I was not ignoring you.
sonofgloin,
Thank you.
.but they still look like third world towns......why?
That is due to the fact that those with the authority to put their foot down don't. Unscrupulous indigenous leaders exploit this lack of gonads & the above is the result.
A non-military National Service would sort this.

Those indigenous leaders feather their own nests and the rest of Australia pays SSS for it.
Right is Right,
That's because these indigenous leaders were shown by white Australian Labor bureaucrats how to do it. They were taught by the experts.

"Indigenous 'nation' " ?!

There would have been tens of thousands of land-holding groups across Australia, often at war with each other. Will this silly initiative degenerate into endless feuds between groups arguing over boundaries of 'their' 'nation' ?

Not to mention the simple fact that every Indigenous person is, by definition, related to many land-holding groups, i.e. 'nations', so each person would have to spend god-knows-how-long trying to trace - in the 'proper' way - which is their primary group, and which are the secondary groups. And then work out where their primary group's land-holding is supposed to be. And then go there, to live on their land with their 'own' people ?!

And what ? all this leads to a recognition of sovereignty ? Meaning what in substance ? Or is it all just some sort of symbolic stick up the white fellas' @rses ?

Meanwhile, everybody would have to deny any non-Indigenous ancestry in order to present 'pure' links to land.

Who dreams these things up ?

Joe

Watch out Joe saying this;
Meanwhile, everybody would have to deny any non-Indigenous ancestry in order to present 'pure' links to land.

Could end you up in court.
No freedom of speech in Australia.

The notion of one Aboriginal nation is not new - a bunch of conservative whites, under a retired Adelaide accountant named Colonel Genders, floated the idea of a 'full-blood' nation somewhere in the Northern Territory, back in the 1920s. Supposedly, all full-bloods were to be moved there. [I apologise for using the term, but that's how it was phrased.]

David Unaipon (the bloke on the $ 50 note) was the poster-boy for this movement and pretty clearly he saw himself as the President of this independent 'nation'. He was paid to travel around southern communities to gather support, but they unanimously told him to shove it.

To my shame, I had a similar idea in the early seventies, until a very wise person asked me, "But who would leave their own country to go there ? And whose land would they be trespassing on ?" I was a lot younger and even stupider then, but those questions did it for me. Not to mention the necessary compulsion of hundreds of thousands of people all over the country to bring it about. And the idiocy of requiring mixed-marriage couple to either all pack up and go there, or to split up. An utterly idiotic idea then, and far more so now.

But it would create a multitude of new permanent jobs, committees and international conference attendances, for yet another bunch of rent-seekers.

There are real problems facing Indigenous people. It would be more constructive if some of these rent-seekers turned their attention to those and actually did something useful. But that's hardly likely.

Joe

The anonymous Vision for Australia wrote of "a nation within a nation. Sovereign to a point......"

Interesting how some people's minds work: (1) 'brilliant' idea; then (2) zip. Not the slightest grasp of what might follow.

Perhaps, to be fair, the writer lives in a convent on a remote Scottish island and has just read a schoolbook mentioning Australian Aboriginal people. In her mind, all Aboriginal people live, not dispersed across the whole of Australia and mostly urban-based, but all in one location, hundreds of miles from any contamination, all gaily enjoying their entire range of cultural practices intact; and that they have all had more or less the self-same solidary experience, not a multitude of experiences - as they actually have cone for fifty thousand years.

And "sovereign to a point" ? A bit like being "pregnant to a point" ? Or "dead to a point" ? Sovereignty to a point, how would that work ?

For fifty thousand years or more, intelligent people populated this continent, cut off from the rest of the buzzing world, and in its good times and its dreadfully bad times, in which perhaps half the population in drought-stricken regions died, the very young, the old, and anybody who couldn't keep up. This paper

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/10/10/1215627109.full.pdf

gives a thorough analysis of life expectancy in various types of societies, including hunter-gatherer societies, and early- and late-industrial societies. Fascinating, once you get your head around it.

The idiocy of the claim of becoming "once again one of the greatest nations on earth" just has me shaking my head in wonder: how could anybody be so ignorant ?

But I don't suppose that's ever stopped anyone :)

Joe