The Voice of Reason

To counter the sagging spirits of my last post I point you to a voice of reason in the Aborigine debate. Gerhardt Pearson is executive director of the Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation and has a piece in this mornings Australian Straight to the core of the problem. Two issues are vital to every family and every household: managing money and education for the children. Restoring social order and confronting grog and drugs are a prerequisite to our plans in those two areas. It was a mistake not to draw alcohol out of the long list of “underlying issues” and elevate it to the highest priority after the royal commission. And it’s unfortunate that criminologist Don Weatherburn’s points were not prominent in the debate at an early stage: the high rate of offending is the cause of the high rate of indigenous incarceration, not bias and discrimination. And diverting indigenous people away from the prison system is not an efficient way of reducing incarceration if it only adds a few rungs at the bottom of the ladder that leads to prison. He leads the debate away from left wing ‘victim mentality’ and heads upstream to defining the real problem in the first step towards finding a solution……..the high rate of offending is the cause of the high rate of indigenous incarceration, not bias and discrimination. How radical….How true. He then goes on to confirm the opinion of millions of reasonable Australians. Education is the basis for the break-out. The next challenge is to provide seven years of quality and uninterrupted primary education. Then we will send our children to high-quality, high-expectation boarding schools. Our vision is for our children to be bicultural and bilingual or multilingual. We want them to embark on what we call orbits, where they see Cape York communities as their home base, and they orbit to Cairns or Sydney or New York in pursuit of their education, employment and careers. Good God! He also suggests work ethics are important as well as reading. But it is amazing what my illiterate mother and Bible-reading father could achieve. They made sure we children went to school and learned to work, and they constantly told us about the importance of reading. Truly, his is the voice of reason and yet we still have the misguided screaming for land rights. The land rights of the last four generations of my bloodline (and the following one, I might add) have been based on hard work, saving and scrimping to educate kids and to buy land. Hard work, education and a saving program. The rock on which land rights and nations are built.