Indigenous Voice to Parliament

[Magpietothemax]

^Wonderful clip. Thankyou for posting.

[Skids]

I wonder if the voice had been successful, would the kid my wife is supposed to be looking after at school, have got his attendance above the 3 days attended so far this year?

[David]

Quite possibly – this is one area in particular that could presumably do with a far more integrated approach. But we’ll never know now.

[stui magpie]

^

There's lots of reasons why kids don't go to school and 90+% of them come back to the parents.

[Skids]

[David]

[stui magpie]

What do you mean, dig deeper?

As I said, there's lots of different reasons.Poverty, cultural, lack of education, mental health, substance abuse are just some.

[David]

Skids’ assertion is that the Voice to Parliament would have done nothing to aid school attendance, and that it’s merely the parents’ fault. I just thinks that’s incredibly superficial. If there’s a lack of will or capacity for parents to ensure their children get to school, then that suggests bigger policy problems of the exact kind that the Voice was designed to address.

I understand you may agree with that at least in part, but the trouble with saying "it’s the parents’ fault" implies that the solution is on the individual level, not structural.

[stui magpie]

It is on the individual level in the main, and each individual case will be different with a different combination of factors contributing.

There are cases in remote communities where it's a problem across the whole community. That's not an issue for the Voice, that's a situation requiring localised consultation with the community and state government money to support solutions.

The Structural elements are the education system in general that lets kids slip through the cracks despite the best efforts of many hard working caring teachers, and the lack of funding to case workers who work with the parents because more often than not the lack of school attendance is just a symptom of bigger issues at home.

I supported the Voice, but it was never going to be a silver bullet.

[nomadjack]

[Kingsofclutch]

If the truth be told our wonderful lifestyle including schools, hospitals, roads, entertainment, food etc is earnt off the backs of the poorest countries and peoples of the world, and we will always look the other way or make excuses for it because no one really wants to face the fact that given the opportunity to push a button and give up the luxuries of 1st world to save the poorest and make for a more equitable world, that button would only gather dust.

[Skids]

[David]

So we're talking deep dysfunctions that get passed down through generations. Everyone acknowledges that these exist, but it seems a pity in retrospect that a lot of voters just assumed, like you (for some reason), that there's nothing that Indigenous people themselves could possibly suggest to make things better – rather than recognising dysfunction like what you describe as the actual product of decades of top-down policy that hasn't worked.

[stui magpie]

^

He's not suggesting that there's nothing that Indigenous people could suggest to fix it, the point you miss is that you don't need The Voice to make that happen at a local community level.

Is this a one of case, unique in the area? If yes get community services and case workers onto it, liaise with people in the community to find out what has worked before.

If it's endemic in the community, organise a community consultation group to get thoughts and feedback.

The Voice was to make representations to FEDERAL government on policies etc pertaining to First Nations Peoples. This kind of thing is a state and community issue.

[David]

Whether or not that's the case – and I don't know if I agree that there's nothing federal as opposed to state/local government can do for broader issues suggested by cases like this – the clear subtext here seems to be that the parents are to blame, that they're greedy (see references to multiple cars in the driveway) and irresponsible, and that nothing structural will change things like that for the better. If there are any suggestions about community/state-based solutions to be found reading between the lines then I'm not seeing it; and at any rate, the clear suggestion in the post that started the exchange near the top of the page was that issues like this show that the Voice would have been useless.

So I'm not sure if Skids thinks he's agreeing with you or you think you're agreeing with him, but I get the impression you're making fundamentally different points here.