Rainier

You say >>”Burrowing neo-con slogons is easy for lazy dullards.”

If that isn’t a deliberate attempt at irony it worked out pretty well.

You say >>”Without the rights oriented model nothing would have happenned, and much would not have been gained”

I’m not talking about land rights. I fully support land rights. I’m talking about welfare. Passive welfare is a scourge that damages whatever people are the recipients. That is what I am talking about regarding rights orientated policy. There is no balancing responsibility.

You say >> “Its a history you don't know, its a life you've never lived.”

I’ve got a couple of things to say about that. Does that mean you don’t know the real history of white people, it’s a life you’ve never lived. Does that mean you should be prevented from discussing policy issues regarding non aboriginals? I wouldn’t have thought so. I should hope not.

You say >> “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will

That may be true, but it is also irrelevant to the current situation. Those wanting to spend their time on symbolism are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. There is, and has been for some time, a crisis in health, education, policing and many other areas of remote aboriginal communities. There needs to be a real focus on how this is going to be rectified. Until these things are fixed I don’t see how the situation of Aboriginal communities can be improved.

Tell me how will a Treaty help?

Treaties do many things. They recognise status, responsibilities and obligations. They give a direction to policy. Usually they generate understanding and sometimes even fairness.

Doing those things in a positive way enables everyone develop fairly self-esteem, self-confidence and cetainity.

Those are things that are missing with the current mostly unstated mismash of attitudes, along with many irrelevant and damaging policies or a lack of policy.

Besides how can a treaty hurt? So I'd ask not why, but why not?

Well is it just me or are others wondering how welfare got connected to passivity?

How did welfare create dependency all by itself? No, it got trotted out by the likes of Noel Pearson and others with lots of help from the Australian and its grubby bunch of conservative journo’s. Its so entrenched in the white Australian psyche that they don’t even know when or how they learnt to parrot these ‘new’ pseudo benevolent rants about ‘aborigines’.

The lack of rights to land, mass genocide of hundreds of tribes, protection by common law, intergenerational brutality of police, stolen wages and children, all contributed to the conditions on many communities. (Whoops, does this sound like a Rights based agenda?) Sorry!

But no, forget all this, its easier for the 'deniers', the disrememberers’ to lay everything on welfare dependency and mystify the whole history of racist dispossession like it never bloody happened.

What a load of horse shiit.