Hi Joe,

You ask;
What 'failures' have there been in Indigenous higher education ?

A HUGE FAILURE! The first university in Australia, Sydney University open in 1850. The first Indigenous person to graduate from that university was Charles Perkins in 1966, 116 years later, a huge failing. In the next 53 years thousands of Indigenous people graduated from university, a huge success!

Foxy, I keep reading about how indigenous people want a say regarding policies that affect them and I must say that I am at a loss to understand how that would work.
Every single policy that is passed through parliament affects all Australians in some way, including indigenous people.
So, are they saying they want to be exempt from some laws or policies they feel are detrimental to their lives? Are they asking for separate laws based on race? Are they in effect, wanting apartheid?
And I have spent a lot of time thinking about what policies they would object to.
The legal system? Health system? Child protection policies? Land tenure?
You say you have done a lot of reading on this issue so perhaps you could give me some examples of policies they may object to.

Paul, you are wrong, as Foxy was wrong. I can’t recall ever writing anything negative about aboriginal people as a whole. Individual behaviour yes, but that has nothing to do with race.
What I have been very scathing of is aboriginal culture and the rewriting of aboriginal history to suit current beliefs that all white men are bad and all native people are good.
I also question the right of some people who are fairer than I am and who know nothing of aboriginal culture , to claim they are aboriginal and knowledgeable about culture. But that is not putting anyone down because of race.
In fact, like a Joe, I am the one who keeps pushing the belief that aboriginal people are more than capable of forging their own futures and that paternalistic management of their affairs and the constant classification of them as victims does far more harm than good.
Like every other race, aboriginal people come in all different types, and the sooner people like you come to understand that the better. Just like white people, the aboriginal race has great people, good people and awful people who lie, steal, deceive and rip off their own countrymen for their own benefit. The noble savage ideal was discredited long ago and people need to see that and start seeing them as equal people who have made the incredible step from Stone Age to modern society in less than 300 years. If that doesn’t prove how capable they are, nothing will.

Foxy,

They already have many, as we all do. There are Indigenous radio and TV stations, a luntitude of organisations, consultative bodies in all fields in all states and federally, members of parliament - as well as the standard channels of 'voice' which are available to everybody.

I look forward to the day when the scams stop.

Joe

Dear Big Nana,

Firstly, the Constitution confers upon Parliament a special
power to racially discriminate.

Section 25 allows for states banning races from voting and
in various sates been excluded from the franchise. That clause
acknowledges that racially discriminatory laws are permitted
under the Constitution.

The High Court has confirmed this.

The resulting constitutional problem for Indigenous
Australians is demonstrated by the fact that the
"Racial Discrimination Act 1975" has been suspended three times
in recent decades - each time only in relation to them.

The Uluru Statement calls for a First Nations voice in
laws and policies made about them as a way of preventing
repetition of past discriminatory policies.

This proposal has a long history - Indigenous advocates
have argued for decades for fairer representation in
their affairs and a First Nations voice in the Constitution
would guarantee Indigenous people a say, without
transferring power to the High Court or undermining
parliamentary supremacy.

It presents a way of improving Indigenous policy through
early Indigenous engagement rather than subsequent
litigation.

Paul,

Sorry, I thought you meant current failures, ongoing failures.

But isn't it fun to be able to bitch about something that happened so long ago, knowing we can't reverse history ?

But consider this: back in those dark ages that you mentioned, universities were very small, with a very tiny range of courses: law, medicine, dentistry, philology, arts and politics, science, mathematics. Over time, new courses were added, but by 1910, there were barely twenty thousand students in all universities across Australia, about as many as the current (2019) total of Indigenous student enrolments.

After the War, universities were greatly expanded, allowing middle-class students to enrol. After 1960, the working-class could enrol through (of all things) Menzies' scholarship schemes. 1960.

Indigenous enrolments really began to pick up at the end of the 1970s and were close to what was defined then as 'mass tertiary enrolment' by the mid-nineties. Of course, there are now more than four times as many Indigenous enrolments as back then, and twenty times as many graduates. I'm sure you are as overjoyed to realise this as I am :) Nah ?

But that's been the succession: upper-class, middle-class, working-class, followed closely by Indigenous participation. Actually, Indigenous participation goes back much further than people think: Olga Wilson enrolled at the Adelaide Conservatorium to do a Music course in the late twenties, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were other Indigenous people enrolling before that.

But let's keep whingeing about the distant past, which, in case you haven't noticed, is over, gone, buried. But let's wallow in self-pity: those bastard Normans who stole English land, etc., etc.

For Indigenous people now, the bottom line - which you may deplore, I don't know - is that they can access university study just like anybody else. Around 120,000 - one hundred and twenty thousand - have done so since 1980. 20,000 are currently in the system, 55,000 or so have graduated. So more than half of all enrolments have turned into graduations. There will certainly be 100,000 graduates, two-thirds still women, by 2030. Suck it up.

Joe