having travelled in many outback towns in NT recently it is clear that we all have a lot of work to do to try and live together

By the end of last year, nearly 24,000 Indigenous people had graduated from universities across Australia. Twenty four thousand. Currently, around ten thousand Indigenous people are studying at universities. Commencements and enrolments are at record levels. In the last full year of figures, 2007, 1495 Indigenous people graduated from universities. That's four a day, on average. Twenty six Indigenous people completed Ph.Ds, that's one a fortnight. In 2007, with just over three thousand in the median age-group of Indigenous women, 1068 Indigenous women graduated from universities, the equivalent of about 30 % of the median age-group.

Most Indigenous people have agency in their own lives, as much as anybody else in Australia. They choose to study, they choose to work to graduate. They choose 'assimilation' = equal rights, it isn't forced on them as if they were mere passive lumps. They are liberated to that extent from the new feudalism of the Indigenous industry, and hopefully, will never come under its control.

As for the poor b*ggers up in the isolated settlements, utterly uneducated (Professor Dodson suggests that 30 % of the Indigenous population is illiterate - and where do you think they might be ?), with a very poor command of the Australian lingua franca, very few skills, distant from learning and employment, afflicted with addictions of all kinds, in relatively poor health (the 'Gap' is different for remote and urban Indigenous people, and for welfare-oriented and work-oriented Indigenous people) - can any of them make the massive leap into the outside world, or is it already too late ? I don't know.

For more than forty years, I was a dedicated self-determinationist, but it is clear to me that it has totally failed, resulting only in the proliferation of parasite organisations, compradors, sucking money from both governments and their own people. How to liberate those poor b*ggers from their control ? I don't know.

Joe Lane

simple.
liberate Australian governance from racist and discriminatory decision-making with reform of the Constitution to provide for a women's legislature.

Hi Whistler, long time no hear,
Yeah, and as well as men's and women's legislatures, why not right-handed and left-handed legislatures, older people's and younger people's legislatures, and fat and thin people's legislatures, in each of our eight states and territories. I'm speaking of course as an old, fat, South Australian, male left-hander, sick and tired of the discrimination against my OFSAMLH people.

That should fragment democracy fantastically, with 64 different and uncommunicating legislatures, and make it impossible for people to come together to discuss issues in common forums (like OLO) so that we will never again hear any talk about 'equal rights' - what a bourgeois concept !

Yeah, right.

Joe

The period to which John refers was not assimilationist, but gloried in the title Self Determination'. And from 1975 to 1995 funding was massive.

The beginning of the end for Aboriginal development was the imposition of local government on a people who already possessed saturation consensus protocols. With councils, the community's power was concentrated into a few instantly corrupted hands.

Welfare generally was the coup de grace to Aboriginal hope; coupled with CDEP, which immediately killed off Aboriginal enterprise initiatives. This situation was witnessed on ABC radio archives in an interview with Dhulumburrk Gaykamangu of Ramingining in 1983; apparently no one was listening.

The critical and pivotal goal of communities and clans becoming economically self-sufficient was destroyed. It is a myth that there was/is no employment potential. Prospects are massive.

By 1975, all NT Aboriginal children were being educated to year eight level and rising, but this cheerful state of affairs went into sudden screeching reverse when new policy stated that all people who identified as Aboriginal were deemed to be as Aboriginal as people for whom English was a third, fourth or even seventh language.
This is when hopelessly urban monolingual part Aborigines whose only qualification was a pale brown skin took over 'Aboriginal development'.

Next spectre of doom came in the form of school teachers, protected by ALP Governments as their sole sources of political power and propaganda in the six bush electorates. These immature dreamers introduced the myopic and disastrous bilingual education programme.

Finally, the critical ambition of community self-sufficiency and consequential population retention was ultimately abandoned when the then Department of Community Development excised all references to buffalo and enterprise development from the NT Aboriginal Urban Drift Draft Paper.

What all of this proved to me was that there should be no expert or secret decisions, and that all government decisions must be guided by informed electoral consensus.

Tony Ryan

Loudmouth

I was for self-determination as most young tertiary educated people were - it was the one and only 'fix' taught in secondary and tertiary education. It still is and that is a problem.

It is dangerous for our democracy and freedom that political correctness has such a strangle hold in education. Some departments of university humanities faculties are monocultures, where opposing opinion is ruthlessly put down and the current order is reinforced through appointing the clones as tutors and lecturers. Ex-PM John Howard was right when he said that universities were teaching a black armband view of aboriginal history. He could have added that they contribute by reinforcing the victim culture.

Your observation that most Indigenous people have agency in their own lives. That is not assisted where there is an industry that makes a good living out of encouraging learned helplessness. For example, mush of the serious indigenous health problems could be wiped out overnight if basic hygiene was taught to and applied by young mothers. It comes down to using soap and water. Even a daily face wash with clean water and soap will prevent most of the eye disease that is prevalent.

http://rehydrate.org/hygiene/index.html

It is an outrage that in some communities children are not taught English and are illiterate and disadvantaged. The ideologues who are responsible for this will never be held to account, but at least the opening up of communities through the glare of publicity should one day (maybe?!) see most indigenous children taught English for their own and their parents' good.

There have been many studies of indigenous issues, however there has never been a proper study of what PREVENTS indigenous people from enjoying similar health, education and quality of life as the general community. Because of the systemic nature of the corruption that exists, such an examination will never occur. Systemic corruption is inevitable where large sums of money are available from the public purse and the management controls are either ineffectual or non-existent. Therein lies a major part of the solution.