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The Forum > Article Comments > 'Sorry' first, but progress later > Comments

'Sorry' first, but progress later : Comments

By Howard Glenn, published 8/2/2008

The most encouraging part of the debate is that it has the prospect of re-kindling a bi-partisan approach to Aboriginal issues.

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Foz says: 'The only thing I cannot do is offer a personal apology to any indigenous person who approaches me for one. The reason is that I cannot possibly be guilty of human rights abuses perpertrated by other people before I was born. Saying that someone is guilty of something based on their racial inheritence is a gross act of racism itself'

Please don't take offence Foz, but that statement comes from ignorance of what it really going on. Individual Australians are not providing the apology. The apology is being provided by the Australian Government in recognition of policies of past governments. No individual person is being asked to take personal responsibility and if anyone thinks that this is the case, they are wrong.

I have been amazed at some of the negative reactions to the apology.

My mother was taken from her family at the age of six for no other reason than she was deemed a 'half-caste' which meant she was a perfect candidate for assimilation. She grew up in an environment where she had no contact with her family and was told on a daily basis how disgusting Aboriginal people were.

We can't change the past, but we can make sure that the children of the Stolen Generation are no longer told that what happened to them was for their own good.
Posted by CoogeeGal, Monday, 11 February 2008 3:42:30 PM
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Col Rouge: "Then what you are suggesting is, aboriginal people are not a “race”. Then what are they?

A collection of races?

A range of different species?"

Don't give up your day job, old bean counter - you certainly don't cut it as anthropologist. Not only you do you use outmoded 19th century terms like "Caucasian" and "Negro", but you seem unaware that anthropologists no longer refer to "races" at all. This is because, with the development of modern human genetics, anthropologists found that there is greater genetic variation within the so-called "races" than between them.

It is really only racists who continue to use such outmoded terminology, and those who have internalised that racism by being so catgorised.

Aboriginal people are just that - i.e. the descendants of Australia's original human inhabitants. Your reference to them as being different species merely underlines just how racist you are.

Fortunately, you are not only in the minority in Australia, you are now very much in the political wilderness. Suck eggs while the rest of us celebrate this small step towards National Reconciliation.
Posted by CJ Morgan, Monday, 11 February 2008 4:40:32 PM
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Col Rouge,

Your call for '... all Australians be treated equal.' is admirable.

Education services, health services, policing in remote communities are funded well below the levels of the cities.

There is not one tertiary institution in any remote area of Australia.

Employment opportunites are almost non-existant and business development funding in remote communities is also almost non-existant.

Not one person in a remote Indigenous community has the same right as you to land ownership.

The mortality rates of remote Indigenous children and adults are far higher than the same rates in our cities.

There is not one hospital in any of our remote communities.


How would you address these inequalities of entrenched government policies and treatment?
Posted by keith, Monday, 11 February 2008 6:19:04 PM
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I note that certain people put aside their 'might doesn't make right' rule when it suits them to be believe that most people agree with them.

What do you say Col Rouge. Will we end up as an oppressed minority?

If we do, I don't think we will be getting much sympathy from our do-gooding, lefty friends. We aren't 'colourful' enough.
Posted by Leigh, Monday, 11 February 2008 6:47:00 PM
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Leigh, you already exist in a minority, sad lonely men whose only connection to the world is dependent on how they attempt to re-create themselves as intellectual giants here. If what you offer us here on OLO is the best you have, I'd hate to think what you're really like in the flesh. Scary or what!
Posted by Rainier, Monday, 11 February 2008 8:37:31 PM
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Keith,

I think you make some ridiculous statements above. No, there is not one tertiary institution in a remote area for the simple reason that they need to be near populations, and since a tertiary campus needs to have at least a thousand students, preferably five or ten thousand in order to be able to offer a minimal range of subjects, and since about four percent of the population is involved in higher education, if you do the maths, the minimum size for a catchment area of a university campus is about twenty five thousand people, preferably two hundred and fifty thousand. Curse the world if you like, but that's how it is everywhere.

The only place I can think of where the government built a university campus out in the sticks was Fort Hare in South Africa, under the Apartheid regime, specifically designed to keep Black populations away from the cities, and the new South African government has been trying to dismantle this instrument of racism ever since. But you would want to build them all over Australia ? And what - confine Indigenous students' choices to these out-of-the-way institutions ? Who's the racist ?

All university campuses in Australia are available to al Indigenous people. And twenty two thousand have graduated so far from them, that's twenty two thousand Indigenous people who would tell you what to do with your universities out in ther sticks. Fifty thousand by 2020. Do you want to respond with some racist crap about 'Western' education ?
Posted by Loudmouth, Monday, 11 February 2008 9:24:59 PM
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