I have always thought it was very stupid to borrow money and then
give it away as aid !
Even more stupid, I understand some time back some aid went to China.
Does it still go there ?

Some of our borrowings come from China. ummmm errr are we THAT stupid ?

Oh, all sorts of people get to snoop on our phone and internet activity.
I'll bet you never thought Bankstown Council and the RSPCA would get
access to the megadata held by your ISP ?

Hi Yuyutsu,

20 % of all Australian land, and " the worst and most arid" ? By no means "all" of it. Yes, a lot of it, but we're talking about one and a half million square kilometres, 150 million hectares, and a hell of a lot of that 150,000,000 is beautiful country, it can grow anything.

Plus, a lot of it on artesian basins, so that land could be irrigated.

But all of that needs one secret ingredient: effort. But why put effort in if you can get the equivalent of the average national wage by doing nothing at all ? People aren't silly.

Of course, there's the fundamental problem: foraging societies throughout history have very rarely taken up agriculture: even in Europe, it seems, where agriculture took the best part of six or seven thousand years to spread from the Middle East to the corners of Britain - and longer in Scandinavia -it's possible (from DNA studies)that the IDEA of agriculture didn't spread, or diffuse, but agriculturalists did, colonising coasts and fertile valleys, and displacing or absorbing local foragers through inter-marriage.

In effect, what has happened in Australia

[TBC]

[continued]

In effect, what has happened in Australia is that an agricultural-industrial society came up against a foraging society, one with very different notions of the world and how to live in it. And, in some parts of the country, before any notion of transition from one to another could become strongly fixed, generous welfare systems were put in place. So, from one point of view, why work ? Why put effort into anything ? If anything, 'community consultation' simply means that people are encouraged to ask for more an more.

And they've got it. Go into a remote community and observe, and you will notice services provided that no non-Aboriginal community would dream of.

My late wife's community controls 12,000 acres, 5,000 hectares, of mostly good land, relatively free from droughts, often with very deep soils; it used to have an unlimited water licence; CDEP funded most labour costs; and as Big Nana pointed out, no rates are paid on Aboriginal land. I used to make her wild by suggesting that a thousand Vietnamese would have the entire place under production in a year. Her late brother worked his arse off to build up the new dairy and farm, but an accident stopped that effort and the dairy was closed: low milk prices, they said. Nowadays it runs a few hundred head of beef cattle.

If only 10 % of all Aboriginal land was worked as it could be, that would be more than all the land in many European countries. So what's missing ?

Cheers,

Joe