Loudmouth
I beg to differ. Over five billion dollars in Hecs (now Help) loans are outstanding and will never be recovered. They are interest free and only repayable when a certain level of income is reached. The problem is that like Ian Thorpe most professional have tax schemes in place like family trusts that maintain their income below the recovery level or the never reach them.
It cost my Grandmother $120,000 for my sisters degree in OT and $100,000 for mine in Commerce/Law. The was no Hecs then and I personally believe that only those who can afford higher education should have it. They seem to appreciate it more than the free loaders who seek to destroy the society that supports them.
As far as Noel Pearson is concerned I can assure you he is just as much a social parasite and any other of his culture.
I had the misfortune to actually write the protocols for a program called the "The Peninsular Partnership" only to have him pass the implementation over to his brother Gerhardt who called it Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation and ignored me the author.
The Pearson's are nothing more than white trained white haters
basking in the limelight of white mans sophistication.

Joe,
If you discount cultural factors then what do you see as the cause of the difference in aboriginal health and age of deaths.

Do you think that aboriginals living in urban areas continue to require special benefits simply because they are aboriginal. Then what about the non-aboriginals that live in remote areas. Should they get special benefits as do aboriginals in the same areas.

we all saw the NT report of 'little children are angels' and was horrorfied. There were also disclosures by the crown prosecutor at Alice Springs and cases like this in the link below. Regularly we see TV reports and footage of drunken behaviour and communities that look like garbage dumps and kids with all sorts of infections and not going to school.

All the above must have an impact on health and life expectancy.

Why is it that many aboriginals do not seem able to integrate into our society?

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/official-heads-in-the-sand-over-depravity-and-dysfunction/story-fni0cwl5-1226699499138

Hi Banjo,

If you think of any population as differentiated by class and by aspirations, then the Aboriginal population is not all that different from any other - perhaps a higher proportion who want to stay on welfare and away from opportunity and work, hence a higher proportion of Aboriginal people living in rural and remote areas, from which the more enterprising have got up and gone a long time ago.

But we may have reached a stage when, yes, Aboriginal people in the cities don't need any more benefits than anybody else gets. This may have occurred, not through any deliberate government policy (which very rarely happens), but simply through sheer social change over the past two or three generations since the War, mainly through the social changes of moving to the cities, accessing far better educational and work opportunities, mixing with other working people, and building self-reliance generation by generation.

Hence, a massive increase in the number of Aboriginal kids finishing Year 12 since about 1999-2000. Hence a massive (50 %) increase in enrolments in degree-level courses at unis in the past six years.

Many Aboriginal people, in rural and remote areas, have missed the boat. Many owe that circumstance to their own choices, to avoid study, to avoid work. They made choices. In my view, they chose wrong and they and their kids are paying for it. They frittered away a vast range of opportunities, in community self-management, in developing an economic base, in corrupting program after program, like CDEP. They could have been on a pig's back, but no, that's all buggered now.

Now they will have to put up with the consequences of their own choices, in very different condition, over the next ten an twenty years. Pity the children.

Meanwhile, in the cities, another population is rapidly moving ahead.

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Banjo, when Indigenous Australians are born and live as long as other Australians, and have the same employment opportunities, and the same living standards as other Australians...then we can can start treating them the same as other Australians

As it is now...they aren't the same, are they?.

Suseonline, what a pointless "contribution".
Have you even read the thread so far?

Having "the same" opportunities and facilities available doesn't mean you'll ever get statistically equal outcomes.

This is a commonly used red herring of the Left (e.g. comparing average annual incomes of men and women, ignoring the differences in industries, hours, etc.)

"Whitey" is not making Aborigines live in remote areas, take drugs, drink a carton every day, bash their wives, commit crimes at a higher rate then the general community, etc.

Nobody is imposing this, these are choices Aborigines are making.
No amount of money will stop this.
Money can't buy self-respect.

People like you simply perpetuate the notion that it's all Whitey's fault and therefore Whitey's responsibility to fix everything.
That attitude won't solve anything.
They have to fix their own lives.

Susie,
If 75% of people with aboriginal heritage live in urban areas, they have the same opportunities as any other people and therefore do not require any special assistance. Accordingly their health and life expectancy would be the same as the general population.

I take heart from Joes info that more and more aboriginals are becoming better educated and thus into better paid jobs. That is good.

So what about the other 25% that live in rural and remote areas.

Doctors, nurses and teachers must despair when they work in the remote communities, and I have no doubt they do the best they can.

This is the group we need to focus on. It has to be that efforts are put into where the most need is and not approach it from the point of view of 'race'.