I know you guys just loe the wanky b-s, but the best way for an aboriginal person to get ahead is to get away from other aborigines.

Thank you citizen for proving my point.

) with creativity we can change clearners' jobs to cleaning machinery operators and reduce % of cleanres from 4% to 2%;Posted by Paul_of_Melb, Friday, 15 September 2006 2:49:25 PM

Wow, so you are a professional spin-doctor eh? Perhaps you can clarify something for me - can spin-doctors believe their own spin?

Cleaners already are 'cleaning machinery operators' but they still get cleaners' pay and cleaners' social status. The creativity is all fluff in your own mind - try working as a 'cleaning machinery operator' for a while - you will get the picture.

Rob,
there is a beautiful prayer
"Lord, grant me courage to change things I can change,
grant me serenity to accept things I can not change
and wisdom to tell one from the other"

................
and the is another:
"seek, and you shall find"

I am no Christian fanatic, but this are good quotations -
we can do something
if
we are looking for opportunites to do so.

all the best to you

Paul

During the early Qing (1644-1912), Kangxi 1678) had to deal with problem of old loyalities to the Ming. What he did was to identify the fifty --grew to 143, I think-- most gifted Han (under occupation) and fast-tracked them through the Chinse examination system to key administrative posts. While it didn't work as well as anticipated, it might provide a base model.

All the plans and schemes dealing with education, employment etc. will fail. The essential problem for white and black Australia is spiritual.

What use is an education policy, however good in the face of statistics such as those released by the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) about suicide rates in the Northern Territory.

"New figures released today are the first to confirm that the territory has bucked national trends with a suicide rate that increased rapidly between 1981 and 2002.
Rates among indigenous men skyrocketed by 800 per cent, with those aged under 45 most at risk, but non-indigenous men were also vulnerable." from an article about the MJA research
http://sydney.indymedia.org/node/38748

MJA research
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/185_06_180906/mea10056_fm.html

There are many contributing factors to this and they are all related and profound. It is ridiculous to believe tha Aboriginal Australia can simply pull up it's socks, get an education and stop whinging.

Mainstream society is destroying itself, ecologically as well as spiritually through a meaningless, media dominated existence of wage slavery. It stands as no beacon of hope for Aboriginal people to aspire to, consequently any assimilationist strategy will fail.

All of us, white and black, need to find hope and spiritual connection to this place, Australia. That means different things for indigenous people to the rest of us, but the essential spirituality of this place is largely defined by Aboriginal people. The repression of this knowledge through pressured conformity to white paradigms is a significant contributing factor to Aboriginal mental health issues. White Australia desperately needs to learn some more of spirituality. The mainstream suicide rate, especially amongst young people is amongst the highest in the world. Our culture is sick but we are so used to it we do not see it in ourselves. As Aboriginal people continue to die, so does the capacity of white Australia to survive in this continent. e.g. Our 200 years of understanding of the changes in the weather is nothing to a meteorology of 40,000 years or more. How can we have a hope of seriously planning and managing water with such ignorance?