FrankGol,
I must say that I now concur with Rainier..... " many communities do not have adequate primary health services" I did my own research and that with the knowledge that I have never known Rainier to spread bull or say something he could not back up. Rainier and I have certainly had differences of opinion but he is fair dinkum.

I still take umbrage at you taking my comment about rural and remote people having to go to cities for specialist treatment and then deduce from that "Its obvious that medical services are far from adequate in indigenous communieies"

Its obvious that you do not like it when the same is done to you.

I still do not think you care one bit about aboriginal welfare. To you it is simply spin to push your political agenda.

Banjo

It's good that you can find common ground with Rainier in agreeing that " many communities do not have adequate primary health services".

Whichever way I reached my conclusion that: "It's obvious that medical services are far from adequate in Indigenous communities", it seems that you and Rainier and I are singing from the same songbook. How, if at all, do we disagree on this essential conclusion?

Banjo, you say to me: "I still do not think you care one bit about aboriginal welfare. To you it is simply spin to push your political agenda." Two questions:
1) Please tell me what evidence you have to support this slander?
2) You seem to know, so please tell me what is my political agenda?

So what's the more urgent matter here Banjo, aboriginal health or somebody's political agenda? What matters more, fixing the problems or arguing about who gets to fix them?

The most urgent task is understanding a nature of a problem rather than paying a next bunch of mates for telling tales about particular specified issue.

chainsmoker,
It is pretty obvious what the priority is and I am not the one with a political agenda. My fear is that if the health of aborigines continues to deteriorate with alcohol, drug abuse and petrol sniffing, the whole race is doomed to extinction. We have tried the passive welfare track and current information is that the situation is worse.

I have no time for those that really want the current situation to continue so they can use it to discredit the Government, whichever it be,for not doing enough. Have a look at the previous posts here and see how many positive suggestions there are.

While I have the floor, one other matter occured to me. Is it the right thing to do to compare the length of aboriginal life to that of others ,in terms of total population. Would it not be more accurate to compare the urban lifespans of aboriginals and other urban dwellers.

Then compare the lifespans of remote area aboriginals with that of others living in remote areas. I think that would be more accurate and give a truer picture of what the situation is.

Banjo, I think you're onto something there with the urban/remote thing. I'm not aboriginal so probably have no right to say this, but the idea that the only real aborigine lives in the outback sh!ts me to tears.

As others have pointed out though, service provision isn't evenly spread around the country, so if you're going to do the urban/remote comparison you'd also have to do a community by community one. Qld wouldn't do terribly well out of that I suspect.

You could then get a clearer picture of what works, what doesn't, and what the various contributors to the problem might be rather than just blaming aborigines, whites, right or left. It cannot be that simple.