At a minimum, all should enjoy the coverage, application and protection of Australian law.

The twisted multiculturalism that minimises the crimes of indigenous offenders on cultural grounds and tradition, for example, the gang rape of an indigenous girl, is totally unacceptable.

This was Labor Premier Bligh being forced by public disgust and anger at the treatment of victims by courts, a situation that her own party helped to create, but refusing a judicial inquiry of course. The left only sees independent inquiries as being relevant where others are concerned and then it has to be a Royal Commission.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/another-rape-to-be-investigated/2007/12/12/1197135545274.html

Multicultural policy has a lot to answer for.

Hi Joe, I'm sure you're right, but I don't think it has much to do with "getting away with it" so much as knowing that going to prison offers a way out of hopelessness for a time and that there is no genuine social sanction (within their own community, where imprisonment is a standard experience) for those who take it.

Yesterday I dropped one of my newest friends off at a detox facility. He has been in and out of rehab for 7 years. When he moved in, just 6 weeks ago, he was fresh out of a rehab program run by Fishers of Men (his fourth attempt with them), but he didn't tell me that up front. Within a week he had smashed his car and done a runner; two weeks later, having been given the car back he was carted home by the cops after being done high-range dui; three days later the cops were here again, looking for him after he smashed his car again and did another runner; a week later I got a call from the hospital where he'd been taken after being in a serious car accident with one of his mates (from rehab), who'd wrapped his car around a telegraph pole.

This guy is a really decent bloke who spends his whole life being ashamed of himself when he's not drunk or drugged on prescription medications. He's not of Aboriginal descent. All his mates are from rehab.

As you say, Mosman and Toorak are a different kettle of fish altogether.

OTB, the DV advocacy sector has some very good people within it, but it also has a bunch of unscrupulous people focussed only on the money. I'm not sure how to reconcile that. Any ideas?

Hi Craig,

God, I hope you're keeping a journal :) You could pass on some of those strange doings to your grand-kids, they'd be horrified but won't believe you. But yes, crazy and true. It's an incredibly high-coast existence, you wonder where the money comes from to buy one car, let alone a succession of them, to rapidly wrap around telegraph poles. And all without having to work for it.

Your comment that " ..... I don't think it has much to do with "getting away with it" so much as knowing that going to prison offers a way out of hopelessness for a time.... " might need some qualification: I don't think people think too far ahead like that, DV in remote 'communities' is much more spur of the moment, the immediate solution to acute anger and no thought of the consequences. Perhaps the link between action and outcome, cause and effect, is tenuous.

I'm just reading 'The Life and Adventures of William Buckley' who lived with Aboriginal groups around what is now Geelong for thirty-odd years, from 1803, i.e. long before whites had got into that area. It's something of a chronicle of battles, killings, spearings, clubbings, usually over either a woman running off with some other bloke, or being seized and taken away and eventually being killed along with her abductor and his brothers, and her original husband and his family, including young children. How on earth the population was maintained is a mystery. But there was not much powerlessness there. Buckley fostered a little blind boy who was eventually killed and, he claims, eaten.

I'm not saying that happens these days :) But I think that 'community' DV is much more likely to have its own internal dynamics, regardless of supposed outside pressures. More from 'culture' than colonialism, if you like.

Cheers,

Joe

Craig,

The law is there to protect everyone, especially a vulnerable person being assaulted, and while the perpetrator might have mitigating factors such as drugs, alcohol, or being a left whinge air head, if he assaults some one he is guilty of a criminal offense.

It is one of the foundations of the law that an adult enjoying the rights and freedoms granted by law, is directly responsible for his actions. If someone is unable or unwilling to prevent himself causing harm to others then it is the responsibility of the courts to do so.

Behind every meth head or sociopath there is a battered woman and damaged children, and a limit to the number of chances to re offend.

I have also read Buckleys memoirs Joe. Really interesting and I learnt how they organised to meet on certain days without having a maths system!
But I didn't learn anything new about violence in remote communities. As you say, violence there is beyond anything I have encountered in the white community.
Not just in intensity although that was horrific, especially the head injuries, but what shocked me the most was the total acceptance of the violence. It was taken as a normal part of life, regardless of who was watching, whether babies and children got stepped on or hit in the process, and usually involving weapons. Hitting women across the head with a hard object is one of the seemingly few unchanged cultural customs that still exist.
Yes alcohol and drugs increase the problem but don't kid yourself that it doesn't exist when the community is dry. It always exists, and always has from everything I have read and heard. One old woman told me about how, as a prepubescent girl she was knocked out and dragged away from her family by a man from another tribe. Her father and uncles eventually found the couple but seeing as she had already been raped and he was of the right skin group they allowed him to keep her after they had given him a token beating.
Had he been of the wrong skin group she would have been killed and he would have been speared through the leg.
On a positive note, the violence appears less once remote people move into town and live through a generation or so. It seems living amongst people with different attitudes to violence does eventually get through, although it still exists, just at a lower level

Hi Joe and Big Nana,
those are interesting perspectives on pre-European Aboriginal culture. It's not really surprising, there are similar cultural models in PNG, where I grew up and where the cultural background is closely related (as are the people). In cultures based around small tribal groups fertility is too important to be based on Western notions of love. Ask any European aristocrat...

Either way, it's not very useful to try to externally apportion individual blame in such situations, which are culturally and perhaps to some extent econmically driven. Big Nana, I think your comment in relation to immersion in a different culture changing social attitudes is really helpful. I don't think it's necessary to move people to towns though; that hasn't been the experience in PNG, where the best successes have come from local people taking control of local wealth and using it to promote modernisation, both economical and social.

I should correct you on one thing Joe, the person I referred to in my last post has a strong work ethic. He gave up a job after the last car accident because he was injured.

Shadow Minister, thanks for the political statement. Given that your ideas of personal responsibility have formed the basis of the past 50 years of rhetoric around DV and it's getting more prevalent, have you got anything else?