Loudmouth (Joe), "I suppose that's why I'm on and on about the successes of Indigenous people at universities - forty thousand graduates, god that's an army!"

It is. It is not something that has ever been publicised on the 'fact finding' (LOL) ABC and SBS though. Yes, one would believe that it should be trumpeted with pride and optimism. Good news and facts are NOT welcome in the victim industry. There are too many middle class careers, indigenous too, depending on it.

There are risks in uniting people in victimhood and making them a society within a society. Continually repeating (and often inventing) a litany of wrongs and hurts against forebears builds resentments in the young. Worse, it builds an exasperation that no-one is ever listening and there is no possible way of influencing politics.

That is what drove the Hilton Hotel bomber, Evan Pederick, a sane intelligent young man from a comfortable background, who had a permanent job as a public servant and was a union delegate (or higher).

To take another example, Islam relies heavily on alleged discrimination to rationalise its demands, intransigence and violence.

The pressing need in Australia and the West generally is to define and promote a challenging, adventurous and meaningful life for youth that is a sexier alternative to the very negative self-defeating and sometimes downright rotten alternatives that are constantly being given so much airtime, even being promoted, in the media and by cynical SOBs with their own secondary gain in mind.

For starters, if only the taxpayer-funded national broadcaster could bring itself to consider what is good for Australia.

The Indigenous flags deliberately exclude not include and therein lies the root of the problem and is intended to maintain the future earning potential for all of those fleas on fleas on fleas that swing from the guvvy teat.

I am not for anything that promotes separateness of any group within Australia and very concerned where the intent is to cement and reinforce perpetual victimhood.

Hi OTB,

Yes, I'm certainly not interested in 'unity' around phony issues - that way lies disaster, in the long run.

I hope that as many graduates as possible can find employment in the mainstream, not in separate units or organisations, since their ethos are often frankly corrupt, in which people occupy positions which don't actually involve work. It seems, for example, that in many university academic environments, Indigenous staff (and non-Indigenous as well) spend a huge amount of time 'working at home'. For example, staff in student support units 'working at home'. How is that ? Or 'research', which never seems to get anywhere. And then there are all those conferences and overseas trips, doing incredibly important work. My wife estimated once that, at any time, around 1 % of the entire Indigenous adult population was overseas at conferences. And with absolutely nothing to show for it.

So I would very strongly advise any Indigenous graduates to have nothing to do with Indigenous units or organisations until they lift their game - which leaves the graduates with a very tough row to hoe, and nobody going into bat for them (to mix metaphors), and constant pressure on them to be shunted into Indigenous units throughout their careers. Hence see above. Very corrupting.

And so we get back to deep racism.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi again OTB,

But I would respectfully disagree with you over the importance of the Aboriginal Flag: provided unity is based on truth and integrity (a very big IF, admittedly), then I'm happy about stronger unity and cohesion amongst Indigenous people, and I've always thought that the Flag represented that sort of unity. I think it's a beautiful Flag.

God knows there are enough forces around to fragment the Indigenous population and, of course, many of them have been around for sixty thousand years. Paradoxically, colonial state administrations both cemented that fragmentation AND enabled people to move around far more than they ever had.

In the Protector's Letters here in SA, he complains about Queensland people coming over the border during droughts for rations, which weren't available in Queensland, and staying for some years. He doesn't mind feeding them but asks for some subsidy from the Queensland Chief Protector.

At the missions, from the earliest times until much later, people came and went as they pleased, and inevitably many people might hook up with a local and stay on a mission or settlement, who came from somewhere else far away: there are people in SA now with some Mission/Settlement connections who would be unaware that their ancestors came from Albany, or Townsville, or Broken Hill way, or Alice Springs or western Victoria, back in the late nineteenth century.

But fragmentation is the norm in Indigenous society, and enormous efforts are going to have to be made to overcome them - there is certainly no cause for smugness amongst the 'leaders'. The Gap between the two Indigenous populations, one oriented to work, the other to welfare, is growing - and rapidly. Since it's not the job of the working population to stop and 'go back', then it's the job of the welfare-population to get off its collective behind and do the moving. And the job of courageous 'leaders' to tell them so.

Joe