Joe,

Your analogy of some bloke who's wondered in off the street
to advise a brain surgeon? You never know who you're
really dealing with in life. Best to think twice before
making these analogies. I know of quite a few cases,
growing up in the suburbs of Western Sydney where my
taxi-drivers were surgeons in their own countries
and where experienced surgeons were only allowed jobs
as hospital cleaners because their qualifications and
experience was not recognised in this country. Time of
"White Nation," and all that!

Foxy, first of all, there are no aboriginal nations, that’s just a modern catch cry the activists use. For the people actually living in the bush the term is tribes. When a traditional aboriginal person meets another, unknown aboriginal person, they don’t ask what nation the belong to. They ask what country they belong to. When that is established they starting trying to work out if they are related somehow, even to the 100th degree of separation. Another word used is “ countryman” which refers to all aboriginal people, not just one tribe or family.
As for the system failing so we should try something new, well, the most obvious solution is the easiest and that has never been tried so you can’t say it has failed. And I’m talking here about treating aboriginal people exactly the same as non aboriginal people. My aboriginal late husband was most adamant about this, it was his constant cry.
No special aboriginal health centre, no special aboriginal schools hospitals. No special hostels. He believed, and rightly, that not expecting aboriginal people to rise up to western standards of living and care would turn them into second class citizens, unable to compete with mainstream employment and education.

Foxy, if you want an example of an area that has been managed totally by aboriginal people for decades , then look at the aboriginal health system.
In the 70s, the building and management of aboriginal health centres began. Billions of dollars were spent building clinics, training aboriginal health workers, electing management committees who were all aboriginal.Putting aboriginal health workers and aboriginal liaison officers and interpreters into every hospital.
Since that time, every year, the government has hands over billions of dollars to aboriginal people to enable them to manage own health issues.
Every town pretty much has its own aboriginal medical health centre now, staffed by aboriginal health workers. The only non aboriginal staff are the doctors. In the remote communities aboriginal health workers support the nurses who work in the clinic and those clinics have their own aboriginal management committee.
So Foxy, seeing as how aboriginal health has totally been in aboriginal hands for nearly 50 years, why havent they solved the issue of poor health outcomes in their people.

Dear Big Nana,

But don't you understand - that is exactly what
the Uluru Statement is asking. They want control of
their own lives. They want to make their own
decisions. They don't want any more "special"
treatment from the government. They want to take
responsibility for themselves. It seems that your
husband would agree with this.

Foxy, they already have the chance to make their own choices. They can live on country, they can speak their language if they want to, they can practise their culture if they want to. Hell, they even force welcome to country and smoking ceremonies on helpless audiences. But those choices have to be within our laws.
Do you really want old men raping 13 year old promised brides?
Do you really want kids not to have to go to school?
Do you want wife beating, even murder to be legal because it’s a cultural custom?
What sort of decisions do you think they want to Change ? Do you want apartheid in this country?
And they have shown, via the medical services, that they don’t succeed when they manage their own affairs.
Currently aboriginal people are not expected to own up to their own responsibilities, and so we have children left in appalling conditions that I wouldn’t leave an animal in. Parents are not punished for neglected and abusing kids. Men are rarely punished for abusing their women. Men and women are not punished for their appalling treatment of the frail aged.
A Voice is not going to change any of those things, in fact people in remote towns and communities have never heard of a Voice and if it came about it wouldn’t make any difference to their lives anyway.
Aboriginal land is in the hands of aboriginal land councils and looking at the intense arguments that are happening between land councils and communities members, I shudder to thing of the fighting that will ensure if aboriginal people get more control of their own issues.

Hi Big Nana,

Please excuse the arrogance of the naive. Of course, all of the communities I know have had community councils, full community control, for the best part of fifty years. As you would be fully aware, those councils have had all the powers (and responsibilities, often delegated to some whitefella whether she likes it or not), of self-determination for that time, if not long before. Foxy may benefit from looking at Tadhgh Pertill's 'Dystopia in the Desert' to see how that 'works'. But I doubt she will.

People in Indigenous communities have had standard, human responsibilities - in modern settings - for many decades, but the problem is that they've often tended to look for others, usually non-Indigenous, to dump them on. I was just talking to a young Aboriginal bloke, mid-forties, who rather off-handedly told me that his mother had left him at the hospital after he was born to go back to the pub. He was somebody else's responsibility, after all. Somehow.

How ? You have kids, you're responsible for them. For feeding them properly, making sure they were well and safe, and had a bed at night, and that they went to school. Don't whitefellas expect that ? Then why not Blackfellas ?

As for government 'control', I've lived on places where I, as a labourer, was the only whitefella there for weeks at a time. No 'government' bloke within cooee. In fact, for months at a time, and then only to drop in and provide some advice. Often an Indigenous 'government' person. The days of Simon Legree are long gone, Foxy.

Joe