Stop the forced removal of aboriginal communities

[malteaser]

Totally agree, but the problem of welfare is not just an aboriginal problem, however it is the only problem that is discussed with Aboriginal peoples. This is evident in all conversations. I admit my lack of knowledge and how this cycle can be changed we need a rational converstation with all stakeholders, which includes ney-sayers and doomsters. A discussion of a country that could be proud to have a group of people who are unique in their culture, identity, way of life would be good. We all love the great outdoors but on the same hand condemn those who choose a lifestyle that in a sense we wish we had, maybe it is reverse jealousy, so we get a RV destroy the land and then victimize them because omg they don't have a 2 storey house with mod cons and as one person said to me, "a proper job". (I also understand the issues of poverty which is a different discussion) because poverty also means spiritually poor, as opposed to the great $ which creates its on spirituality.

I have traveled and spent many hours with communities in Africa and South America and the one thing that struck me was that although they had absolutely nothing as in material things, they loved their life just as I love mine in a 3 bedroom house with everything. Peoples of Peru are one group that showed me that although poor in terms of what we have, they embraced their indigenous people and celebrated and they felt included rather than excluded. Who are we to judge?

In terms of absolute poverty these things are easily fixed if only we stopped fighting with others and stopped repressing groups of disadvantaged societies because they don't have the same belief system. Another example of we are better than you. Do you really think ISIS started just yesterday? These people are the result of decades of being disenfranchised, at sometime they just went bang and now we are seeing the results.

As soon as welfare is raised we as a society mostly focus towards people as weak and useless when this is not the case at all. People who have been on welfare for decades are a result that we look down on anyone who can't talk like us, reason like us. Teachers often have this problem of thinking that everyone is at the same level and then label those that don't behave or react the way we wanted them to. I teach at a secondary school in Geelong and if there is ever an issue of welfare I see it everyday with kids who have been born into generations of never getting out of a cycle. As an example, I teach a young girl of 14, who is in year 7 and was tested, her level, was grade 1. How did this girl not have the appropriate help? This young girl will most probably be victimized and then thrown out then again be part of the welfare cycle. You can blame govt agencies but we are the ones who think we wast money on social services. Oh by the way she is a white Australian. What disturbs me is the polarization of a group of people who after years of media stereotypes and agenda setting label aboriginals as poor, victims, as opposed to all the positives one can throw at white Aussies, look at us, be like us, when you become like us, they take take take.

[ronrat]

Until the OP shows me any evidence of what the Government is doing, that is ours and not Peru, and what the ADF role in this is it it is all bullshit. It seems like another NGO fund raising piece of crap that I regularly see in SE Asia. The Ops last post seems to me that teachers are the blame and not anything the Government can do given it it appears to have been over an 8 or 9 years period and you can hardly blame the current Government for all that. But I stand corrected.

I live in a rented 2 bedroom house in Thailand with my girlfriend and at times all members of her her family. What is the point. I have no car, no investment property, and own little. But I will die happy I hope.

You seem an apologist for ISIS supporters and still have not provided one shred of evidence, not one, that the ADF will be involved in all this.

Fanciful propagandist bullshit that is best left on its shelf and you should be ashamed to call on us as Football club supporters to be part of all this.

Look to the likes of Joffa who DO make a positive difference and not by denigrating people in Australia who are trying to do their best like the ADF and the AFP who have made a difference in the Solomons and East Timor.

[think positive]

[think positive]

[David]

[watt price tully]

[think positive]

coulda been a more simplistic answer

[5150]

[stui magpie]

[HAL]

Do you have any idea what I am talking about?

[stui magpie]

Not a $�$%^%%$ clue.

[pietillidie]

The most instructive parallel between the Middle East and remote Aboriginal communities is our authoritarian obsession with singular solutions, and bumbling interference in other people's lives. You either blow the shite out of something, and assume people will pick up the pieces following your amoral holocaust, or you let people cut a path to their own working system.

In the case of the Middle East, if you were vaguely rational you would get rid of the oil economy and see what sort of economy might develop in the absence of oil-funded regimes.

In the case of Aboriginal Australia, you would give folk access to forms of education and employment which make sense to their local world, without insisting everyone has to have our forms and structures of living. Then, slowly, people would find their own way; some staying in a more localised form of bush employment; some kids with certain aptitudes and desires heading off to boarding school, some kids remaining in a more traditional context, and so on.

Currently, all we're doing is perpetuating generations of post-traumatic stress disorder by forcing folk into ridiculous, existentially meaningless pseudo-towns, as if to hurry up their transition. But you just can't hurry the base cognitive-emotional parameters of the human brain. You simply can't; the inability to grasp that due to ridiculous fantasies about our own development from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to today is a constant stumbling block to us dealing rationally with Others.

No, we didn't think our way rationally from the Dark Ages to postmodern Melbourne. We made our way from plague to war to discovery and back again to war and poverty and ignorance and on to discovery and around and around like staggering drunks on their way home from the pub. And yet we get impatient and poke and prod others who don't sprint to glory as we did in the completely juvenile tales of our own "history" we were spoon fed as children.

As I say, the other option is to kill 2-5M people on the Korean Peninsula so the country can develop to our way of liking�even then taking six decades for only half of the Peninsula to be developed, four of which were run by murderous tyrants.

It's time to allow Aboriginal peoples to be bi-cultural of their own choice, meaning access to land and bush employment and lifestyles for those who choose it, access to traditional Aboriginal cultural education for those who choose it, and a way to the big smoke for those who choose to go that way. It's obscene that we no longer celebrate Aboriginal culture as a unique, marvelous and mysterious wonder of human diversity, but instead spit and curse at folk who are failing at being "us". Why do we insist that everyone has to transition to "us"?

Bugger it! Let people be traditional and let's celebrate that traditional culture with them as a living and special aspect of Australian life. However things then develop, so be it! The insistence and frustration with "fixing" Aboriginal culture is like a national case of OCD; as if there's a crooked picture on the wall that has to be straightened�and right now, damn it!

The thing which strikes me more and more as I investigate and live difference in the big bad world is just how undisciplined, impatient, petty and careless we are. When it comes to understanding human difference and diversity, we really are unsophisticated swine, no doubt due to years of trampling the planet at will and glorying in our complete dominance.

Or, put another way: When it comes to understanding Homo sapiens, we're bloody Neanderthals!

[think positive]

[Wokko]

[Jezza]