"Leftists experience multiculturalism when they go to a restaurant on a Friday night, although when they get food poisoning, they choose not to see that as cultural". (Quote:Benjamin)

You poor sod! You've been given a real flogging with the Aryan purity/neo-con stick haven't you?

Rainer,
It seems that it is politically incorrect to say that someone has “aboriginal blood”, or to say the word “negro”, but you refer to children as “dogs”. Having known some other university lecturers, I’m not surprised at all that you think of children in that way, but I don’t think of children in that way.

The term “Aboriginal-Australians” could be trialled, similar to African-Americans. In fact both groups are becoming very similar, as many Aboriginals are now urban and have very little relationship to the land, similar to the African-American.

Various statistics of the Aboriginal-Australian communities and the African-American communities are also very similar. Higher rates of poverty, higher rates of imprisonment, and higher rates of violence (particularly black on black violence). In fact, most of the harm being carried out on aborigines is being carried out by themselves, or by other aborigines.

Prove me wrong if you can.

Because these statistics are so similar, it leads me to believe that land rights or saying “sorry” will have minimal consequence for the Aboriginal-Australian. The future of the Aboriginal-Australian is mostly urbane, but their future can already be seen in many African-American communities unless things change.

C.J Morgan,
As well as higher rates of poverty, imprisonment and violence, what has become noticeable within African-American communities is a major decrease in marriage rates over the last few decades, together with a major increase in out of wedlock births (from 25% in 1965 to 70% in 2006).

This may seem to be a feminist ideal or a feminist heaven, but it has lead to large scale welfare dependency, an epidemic of fatherless children, and an ongoing poverty cycle that then feeds back into the violence and imprisonment.

You can also have a look at some of the programs being undertaken in the US to get more African-Americans married and employed, and then wonder if similar programs should be implemented in Australia for the Aboriginal-Australian, for their own sake.

http://www1.hamiltonproject.org/comm/events/20061128.htm

I suppose we should be grateful to HRS for providing a link in support of his claims. However, the document it links to provides no actual statistics - rather, it links to a transcript of a panel discussion about marriage in African-American families. Nowhere does it mention "negroes", nor indeed Aborigines.

If we are supposed infer that this discussion is relevant to an article about Aboriginal policy in Australia, then HRS will need to do better than that. For example, we have been given no evidence at all that marriage rates have fallen among Aboriginal people - if this is indeed the case, then HRS should some actual evidence.

HRS has also failed to show why it is that this American discussion is relevant to the subject of this thread. Hint to HRS: have a look for some similar discussions about conditions in Native American communities if you want to find parallels in that country. Your assumption that statistics pertaining to African Americans are relevant to Australian Aborigines still smacks of racism to me.

And what on earth do HRS's snipes about women, children and feminism have to do with the subject of this thread?

CJ Morgan

The point of the exercise is to show that the situation of the Aboriginal Australian has more to do with social systems than with politics.

If you dig a bit deeper into the “panel discussion” you will see that they are discussing a major study on marriage amongst various communities in the US, and if you want to see the future of the Aboriginal Australian, than you can look at the African American. Right now they are almost identical in many ways.

Both are mostly urban, both have high rates of unemployment, both have low rates of marriage, and both have high rates of welfare dependency and poverty.

There shouldn’t be calls for saying "sorry". The main call should be to “get a job and get married”.

Kevin Rudd may well observe that Howard's likening of the crisis to the debacle of Hurricane Katrina may well be on the money .

As I understand it, there had been no Government attention paid for years to the engineering experts that reported that urgent work and large amounts of money needed to be spent on the levee walls that protected the disadvantaged communities involved . In short it was a disaster waiting to happen .

George W sends in the troops.

Sound familiar ?

NT child abuse figures 'not a stand out'

Posted Fri Jul 6, 2007 5:36pm AEST

The co-author of a Commonwealth commissioned child protection report says sex abuse figures for Indigenous children in the Northern Territory are among the lowest in Australia.

Diedre Penhaligon from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare confirmed Indigenous children in suburban Victoria are more at risk than those in the Territory.

Ms Penhaligan says over the last few years the number of child sex abuse reports has risen across Australia, but says the Territory figures are not a stand-out.

"It's certainly possible that the Northern Territory may have been maybe a bit unfairly targeted compared to other jurisdictions," she said.

"It's a problem in every jurisdiction."

"If we look at the Northern Territory about 4 per cent of all substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect were for sexual abuse in Indigenous children.

"But for other children, that is people who haven't identified as being Indigenous, it is actually 9 per cent and that's a pretty consistent finding across all the jurisdictions."

Earlier, a Melbourne University Professor claimed child-sex abuse was five-times more prevalent in Melbourne suburbs.