Hi PAUL1405...

You've hit the nail right on the head ! Generally speaking the police DO, DO their job and place these louts before the courts, and that's where the whole system fails, and fails miserably !

I'm speaking in general terms not crimes committed 'exclusively' by indigenous people. All levels of the judiciary are out of step with community expectations. We've discussed this specific issue ad nauseam, and still we get nowhere ? The courts are the real problem, without doubt.

Paul I appreciate your sentiments and I am glad your market day went well. My reality for the last six months is my wife threatened with rape, a taxi driver with a brick through his window outside my house and now the latest with my niece who lives in a different city. To my knowledge none of these Indigeneous people have been brought to justice. It is difficult to believe the stupidity of groups like Amnesty who claim Indigenous are over representive in prison. when obviously their crime rates are massively higher than the general population

runner is about to be assured that it is society's fault that indigenous (and other 'disadvantaged') commit crimes, especially the violence that is directed at people.

It is all in the trope, see here,

<Society Is to Blame

Man: All right, it's a fair cop, but society's to blame.
Church Policeman: Right, we'll arrest them instead.
— Monty Python's Flying Circus, "Church Police"

Basically, the old idea that people can be forced into a life of crime through extenuating circumstances. Since a person is born into a poor, violent, or non-white social milieu, we should not be surprised when such a person becomes a criminal, nor should we blame him for resorting to criminal activity; all his life, he has been operating at a disadvantage that most Acceptable Targets don't suffer from.

This trope is sort of a crossbreed between Inherent in the System and Freudian Excuse. Also known by the fancy name of "social determinism."

The Trope Codifier was the legendary American defense attorney Clarence Darrow (best known for defending John Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial), who defended a pair of young Straw Nihilist thrill killers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, by arguing that society had twisted their minds. Though everyone expected them to hang, they got off with life sentences.>
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SocietyIsToBlame

Offenders commit crimes by CHOICE and they should be held responsible for that choice.

to be continued..

continued..

The police force is there to uphold the law. That is the advice of the High Court (Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick). Police are never doing wrong but are doing what they are charged to do when they arrest an offender. Don't do the crime and don't do the time.

Taking the example of the rural poor who have always lived in and around country towns, they were always working poor who took pride in themselves and their environment. "Soap is cheap" as many a grandmother would have said and "Self discipline is a virtue".

Yet recent demographic change has seen many previously clean, tidy, law-abiding and welcoming country towns become the exact opposite - towns that travellers now avoid and the local businesses and councils are suffering as a result.

Symbolic 'reconciliation' blames, patronises and avoids responsibility. It is about lifelong tickets on the victimhood gravy train.

Hi Paul,

Yes, I suppose that figure of thirty billion includes all forms of payments to Indigenous people, explicit funding for programs, welfare payments, royalties from mining and conservation park leases, cattle and sheep agistment fees, exploration licences, and maybe many other forms of transfers.

Perhaps half, maybe more, of all Indigenous people live on wages from their own labour. Many of course are employed in those organisations which depend on government funding. So you're partly right, of course, in that much of that thirty billion, paid as payments to Indigenous organisations, is also paid out as wages for their Indigenous employees.

But many Indigenous working people never ask for, nor receive, any of that bucket of money. So, notionally, it is divvied up between perhaps two-thirds of the Indigenous population, say four hundred thousand people. This still works out to the equivalent of seventy five thousand dollars per head.

If there are any programs which actually do what they are paid to do, such as Indigenous student support programs at universities, then if I was Abbott or Morrison, I would expand them, use them as models in related areas (for example, support programs in TAFE, and in secondary and primary schools).

But if programs don't actually do anything from one year to the next, then I would close them down like a shot, and seize and sell off their assets. I would probably stop funding most international conferences and overseas travel by program employees. I would try to find a way to limit ILC funding to manifestly working projects with a relatively modest cost outlay, no more grandiose mega-projects - funding only for projects which actually employ Indigenous people at a relatively low cost-production ratio.

Once the dust settled, and the landscape was full of active, working programs geared to outcomes, instead of feather-bedding, nepotistic scams, we could move towards talking about reconciliation and recognition. i.e. reconciliation and recognition as long-term REAL outcomes, not as symbolic gestures.

Joe

Hi o sung wu

In defense of the courts, I don't think we have too many empty jails. Even though politicians talk tough on custodial sentences for various offences, when it comes to the crunch they are not willing to commit more of the budget to incarceration. The truth is for all the huff and puff there is not all that many votes in the prison question. In fact, we all want jails, but not next to our house. What does it cost to keep someone in prison these day $100k/year, that might have something to do with it as well. Someone steals a $10k car, you lock em' up for a year at a cost of $100k then they get out and steal another car. Very counter productive, its cheaper not to catch em', just make cars harder to steal, or increase insurance premiums.

As for indigenous people being over represented in the prison population, of course they are, as long as we have a prison pollution then there is an over representation of someone, black, white and brindle people. In an ideal society the ideal prison population is zero anything else is not ideal and represents an over representation. Given we are a bit short of ideal at the moment, society would be better served trying to keep people from offending in the first place, and therefore out of jail, much more productive.