Shockadelic, Australia has several big deserts, but there's a huge amount of Australia that's not desert.

Reversing desertification is difficult, but it is possible. A magic wand won't help: it requires water and a small amount of clay. Often erosion control measures are also needed.

Why do you assume northern Australia's Aboriginal population to be anti development?

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rehctub, if you want a deep recession then I suggest you keep voting for the Liberals. But before you do, please get rid of the absurd notion that it would do any good whatsoever. Recessions erode our skill base and destroy wealth.

How much do you think worsening our working conditions improves our competitiveness (in terms of US cents that the market would have to devalue our dollar by to give it an equivalent competitiveness boost)? Does your answer take into account the productivity boost from increased mechanisation that our higher wages encourage?

I strongly disapprove of taxing spending. It's far better to have free trade and tax the wages and profits than it is to impose taxes that make it harder to make a profit. And we don't gain anything good from shifting more of the tax burden onto those least able to pay it.

Australia has almost no sovereign debt, and has not taken any on for decades. We have unlimited credit in Australian dollars, so investors have a 100% chance of getting their money back. And if any ratings agency dares suggest otherwise by downgrading our rating, we should sue them for libel.

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CHERFUL,
We must stand up to those who dare criticise us when children are abused in our detention centres! How dare they verbally infringe our sovereignty! Having a PM strong enough to ignore them is far more important than human rights!

Seriously, I'm surprised anyone still thinks like that.

Aidan, *if/when* the desertification is reversed, *then* we can talk about how many more people can live there.
If, when, then.

"but there's a huge amount of Australia that's not desert."

And that's just wasted land?
It's farmland, it's natural habitats, it's difficult terrain (which is why it's not been developed in 2 centuries of modern settlement).

All the obvious development opportunities have already been done.

Why do you presume Aborigines are pro-immigration?
Because they're included in the leftist "rainbow" (whether they like it or not)?

Free trade makes great sense for countries on the same level of development or in close proximity with minimal transportation costs (e.g. within the European Union).

Not so great for Australia.

Geographically isolated, a small local market that could never compete with cheap plentiful Asian labour and one of only two highly developed nations on our side of the planet (the other, NZ, being even more isolated and smaller than us! How does free trade help them?!)

Hi Shockadelic,

Australia is the driest continent: we probably have no idea really what wet looks like. And Australia's soils often are very poor. But on the other hand, with water, they seem to be growing almost everything around Alice Springs, which might give it some reason for existing.

As for Aboriginal people's attitudes to migrants, I've rarely (if ever) heard anything positive spoken about refugees or migration or non-Indigenous minorities in other countries. And more recently, the rare comments that I've heard from Aboriginal people about refugees have been mostly along the lines of "Send all the b@stards back, we don't want them here."

Living on the mission back in the eighties, the standard term for the Greeks and Italians in the area was, of course, 'wog'. Sometimes 'dago'. Rarely 'Italian' or 'Greek'. Even now, come to think of it.

During the coups in Fiji in 1987 or so, the only comments I heard from Aboriginal people were incredibly racist ones in support of the Fijian reactionaries, not one comment in support of the democratic rights of the Indian minority (and yes, it WAS in the minority in 1987, and had been since about 1970: now Indians make up barely a quarter of Fiji's population).

Are the relations between Indigenous groups and migrant groups healthy and mutually supportive, such as with Samoans and Tongans in Brisbane, Indonesians in Perth, Sudanese in Darwin, and as in earlier times, Italians and Greeks around the country ? Do migrants and refugees get harassed anywhere by Indigenous people, especially the more visible they are, such as Africans ?

If you are there, dear reader, you would know much more than the rest of us.

Joe

Having worked amongst several Aboriginal groups over several years, I would have to agree with you Loudmouth. They are without a doubt some of the most racist people I have ever met!
I remember thinking on many occasions that they seemed to dislike other races even more than the ones of European origin.

Several years ago, I had to take one couple to hospital, after the husband broke all his wife's fingers, and when the doctor came out to call her in for assessment she yelled out loudly that she wasn't having no Chinese bloke touch her!
I just wanted to hide under my chair, I was so embarrassed.

This was just one of many such occasions. Possibly though, I think they seemed to hate members of rival Aboriginal families more than anyone else anyway.
I often wanted to ask why they didn't even consider the fact that many of them obviously had European ancestry, so why did they not embrace that side of their history as well?
I was too chicken to ask though....

Ahh yes Suzie, it was that question that got Andrew Bolt into such
a lot of trouble, that he confused grandfather with great grandfather
was becide the point for the politically correct.

Hi Suse,

Sounds like that bloke didn't even like his wife much either :)

I worked on three Royal Commission transcripts concerning the Native Police in Queensland, around 1860. It had white officers, but roughly six to one were Aboriginal police. They seemed to be recruited from that region around the lower Darling, Murray and Murrumbidgee, and some from the Barwon and Namoi.

Somebody proposed to me recently that traditionally, Aboriginal people were actually quite anarchistic, each person for themselves. I'm still thinking that through, and also the nature of herding cats.

Certainly, in almost all the reports etc. that I've been transcribing and indexing, there are plenty of references of people just taking off, pleasing themselves, coming and going, men selling their women for grog and tobacco at the drop of a hat, women casually neglecting their young children and old women.

But it reminds me of a saying in some other part of the world:

* Our country against the world;

* Our region against every other region in the country;

* Our tribe against every other tribe in our region;

* Our clan against every other clan in the tribe;

* Our family against every other family in the clan;

* My siblings against our father;

* Younger siblings against the eldest siblings;

* Me against all of them.

In such circumstances, friendships are temporary alliances; marriages are very much for keeping the peace between families or clans; the assumed knowledge, and the power to brutally harm, held by the elders, is about all there is to keep people in line.

But they do have such lovely, quaint art, don't they ?

Joe