On of the greatest benefits that Aboriginal people, particularly those of north Queensland, have got from European settlement is that the Torres Strait Islanders no longer consider them vermin to be killed on sight.
The Aboriginals had no answer to the superior technology of the Torres Strait people.

I assume that you have your tongue firmly in your cheek, ConservativeHippie.

>>Pericles - Against the Bill of Rights? Paranoid such would favour the rights of one group over another? Have you read the American Bill of Rights? I cannot fathom how anyone could be against having a bill of rights based loosely on the USA example.<<

Exactly. A bagful of weasel words, covered in the grease-laden chip-wrapper of lawyers' briefs.

G'day Bruce,

You're onto something there. Perhaps, before they begin their starry-eyed work with Indigenous organisations, city-based professionals should be required to spend a few days in an Indigenous community. Say, from Pay-day Thursday until the next Monday, over a standard weekend. What larks !

Jay,

"Personally I'd rather see a bill of rights added to the constitution explicitly recognising the rights of all ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups."

Would you care to re-think that ? Did you mean "standard human rights such as equal protection under the rule of law, with no discrimination in favour of anybody on ethnic or gender grounds" ?

'Rights of groups' ? Or 'no discrimination on ethnic, cultural or linguistic grounds, on the basis of the rule of law and equality of all before the law' ?

As Pericles notes, a bill of rights would be a lawyer's banquet.

Joe
www.firstsources.info

No Joe, just live on Jingili Terrace, or within 2 kilometres of the Zoo (NT Housing units in Parap) or within Coo-ee of any take-away alcohol shop in Darwin or Palmerston for say 2 months...then see how attitudes can change.

These 'aberrant originals' give decent Aboriginals a bad name. Most are in the cities and townships because of anti social behaviour in their own communities, and carry on in the same manner as before, but with more frequent access to grog...compounding the existing health problems such as renal disease, diabetes, mental illness etc brought on by long term diets of MCDonalds/Red Rooster/KFC, cans of tuna & One Minute Noodles going hand in hand with insufficient daily water intakes. (Read: Poor nutrition).

The former Administrator of the NT, Ted Egan had a wonderful plan which departed radically from the paternalistic model that seems to prevail amongst many academics and their political sponsors. The Bleeding Hearts won over yet again because it was "...not in tune with..." - the indigenous industry that bleeds its own people white.

If main stream academia, its politically charged arms, and the insidious basket weaving do gooder parasites who siphon off good money actually spent some time living in a community or "Long Grassing". Therefore not experiencing community living via an LCD screen in Redfern, they may actually see the nuts & bolts of what has to be done to address the Third World conditions in which some of our indigenous cousins exist.

There are some however who would not benefit if the entire GDP was directed to fund them, in other words a 'lost cause'.

Hi Albie,

Yeah, I recall an Aboriginal academic friend whose many brothers and sisters were what you might call, politely, tear-aways - he visited one on the Sunday after pay-day and looked in the fridge (a legitimate investigative technique); inside was a bottle of water and an old carrot.

Is bad health 'done to' Aboriginal people in those circumstances, or do they have the agency, the will, to do it to themselves ? How many Aboriginal people does it take to improve Aboriginal health ? It depends on whether Aboriginal people want to improve Aboriginal health. People surely have a rough idea of what is good food and what isn't, about how much damage grog and drugs can do, even on whether or not one should spend one's cash on card-games or on food for one's kids (boy, that's a hard one), or food for oneself (more likely).

Self-determination means, I have always assumed, that Aboriginal people deal with their own problems, instead of dependence, relying on an army of do-gooders to take up the slack. And 'slack' would be the operative word.

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Joe, "Is bad health 'done to' Aboriginal people in those circumstances, or do they have the agency, the will, to do it to themselves?"

Such simple cheap initiatives as WHO's soap hand-washing campaign, if directed at young indigenous women and mothers could prevent many serious health problems. It is not that indigenous women do not use soap, eg for clothes washing, but it is not always a routine to wash their hands after changing their infant, before making meals and after washing clothes too for that matter (plenty of faecal matter encountered in that activity, a fact that the general population are unaware of as well).

Of course there is no taxpayers' $$ for social science and law professionals in the WHO campaign and improvements to health could affect planned-for eternal obligation and entitlement. Hmmm, perhaps that WHO program that has been conducted most successfully for indigenous in developing countries is a very bad idea after all.(sic)