mhaze,

As you say, people don't remember or don't want to remember. I brought ATSIC and Mr. Clarke up recently.

John Howard was able to close it down, but if this racist referendum gets through it will be there for good.

My guess is that 95% non indigenous Australians would support such a voice. The dilemma is to find people with sufficient integrity on both sides to resist the urge of past-blaming whenever a hickup arises. It'd need to be people who accept that many of the past wrongs were committed by people who were sent here in chains & who survived the sea journey & once here had fewer rights than the indigenous.
People who accept that recent indigenous leaders have failed also through greed & corruption, not just the settlers. Indigenous leaders of the future need to acknowledge the enormous good will forwarded to the indigenous of this land & just because many failed to take advantage of the opportunities & let themselves go & find bleating discrimination the easier path.
Many very early settlers were just as ignorant & superstitious as the indigenous yet the mostly academic hindsight brigade is not smart enough to see that> They're the ones who resist every effort to close that gap ! The reasons are obvious !

One can blame the uneducated or uncultured for the wrongs that have been done. However, the highly educated can be as cruel and unfair as the uneducated. Those who commanded the ships that brought the convicts to Australia and presided over the cruelty and the slaughter were educated men. The top Nazis and those who supported them contained many educated men. Heidegger, one of the twentieth century top philosophers was a Nazi. One of lowly class can be a decent noble person and one of cultured and noble background can be a dirty dog and vice versa.

Victim blaming must stop, there is no doubt in my mind that Aboriginal people came off second best due to European colonisation, only an ardent racists would believe otherwise. Recognition, and truth telling of the past is important, it can't simply be ignored or altered, as some would have it. Without that truthful recognition we cannot move constructively forward. Fortunately many Australians have come to know of that truth that was hidden for over two hundred years. In some areas improvements have taken place since the first real efforts towards equality were made back in the nineteen seventies by the Whitlam Government, but after fifty years and many mistakes and failures more still needs to be done. The 'Voice to Parliament' is deserving, and is just one more step on the road to improve the lives of our First Australians.

The Aborigines of then were utterly different in mentality just as the descendants of the settlers are now ! Both are evolving more & more selfish & conniving.
We must move away from the notion that the Aborigines were always the victims. Their land was invaded & they drew the shorter straw. Their retaliations when the opportunity arose were horrific in the extreme. They can not be blamed for standing up against the invaders then but today's can now safely be accused of double standard !

The word "educated" is wrongly used all the time, just as are so many words bandied about by people who regard themselves as being educated by dint of a piece of paper.

There was no deliberate cruelty as an official policy for the First Fleet. George the Third specifically put in writing that the native population was to treated with kindness and respect, and anyone not doing so, was to be punished accordingly.

An 'educated' person would know this, and therefore refrain from lying about British settlement, or stop repeating the lies of others.