Jim,

You're right - the great majority of the twenty six thousand Indigenous university graduates don't need any particular help from any government agency, they're doing fine on their own: they've seized the opportunities available, which the state legitimately provides, and have reached the point where they don't need its services any more than anyone else.

Another four thousand Indigenous people commenced award-level university studies in 2010. That makes a total of more than sixty thousand since 1990. Opportunities are there, people only have to have the courage and determination - the self-determination - to seize them. The role of the state is to enable such people to progress through their studies to graduation, by funding active student support services adequately.

By 2020, there could easily be fifty thousand Indigenous university graduates and another fifteen thousand students. The people themselves are doing away with the need for a nanny state by doing what they can to become self-determining. Self-determination and dependence contradict each other, you can't have one with the other. So the quicker people take up opportunities, in work or in study (TAFE or university) and then work, the sooner the nanny state becomes an unnecessary involvement in their lives.

Joe

Individual , stop moaning about Aboriginals and face up to facts that we have excluded them from the best we enjoy on purpose, for a couple of hundred years .
Major Mitchell thought the smartest man in his large Southern Exploration Party was Piper - it's been to our Detriment we haven't used their talent - we have content sucking the Riches out of their Land and housing them up near the Tip.
Some very Selfish Attitudes about .

But, Jim, they don't have to stop up there. As it happens, my wife was raised in a tin hut in a small SA country town, up between the tip and the cemetery. No water, no electricity, no sewerage. But she never, never let it get to here, to think of herself as a victim (even in her school photos, there was always this bright beaming smile), and from an unpaid servant on a sheep station, she finished her career as a senior lecturer, and head of SA's Indigenous Education Consultative Group.

The state has responsibilities to ENABLE people, particularly those in hard circumstances, but not primarily to PROTECT them. If people actually are in hard circumstances, then the obligation of the state is to provide pathways for them to get the hell out of their situation and join the rest of the world. Nobody has to be a victim, and nobody is as long as there are pathways out.

Joe

Jim, I can't see that it is our responsibility to put too much effort into trying to get those who just don't want to learn, to start learning.

I saw some of the young boys my son was friends with to whom it was a badge of honor to do badly in school. It did worry me for a while, that it might rub off onto him. You would be wasting your time trying to change their attitude. The only thing that would achieve is a pay cheque for some humanities graduate, & no result.

What I do see is a mistaken way in doing things after school. I could not believe what I saw in New Guinea. To use a back hoe to dig a deep trench past a squatters village, with a hundred able bodied men, who would have been happy to do it was stupid.

It is just as bad to use a $400,000 street sweeping machine to do a bad job, when 4 illiterate men could do it better & cheaper. Would not this be better than paying them dole to do nothing?

I knew a bloke in Bundaberg who had been a wharfy. In his youth he had been in a gang of over 75 loading sugar in bags onto freighters down at the port. Now they have a you-beaut $100 million conveyor system that does it quicker, but perhaps not more cheaply, & lots of kids on the dole.

There may not be high tech jobs for those kids, but they could probably lump a bag of sugar.

Thanks Hasbeen did not know and am grateful mate, keep you informed.
Loudmouth Joe and Jim.
Both you know about this my view may be different.
See I know of the achievements, in 1960 sat on a bus in Blacktown every morning[brief stay in Sydney] with a father son daughter on their way to uni, they became mentors to me, they Aboriginals,went very far.
My life has me looking after the failures, and often thinking they fail because we, while maybe not wanting it, help them fail.
It is them I want to see nanny state help.
Shyness,fear, isolation, all stop some progressing.
Sorry but at the very least I want us to do what ever it takes, for ALL KIDS to get an education and opportunity to work.
I see as separate silly nanny state laws , but value ones that prop up and guide those who need it.
For this reason I firmly think we should have fences both safety and guides.

Got to get To them Early Hasbeen.
Lumping Bull forquarters was a bit of fun for a while !!
Agree with you Belly - Some definitely need help - getting them and their Parents to Accept it ,change the mindset can be Hard , cheers Jimmy .