Way back in the dim dark past a couple who became friends of mine were idealistic members of JFKs Peace Core. They went to a Pacific island, & at government expense established a couple of plantations & farms to help supply the population with a healthier diet. The villagers were not prepared to get off their butts & maintain them, & they died out. Sound familiar?

They got cunning. They picked a couple of go-getters & supplied them with the stock & materials to plant their own plantations & farms. A couple of years later, with the go-getters becoming wealthy from the product of their farms, they had most of the people of the island wanting stock to develop their own farms & plantations.

About 20 years ago we, the tax payer, gave the people of Palm Island 14 fishing dories, extremely seaworthy diesel powered fishing boats, as used by our reef commercial fishermen. The idea was to encourage a fishing industry to supply near by Townsville.

In just 4 months the only one still running was the one doing the sly grog run from Townsville. The rest had been smashed or the mechanicals destroyed by abuse. Sound familiar?

At the same time the island was out of water, with the dam dry. Two & sometimes 3 barges were running full time carrying water to the island. We the tax payer spent a small fortune supplying & fitting water saving devices on the island. The company I ran supplied & installed a couple of hundred solid brass water saving shower heads, about half the requirement, & some hundreds of water saving tap washers.
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We went back a couple of months later to fit the rest. We found most of the first lot gone, & open pipes wasting huge amounts of water. They had found the expensive heavy brass components made excellent FREE fishing sinkers.

You can bet your boots that if the aboriginals were having to pay for the boats or showers they would have been treated with at least some respect. They will never advance while given everything for free. Time to make them pay their own way, with all help hidden in the background, rather than handed out for ever. Handouts are never respected by anyone, Polynesian, Aboriginals or Europeans. It has to stop.

Rather than rely on imagination, I Google it, and according to DFAT:

"Around 12,000-16,000 Australian businesses are Indigenous-owned".

I must say that I find this very hard to believe, and the huge gap in the guess - 12k to 16k - doesn't engender confidence in the claim. If true, however, why would any more money be showered on them if they are doing that well.

ttbn, you can almost bet your life there are 12000 to 16000 white advisers out there with their mitts in the till.
David

I'm sure you are right VK3AUU. Another good reason to shut the taxpayer till, & lock it shut.

Descendants of real Aboriginals have certainly been ripped off; art being one area. But whites have been the ones to do something about this. Artists, many of whom live in remote areas have no English at all, or not enough to press their cases.

However, this ‘collective intergenerational responsibility' nonsense has to stop. And, we should stop calling living Australians ‘aboriginal’; they are no more aboriginal than I am a Scottish/English/German after more than two centuries.

We have no reason to be guilty, or ‘make up for’ what a long-dead generation might or might not have done to another long-dead generation.