Thursday, March 5, 2009

More unravelling

Paul Toohey writes about aboriginal issues and the right and wrong he sees with some "solutions".

Here he talks of

THE slow unravelling of the Northern Territory Emergency Response, better known as the intervention...

2 comments:

RebeccaH said...

Can't really speak to your aboriginal problems, but as North America (and South America, for that matter) has had much the same problems, I can only say that aboriginal problems will never be solved by politicians. Only when the aborigines finally decide to integrate themselves into the larger, modern society and take charge of their own problems, will they begin to provide real solutions for themselves. If they find uranium or oil under their ground, or decide to build casinos, that might be a step up for them.

Skeeter said...

Rebecca, I agree about integration being the only solution. Those aborigines who have accepted and strived for assimilation have thrived, and many now live unnoticed among the white communities.
In my lifetime, the only politician's solutions that looked like reducing the misery were the so-called stolen children, and the Howard government's "intervention". Sadly, the former has been declared politically incorrect for children with tinted skins, and the latter now looks like being unravelled before it has had a real chance.
Australian aborigines can gain native title to virtually all of Australia. They now "own" enormous resources, including vast uranium deposits. Attempts have been made to guide them towards managing those rich resources, but that has not led to any wide-spread signs of affluence or integration as yet.
I believe it is not a race problem and nothing to do with colour genes. It's a cultural problem. They have a forty-thousand year heritage of socialist, subsistence living. The concepts of private property or wealth, those nasty side effects of capitalism, are beyond their ken.