that they've got bad luck when it
comes to thinking. (Smile).

Foxy,

For god's sake. Indigenous people have had responsibilities, through community councils, for the best part of fifty years now. Whether they were aware of those responsibilities is debatable: on the communities that I am aware of, they immediately appointed whitefella administrators to handle all of those sorts of issues. Those administrators were careful never to disagree with a councillor.
But when they did not come up to speed - say, they didn't get the housing finance that the council wanted - they were sacked anyway and another whitefella appointed. That's called decision-making.

Running a community council, even for a very small community, is a very complex business - they might have pretty much all of the same issues as a very large council, only on a Lilliputian scale. And it's not a given that the people on the community have the necessary skills, any more than the people up and down your street or mine could run all of the affairs of the street. 'Community' is not 'Utopia'.

But people were given those responsibilities, and they have had them ever since, and still have them.

People make choices. Not necessarily sensible ones either.

Joe

Paul,

Each time you post I can be pretty sure that 90% of it is bollocks, as to how much is misunderstanding or pure ignorance and how much is pure made up lies is difficult to determine. Your poor spelling certainly gives me the impression of the former.

Firstly as Australia has accepted a total of zero whites from Zimbabwe as refugees, the fellow you describe never came over as a refugee.

Secondly, the only "Turkey shoots" that occurred involving special forces were the surprise attacks by the SAS and Selous Scouts on guerilla training bases in Zambia and Mozambique, and did not involve civilians. If you want details feel free to read the book on the Selous Scouts by Peter Stiff.

Finally, while there were undoubtedly atrocities committed by Rhodesian forces, it pales compared to the systematic horrors visited on locals by the "freedom fighters" in the name of re education.

That this fellow was "racists" (sic) there is no doubt, but as they say, one swallow does not a summer make.

Joe,

Why do they need the whitefellas to oversee black
communities and committees?

So what you're saying is that the blacs aren't capable
to govern themselves and make their own decisions.
Lack of experience? (wonder why?) or that they're just
ignorant, lazy bastards and need whitefellas to look
after them?

The fact that aboriginals are around 15 times more likely to go to prison than non-aboriginals is, apparently, proof that there is inherent and incessant racism in the Australian community to the detriment of said aboriginals and that measures must be taken to redress this.

Using the same logic...

The fact that men are around 19 times more likely to go to prison than non-men is, obviously, proof that there is inherent and incessant sexism in the Australian community to the detriment of said men and that measures must be taken to redress this.

I wonder how that'll fly?

Foxy,

No, that's exactly what I'm NOT saying - of course, Aboriginal people are as capable as any other group of ordinary people to learn how to manage their own affairs, but it may be that they also see 'self-determination' as the right to hire and fire people to do the work. Perhaps the councils saw themselves not so much as replacing the superintendent from previous days as replacing the Department which had employed him.

But the upshot was that they didn't seem to learn what was actually required to run the communities, that was passed over to someone who usually didn't even live on the place.

As well, the rule that nobody who worked for the community council could be a member of it (as with all rules in Aboriginal councils, that got bent a it) meant that nobody on the council was actually au fait with what was going on day-to-day, nor really cared that much about employment, jobs, projects, or the economic development of the place - except, of course, for getting huge amounts of funds to do something-or-other and to appoint yet more managers and directors of the new projects from the most powerful families. Whether it was going to work or not didn't seem to matter. So oversight of what one would have thought were key enterprises was pretty perfunctory.

Weird, but if anything, there seemed to be hostility from councillors towards any projects, even as they got funding for them. The aim seemed to be to wind down activity so that everybody could live a quiet life without the bother of employment.

My brother-in-law ran the brand-new dairy but when he asked for permission to fix up many of the fences which had fallen into disrepair, the council refused him funds. He tried get a neighbouring CDEP program to come in and fix them, since the community's CDEP program wouldn't, but that was also denied. So he had fewer and fewer paddocks to pasture his cows in over time. Somehow he managed, in spite of council opposition.

Weird, but that's how it worked.

Joe