Recognition Australia has reported the “quiet abandonment” of their Recognition campaign. They were also quiet about the $30 million we have been charged for their shenanigans since 2012, when Julia Gillard put a bunch of 'experts' aboard the gravy train.

Duterte justified reducing the Phillipines Government funding of their human rights commission to $20 thus:

He told local television that the commission deserved the small budget for being "useless" and defending criminals' rights. 

Unfortunately it is all too easy to waste other peoples money when one is not accountable, and there in lies the problem.

How many more tax payers dollars are we going to flush down the toilet on this very small portion of the community.

Even though anybody could see that it wasn't really a goer, Aboriginal elites have been flogging the virtues of separatism and segregation for decades. The tragedy is that they haven't put much time into a Plan B. So they'll keep knocking up against common-sense and the real world, like one of those little automatic vacuum cleaners bumping up against a corner.

Plan B ? Clearly we're all here, in Australia, for the foreseeable future. Nobody's going anywhere. Few if any Aboriginal people are leaving the cities to live in remote 'communities' - surely one of the prerequisites for any serious push for a separate State, or a separate country ? Nobody wants to. Urban people, the great majority of Aboriginal people, want to stay urban, as is their right. Come to think of it, almost no Aboriginal people have ever given up living as Australians, with all their rights, and gone back to a traditional life, not unless Toyotas were supplied and maintained.

So is it possible to start the long process of genuine Reconciliation, based on both our permanent co-habitation, and the whole truth about our past, the good and the bad ?

At the last Census, nearly forty nine thousand Indigenous university graduates were counted. [So by the end of this year, make that 56,000, one in every six or seven adults]. More than 40 % of Indigenous households were either owned or being purchased. Year 12 completions are up ten times in the last twenty years. Overwhelmingly, by the way, these are urban achievements. Aboriginal people are an urban people. They are not to be compassionately pitied, but to be wholeheartedly admired.

The tragedy is that Aboriginal elites and 'leadership' seem to have no idea what to do. I don't think they even understand the current situation, arrogant as that may sound. So sheer social change will make all the difference, not any particular policy, nor any Grand Scheme by some charismatic 'leader'. So it's all: start from scratch.

Joe

Hi Joe,

In a former life I met a few Aboriginal students in secondary colleges in the NT. They were young men and women who had passed Year 10 and were preparing for and/or had just finished their final two years in high school, with a lot of extra help (live-in colleges, tutors, etc.).

But what struck me was their intelligence. These were really impressive kids.

A few years later, one of the senior bureaucrats in the NT education system received an OBE (I think it was) for his decades of service, particularly to Aboriginal education. He was a good man. I called to congratulate him and in the conversation which followed, I was not surprised to hear him say that after all those years he really had no idea how to ensure that the NT education system succeeded in looking after Aboriginal students.

In the big cities it's different, because, as you say, they are urban people and adaptable. But students in the NT (and probably remote parts of NSW, Qld, WA and SA) end up caught between two worlds: the one they have been educated to work in and the world from which they have come, where their people no longer see them in the same light as before. In some cases, the end is personal tragedy.

It's a long road since Perkins freedom ride of the sixties. A long road since the abysmal blacks camps, on the edge of most country towns, where the the most beautiful edifice was a red public phone box . Replaced now with domestic buildings resembling respectable housing.
Traditional walking tracks across farmlands between towns, now redundant to personal vehicle transport.
These conditions were repulsive to whites, and reinforced prejudice towards blacks.

In the midst of this social transformation , came the period of the stolen children. The crude attempt by whites to force the issue of tribal reform.

I've lived through much of this, and I'm happy for you Joe. Your a man with a heart!

Hi Diver Dan,

There's been only one case of 'stolen' which has been proven. Every person taken into care, for whatever reason, would have a file, so that they can find that from their State Archives, it's not difficult, and take it to court.

Yeah, I've been trying to understand the Indigenous situation and response for a very long time, and around thirty or more years ago, I got interested in what they call patron-client systems. There's s lot about it on Google Scholar.

Recently, I've gone back and looked at the theories about rentier states, rentier economies, rentier societies. They make a lot of sense in the context of Aboriginal issues.

Still working on it.

Joe

I don't know why they wanted Special Recognition. The Constitution recognizes all Australians & that includes, as of 1967, Aboriginals. So there is no need for Special Recognition.

Jayb, its all a diversion to take focus away from the real truth, that being that no matter how many billions we pour into this sector, little to no real progress will be made.

Its a case of the old saying, 'you can lead a horse to water, but you can not make it drink'. But hey, Rudd in all his wisdom apologised so all will be right now, right, pull the other one. Forever the victim.

Thanks Panditji, I'll bear that in mind if I'm ever in Ludhiana.

Speaking of 'Recognition', there are now Indigenous members of parliament in WA, SA, NT, Qld, and Victoria - and, of course, in the national parliament.

There are government ministers who are Indigenous in WA (Treasurer), SA, Qld, Victoria and in the national parliament.

Indigenous members of parliament are spread across the Lib-Nat coalition, the Labor Party and the Greens.

Clearly each of those parliamentarians has a 'Voice', in most states and all three major political parties. How much more 'Recognition' does there need to be before one can say that a situation of equity or parity has been reached ?

Joe

//Astrologer in ludhiana//

Can't be much of an astrologer then... with Leo ascendant in Uranus and the approaching conjunction of Ursa Major and Virgo, any fool can tell that now is a really bad time to be advertising services based in India to Australians.