Government policy now recognizes and celebrates our cultural diversity. It accepts and respects the right of all Australians to express and share their individual cultural heritage within an overriding commitment to Australia and the basic structures and values of Australian democracy. It makes our administrative, social and <a href="https://personalmoneynetwork.com/">economic</a> infrastructure more responsive to the rights, obligations and needs of our culturally diverse population, promote social harmony in our society and optimize the economic and social benefits of our cultural diversity for all Australians.

Thank you, Marth,

But with respect, what you write sounds like it's looking down at Australia from a very great height, an eagle's view if you like, while the real, day-to-day work goes on, on the ground.

Generation One and Twiggy Forrest's projects identify what companies can commit jobs and earmark them for Indigenous people, AND then identify Indigenous people to take up those jobs, or to do the specific training to do those jobs, and then take them up. At any time, close to fifteen thousand Indigenous people are now at Universities - perhaps 120,000 have been to university at some time. 33,000 have graduated. Yes, things are moving.

Come down to Earth - it's much more exciting than way up there :)

Cheers,

Joe

You keep referring to these people as indigenous. I fear you mean Australians with a percentage of indigenous blood in their veins which greatly improves their capacity to absorb and retain information, an asset well directed at higher education.
Please do not call them indigenous the4y are generational aborigines reaping the benefits of a white society guilt complex.
This e4ducation will come back to bite us in the bum mark my words.

Hi Chris,

The older I get, the less I understand what people are trying to say. So I don't get what you are writing.

I don't think anybody, any group, has any particular ability to 'absorb and retain information', any more than any other group. And certainly not material in contemporary higher education. Neither has any group any lesser ability, I hasten to add.

I don't know what you mean by 'generational aborigines', but certainly there is a lot of trading on supposed white guilt. I've been working on old letters and documents from the nineteenth century, and it it pretty clear, for example that people weren't 'herded onto missions', at least in South Australia, and maybe everywhere else too: my position is that unless something can be shown to have happened, it didn't happen. If it did, prove it.

Today, I was just reading about one bloke expelled from one mission and another who desperately wanted to find work and accommodation on another mission, and a couple wanting to move from one mission to another. All from about 1872.

I don't think that people were 'driven from their lands', at least not in South Australia. Able-bodied people were expected to 'occupy and enjoy', to make use of their lands, to live off the 'natural foods' of their country as they had done for fifty thousand years, and for this purpose were given boas, fishing gear and guns.

I don't think that 'countless thousands of children were taken from their parents', at least not in South Australia. There's really not the slightest evidence of this.

I'm not convinced that Aboriginal people were paid less, taking rations for old people and families into account - at least, not in south Australia.

I'm not convinced any more that many massacres occurred, at least not in South Australia. Apart from some Aboriginal massacres of whites, on the Coorong and around Port Lincoln.

[TBC]

[congtinued]

One crime that I think was committed against Aboriginal people was, from about 1908, to dumb down the education system, so that nobody could finish primary schooling and go on to secondary and higher education until the fifties and beyond - at least, on South Australia. Ghat would have condemned people to remain in rural employment, on lousy pay, and cut out - and their children - from better sorts of employment, and from working in the cities. It would have led to relatively higher levels of economic destitution -and hence children being taken into care - and far less employment opportunities for women. Hence the long struggle, two or three generations, to get back into the game.

And yes, to come back to the present, I would assert that many non-Aboriginal people have pushed themselves forward and claimed many of the benefits earmarked for Aboriginal people. But that's white fellas for you. Is that what you are getting at ?

Cheers,

Joe

Marth "Government policy now recognizes and celebrates our cultural diversity. It accepts and respects the right of all Australians to express and share their individual cultural heritage"

Australians already had the right to express themselves and live any way they want within the law.

It's called "liberty", a fundamental concept within the modern Western world.
No need for special policies.

The government should be defending our liberty, not impinging on it with ridiculous laws like anti-discrimination/vilification.

Citizens should be free to associate or *not* associate with other people as each sees fit, and should be able to express negative/critical opinions about anyone.