Interesting point about the equal opportunity. Agree in principle with the underlying point of your article that equal opportunity may not necessarily bring equal outcomes, the devil is in the provision of truly equal opportunity and this does not occur. I also disagree that a lesser outcome is purely a result of choice. Even having an exposure to the broad opportunities that are available is not available to everyone.
It is difficult to comprehend that someone who has spent their formative years surrounded by poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, horrendous living conditions and not a positive role model in sight has anything like equal opportunity. I was extremely lucky to have parents that made decisions about where we lived and where we were educated so that our opportunities were not equal - we had way better opportunities than lots of other kids whose parents didn't make those types of decisions.
It is true that people can choose not to be like their parents or other people in their situation and can get some semblance of equal outcomes, they have a lot of other hurdles to overcome that people in better situations never even had to consider to get their 'equal opportunity'.

Here's a few of my thoughts on opportunity, health, etc:

Around the world, many countries were colonised by the 'white man' (similarly to ours) yet outside Australia, their native peoples have a stack of drive, ambition and motivation to work hard to advance themselves;
People make choices in their lives that put them at near certainty of bad health outcomes, our safety net has become a hammock in this regard as people will eat badly, smoke, drink too much, particularly in remote areas, knowing full well we'll be there to help them out when by that time the help doesn't cure them, its just wasting money to put off the inevitable (lets have more rigorous cost-benefit analysis and rationing of healthcare for lifestyle diseases);
I live in a city with several tertiary hospitals yet cannot receive at no cost, for my knee issues, the podiatry/physio consults and treatment needed whatever that is, yet someone with self-inflicted disease may receive the podiatry consult on medicare;
Tobacco excise could be increased heavily say up to 30 cents per stick, and the money used to fund an increased private health insurance rebate up to 50% of the premium......... a great way of making the biggest users of hospitals pay closer to the actual cost and rewarding personal responsibility.

An interesting essay and one I overall agree with. On other concurrent threads, I have being thinking about the natural differences between men and women as being seminal to the outcomes they achieve.

One particular idea you hear a lot on TV - that of women not being paid as much as men for doing the same work - springs to mind. What if the pay is actually comprised of two components - a merit component (for doing the job well in real time) and a reward component (as a dividend for doing past work well, which works in the same way as compounding interest). As women working in the paid workforce is a relatively recent phenomenon, this may well explain why they do not get paid as well as men - they haven't had the same history and grounding and therefore don't get the dividend. (BTW, don't blame the system for this, this is pure physics speaking here.)

OTOH, women really come to the party with their nurturing roles. The joy they get in life mostly comes from raising a family, and that joy comes from a rich history of doing that activity.

So the real question is: what do women really want to do? If they do want to stay home, and the family can afford it, it actually makes sense for society to let the man get the better wage and, as a team, they get by that way.

It seems to me the ones complaining the hardest about lack of pay equality between the sexes are single academic females. How many females are paying the price by working to look after home and baby AND having to work in the paid workforce? For what reason? So that single, academic females can have a comfy life and business can spruik on about productivity? I reckon this issue needs to be looked at from a lot more angles than the typical debates on this issue have in the past.

The economic imperative is trumping the human. Does it have to be this way? Can it be done better?

What sort of an article can discuss equality, opportunity and outcomes in Australia in 2009 without mentioning those most lacking in opportunity: the disabled? A report commissioned by the federal government and released last week describes the experience of people with disabilities and their families. It is entitled "Shut Out". It speaks of how people with a disability are "excluded and ignored" in our society, how they cope with a service system that is "broke and broken", how they "can't get a job" or if they can, they "can't get there, can't get in, can't get it" and how they are "isolated and alone" socially. I agree that opportunity does not guarantee outcome, but without opportunity there can be no chance of outcome. What's more, I disagree with the basic premise of this article: that we are a caring society. A caring society does not have one large group within its midst who are forgotten and for whom the national ideal of a "fair go" is so imperfectly extended.

Thanks for the comments everyone. This is my first post at this website, and I appreciate all feedback on my ideas.

@estelles - I know I didn't mention the disabled in this article. Originally the central focus was on the Close the Gap campaign, but it end up as a more general discussion. I'm not sure if you are referring to just Wheelies in your remarks, or disabilities more generally. But I can't help think you may have missed the point. Equal outcomes for Wheelies means they are getting a massive advantage compared to others. I guess in the end it is a question of values - how much do we as a society value to contribution of the disabled? The more we value the contribution, the more we should spend (and regulate) in favour of equal outcomes.

I'd like to end on a positive note. Disabled people have far more opportunities today than they have ever had in the past, and it is likely to only get better.

Let me guess you think school vouchers would be a good thing to.
Cam you need to live a little you sound like your brought up in a nice rich family on the north shore. Reality is very different for most of the world then it is for white breed north shore boys.
The fact is kids born in dysfunctional environments tend to be dysfunctional themselves but you say that just because they make bad choices. Now that not to say them some people make great choices and get out most don't. It is in everyone’s interest to try and stop the cycle to force improvement then.
You need to think your ideas through a bit at the moment your coming over all right wing racist to me.

Sorry this article is just wrong.
It is a good idea to increase opportunity and choice but your arguments are niave, childish and downright racist.
Comparing basketballers, rich people buying kidneys and mythical breeding men with the lives and health and grinding poverty of indigenous people is a new low in bastardry.

Your straw man argument of a "free market" in organs is only possible if there are people poor and desperate enough to sell their own organs. People who's lives are so barren and wasted that they could contemplate selling parts of themselves like new age prostitutes. This is not a world I wish for and I wonder how any decent person could?

I think outcomes are important but everyone is different and it is the opportunity to accomplish ones full potential and live a happy and fulfilling life that is the most essential aspect of any society that is to be succesful in the long term. Please stop with the simplistic "poor people get what they deserve" mentality and think about how much better the world could be if all those you see as outcasts and povos were able to fulfill their potential and live lives that give them choices that really do allow people to be their best.

Cameron,
At least the concept of equality is under discussion and action even though the action taken may not always be successful. We may not be reaching equality but are striving for it. Too many people seek ways to divide us and drive inequality.

It is interesting that you should end on such a "positive note", Cam. The report that I quoted, "Shut Out", says in its introduction by Dr Rhonda Galbally AO:
Many people in the community believe disability is someone elses problem. They do not believe disability will touch their lives, and give little thought to the experience of living with disability, or caring for someone with a disability. Without first-hand experience, they hold on to the belief that at least things are better than they used to be. (She might have been talking about you, Cam).
The stories you will find in this report will challenge those beliefs.
For many years people with disabilities found themselves shut in - hidden away in large institutions. Now many people with disabilities find themselves shut out - shut out of building, homes schools, businesses, sports and community groups. They find themselves shut out of our way of life.
As this report sadly illustrates, Australians with disabilities are among our nation's forgotten people. But it is time for their stories to be heard - and acted upon.

I can personally testify that things are in fact worse than they used to be. On the OLO forum, I often post a comment about disability. Congratulations, Cam, because you are the first person in several years who has actually acknowledged my post. While the issues of the indigenous people and the refugees take priority on this forum, the issues of the disabled are not even up for debate, on the agenda or trendy enough for OLO.

I would love to agree with the article, but I think it misses the reality that equal opportunity can only exist if we all start from the same place. How is an indigenous kid from Palm Island or a remote community meant to know that there is something 'better' out there - that a life without violence, hunger, alcoholism and disease exists? They cannot make the choice if they don't know the choice is there. Thus, while they have access to exactly the same services as white people like myself, they cannot utilise these services because they don't know about them and aren't equipped to access them.

As estelles said, disabled people also start from a very different place. Should special education units in schools be shut down? They usually have much smaller class sizes, resulting in greater access to teachers and greater funding per student. This appears to offer unequal opportunity but, in reality, is simply a measure to close the gap between the opportunities available to II and mainstream students.

'Equal opportunity' necessitates unequal distribution of funds, services and resources - in essence, what it requires is equity rather than equality. While I think the notion of 'from each according to his means to each according to his needs' is overly simplistic and removes the incentive for hard work, I'm happy for a considerable portion of my tax dollars to go towards helping people less fortunate than myself, even if those dollars do not benefit me personally.

Otokonoko,

There is a university campus barely thirty miles from Palm Island and, I'm sure, staff from the Indigenous student support program there would have gone out to Palm many times to let kids and parents know about tertiary study. Kids from there would have visited the James Cook Uni campus many times. They might even know some of the twenty four thousand Indigenous uni graduates or one of the fifteen hundred who graduate each year across Australia. I don't think people can use the excuse that 'they didn't know' much longer.

Joe

I am aware that there is a university campus not too far away from Palm. I spend a lot of time there. Strangely, I don't see many Palm Islanders on campus, though. Is this because black people are inherently stupid? Is it because they are too lazy to go to uni? Or is there some sort of barrier preventing them from going?

It's not as if Palm is like Maggie or Straddie or Moreton Island, a nice little holiday destination just off the coast. It is a bed of deprivation, abuse, violence, poverty and (perhaps as the cause of all this) unemployment. There are no jobs on Palm because there is no industry there. There is simply nothing to do. Is it the child's fault that he/she was born into this society? Should the child be disadvantaged by circumstance and doomed to die 20 years earlier than his mainland counterparts? When the child falls into the habits of his parents, because that is what he has been brought up to see as 'normal', is that his fault? Should we just tut tut and him and accept that this has always happened and will always happen, or should we try to give them a boost to elevate that part of our country out of the third world? I don't mean that we should throw blank cheques in their direction, but I do think that it is reasonable to spend more money 'fixing' deprived or troubled areas than we spend on maintaining the successful ones.

Now, it is true that the little kiddies could scrape together enough money and flee to the mainland if they wanted to. Some have done this. What do they do when they get here? How do they motivate themselves to come to school, to get work, to pay the bills? It's a big ask for a teenager, and especially for a teenager who is immediately identifiable as a Palm Islander and therefore judged as unreliable, uneducated and unlikely to stick around.

A. Dobrowich posted this link in a thread on aboriginal housing and i hope will not mind me quoting it here. My starting point was very different years ago when I was strongly for the autonomous self-management that has led to many of the present problems.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21816376-25717,00.html

Some responses about the housing post above:
In NSW, an aboriginal applicant receives preference for government housing. Their entitlement, in terms of size, includes an extra bedroom above their standard entitlement for household size (eg a single is entitled to up to 3 bedrooms).

On another note, I want to make a treechange to a rural area on the ranges in the south of the state. The bureaucracy won't let me go, I'm sure if I could tick any certain boxes, it would let me go.

I read this post and thought of a long rebuttal, but then I read the following quote.

"The essence of discrimination is to treat what is different the same, and same different."

I think it says it all nicely.

They used to blame the working poor for dying from cholera because of their "choices". Even though it wasn't equal to the rest of England they built sewage systems in London and surprise surprise peoples personal choices had nothing to do with it. If we listened to people like Cam we would still be living in our own faeces.

I also found it interesting that Cam chose closing the Gap to highlight his case when the NTER is actually discriminatory, hence the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act. An interesting omission.