Keith WIndschuttle starts a debate on assimilation. He is of the opinion that it is the way ahead for aborigines and I for one agree and have been saying so on this and other sites for some years now.
To me the recent Redfern riot is the result of rounding up aborigines and putting them in a locality all by themselves and saying ‘ be good boys and girls now and we will give you lots of support and help. (read ‘money’) The good one see the writing on the wall and move to suburbia and we are left with losers and rabble. We have the same subgroups in white society but we don’t round them up and put them in one locality – they are spread out.
If I was given the power to fix the problem I would start by sitting down with elders, say at Yeundemu, and ask – do you really want to live here? Is your attachment to the land so strong as to keep you in squallor?
I have a strong attachment to the South West of Western Australia where generations of my family rest under marble headstones but I moved on and followed a career in the military. The call of home is strong but it is easily muffled by a lot of other considerations and I think to stay there, just because your family were there, condems one to a life limited by the locale. Yeundemu (at least the last time I was there )is a desert shithole – a great place to drive through on the way to somewhere, anywhere.
Under Hawke, the commonwealth government actively supported the “outstation” or “homeland” movement under which some Aboriginal communities withdrew from larger centres of population into isolated areas. The government also increased funding to the existing remote communities located on the old missions and reserves and in largely Aboriginal-populated country towns.
I don’t agree with Bob Hawke on this, in fact I don’t recall agreeing with much that he did, but ‘outstation’ or ‘homeland’ relocation has to be the best example of ‘hide the problem’ around.
We shouldn’t lock them up in desert ‘homelands’ Let them come into town, let the kids envy others and let them work out for themselves that ‘envy’ doesn’t lift your lifestyle but education does. If a school room is 100% full of kids from dysfunctional families then there is no benchmark. In towns, with a mix of success and failure, black and white, the comparisons are obvious.
In competition, kids strive to win
The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows clearly that, in suburban Australia, there is now an Aboriginal middle class (population 18,000). Even at lower socio-economic levels, in urban regions the majority of Aboriginal adult males have jobs and the majority of Aboriginal children complete school. In the remote communities and towns, where Coombs’s policies have prevailed, these statistics are completely reversed.
Knowing the left will be incensed by Windschuttle’s lates foray in to politics I went on over to
Robert Corr for his take. He says of Windschuttle;
But what of his claim that we should simply move people off their traditional lands? I reckon that’s a cop-out.
Rob, it was a cop out to force them there and I don’t think anyone is talking about forcing them off their tribal lands, just encouraging them to move to where the action is. Move to town, go to school, get a job, earn and save, buy a block of land, build on it – eureka – you have equity in the land. something you will never get in the desert.
Stay where you are and even with land rights you are left with no equity in shit country. Sit in the sand, teach your kids about the dreamtime, watch them sniff petrol, grow up, beat the wife, stay drunk all day, die, get buried, get nowhere in life, didn’t improve on the last generation.
No hope for the next.
Rob’s answer is to reinforce failure.
In my opinion, the narrow rights that native title confers are the real problem with land rights. If that title confered real, economic title to the land, it might go further (but by no means all the way) to making those communities viable.
Economic title to Yeundemu will give people equity in stuff-all. And don’t counter with ‘give em land rights to functional, profitable properties’ because without education and training functional becomes disfunctional quicker than you can say ‘Land Rights Now.’
Again – go to town, go to school, get a job, buy some land.
Assimilate or die out.
WIndschuttle, as always speaks sense, go read his
full article