Hmmm, what will be the situation in a thousand years when there are
no obvious aboriginal people still around ?
Will government forms still carry the
"Are you of Aboriginal or Torres Strait origin ?"

Will the proposed clause in the constitution be still there ?
Looked at in that light the welfare programs seem ludicrous.

Hi Bazz,

While welfare-oriented Aboriginal people have a genius for turning promising programs, like CDEP, into yet more no-work welfare programs, I have very strong concerns that your 1000-year scenario won't occur.

Concerns ? Yes, I suspect that there is a rapidly growing existential rift between work- and welfare-oriented Aboriginal people, manifested to a large extent spatially - a rift between remote, rural and outer-suburban populations (with exceptions) and working populations, focussing on their different interpretations on 'opportunity' - one population seeing 'opportunities' for more welfare security, the other seeing opportunities as the pathways to better education and work, usually in the larger towns and cities.

I suspect that the welfare-oriented population is driving itself further and further down the road to self-destruction (that 'self-determination' and even 'community' are frauds) while the growing working population avoids welfare agencies and just gets on with business, socialising and inter-marrying with work colleagues and raising the fourth or fifth generation now in urban environments.

Maybe I'm being alarmist, but I fear that the scourges of grog, FAS, drugs (particularly ice), and a coming Zika epidemic will do great damage to the welfare-oriented population, particularly in northern remote settlements. They may increase the mortality rates (as we'll see in the Census), and will leave behind very damaged individuals who will be completely incapable of ever making their own way in the world. If this is so, then the welfare-oriented population not only will never lift its game but instead, is, one way or another, heading for extinction.

I hope fervently that I'm wrong.

Joe