Dr Tomlison is not an academic but an advocate. It's a shame that so much of our national debate is now shaped by single issue nutters like him. They are skewing debate and shifting our society in ways we don't need.

What is the problem?

Is there too much interference? or

Is the interference underfunded?

hey Leigh, you've completely missed the point.
it's the white fellas who are assimilating into Aborigine culture.
more power women!
and you can't stop that ... ha!

I read the entire article by John Tomlinson.

The situation described sounds totally without
hope.

And that's my basic criticism. It's always
easier to point out what's been done that
was wrong - but how about presenting a
balance and offering some solutions as to
what can be done next. Or is that in
the "too hard basket?"

Heaven help the Aboriginal people -
because it appears no one else can.

"Assimilation has been forced on Aboriginal people throughout Australia, including the Northern Territory. The process is allegedly employed to assist Indigenous people to accommodate to the demands of White Australians and thereby ready themselves for life in the mainstream. Even at its most benign level, assimilation separates the Aboriginal person from their culture, kin and belief systems.."

The world has become too small a place to permit an entire race of people to be stuck in a vast, protected, taxpayer-funded anthropological musuem so that they can attempt to perpetuate a Stone Age-like way of life that has long vanished every else on the globe.

"Rudd is just the last of the colonisers who have waged a relentless race war for 220 years against the Indigenous owners of this country."

Get real. If "the colonisers" had really sought to wage a race war against the Aboriginals, there would be no need to write shrill articles about the perils of "Aboriginal assimilation", owing to a lack of Aboriginals.

‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’

The most active, vocal and tolerated racists in Australia are those interventionists, like the author, who keep on proposing race-based laws.

Their moral vanity does not allow them to see the connection between these race-based interventions and the planned chaos and injustice that they care causing. They keep on thinking that *their* particular race-based intervention will fix or improve things.

It never occurs to them that the problem is not the genetic inheritance of the Aborigional people – as bald an insult as is possible – but the fact of race-based policies themselves.

It never occurs to them to stop trying to forcibly engineer a particular social result, and simply to respect people’s individual rights to freedom and responsibility.

From Cook’s original (unlawful) claim of ownership, to Phillip’s plans for a punitive expedition, to the governmental toleration of massacres, to reserves, to missions, to a bit of eugenics by way of forced removals of children, to the current spectacle of the so-called “communities” – corrupt and dysfunctional artefacts of the welfare state – the common thread is the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of race-based laws – and the conceited racist perpetrators just can’t seem to get it!

Race-based laws and policies are bad in practice because they are fundamentally bad in principle. They don’t work because they can’t work. They are immoral, divisive and dysfunctional. They should be abolished, notwithstanding the self-interested cries of the comfortable vested interests of the officially privileged racists, and their record of utter failure. People have rights to services because they are human beings, and because they have needs, not because of their biological race which is irrelevant and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise.