Assimilate or die out
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
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Windshuttle should stick to his knitting instead of making asinine quasi-political statements on subjects he is ill-equipped to support. The difference between black and white, Kevin, is culture. You simply cannot overcome that difference through statements such as ‘assimilate or die out’
Niall—-the difference between black and white may be “culture”, but to lock aborigines into a culture that simply doesn’t work in the modern world is to condemn them to a life of squalor.
I live and work in a VERY remote community. The people here have clean water, reliable power, their own shop and endless free medical treatment. And free medevacs to Darwin as needed. Plenty of work here, at $22 an hour but none of them will take it on.
They’d rather not feed their babies, because that means a free flight to darwin, where they can buy dope and booze while the staff at Royal Darwin fix up the results of their deliberate neglect.
Windschuttle is right on the money and so is Kevin.
Come and spend some time here and then see if you think the same way.
it was a cop out to force them there
Woohoo. Please explain how they “voted with their feet” if they were being “forced” to live in the middle of nowhere?
Niall, if that is really your name, I wonder, do you, like me, have Celtic roots?
If you do, and our ancestors had followed your advice; that “culture” and its divisive effects needed to be followed at the cost of societal assimilation, I couldn’t have a normal conversation with my neighbour (who is an Anglo-Saxon) without having about – oh – 1,500 years of “baggage” to pull. The English were, at times, quite genocidally nasty to the Celts, over a longer and more prolonged period than the Aboriginies will come to experience for another 1,300 years or so.
But instead we followed the path of pragmatic assimilation (partially by force, partially by choice) and now there is literally no real discernable “cultural” difference between someone whose name starts with “Mac” and someone whose name ends with “by”.
Because the cultures merged Niall. The English of today are unrecognisable from their Saxon forbears. As is the natural process that has been going on far longer than historians can plumb. By trying to enforce “diversity” and encourage all the stupid accessories that come with it, like this homeland garbage, we are only prolonging the period of division.
Assimilation will come. It may take longer than it did for the Celts, Saxons and Norse. But it is, quite literally, unstoppable. And not all the hand-wringing in the world can stop it.
Nothing will change until the parasites that feed of the backs of aborigines are exposed for the racist they are.
Niall. Changing cultures is a matter of the passage of time with a bit of education thrown in. Culture and societies change as witnessed by the fact that we no longer in caves. I agree glib statements don’t change cultures but the message behind it does.
Rob. It’s easy to vote with your feet when your voting for one party. Education and assimilation can open minds to the fact that better lives and better circunstances exist.
My opinions don’t come from reading alone. I have been bush a lot and have sat down with these people. This June I will be visiting a lot of Aborigines in the Territory and Arnhem Land and will be talking with their leaders. I will listen and I will definitely come back better informed but I wager I will find agreement around the camp fires and dinner tables.
They are looking for a way forward and are getting tired of nanny state ideas from politically correct public servants (and commentators) in airconditioned offices who are long on theory and short of having ever had to make a plan work.
Kev, call in at Palumpa (40km from Port Keats) if you get the chance, eh?
Nice people, warm welcome.
Niall,are you really as stupid as your text suggests?? Some free advise, get your hand off it,open your eyes ,use your tiny brain and get a life !!
“Windshuttle should stick to his knitting instead of making asinine quasi-political statements on subjects he is ill-equipped to support. The difference between black and white, Kevin, is culture. You simply cannot overcome that difference through statements such as ‘assimilate or die out'”
No Niall, the difference between black and white is colour, not culture – either can be raised in the others culture, neither can be raised as the others colour.
It’s that trivial a difference, yet hand wringing idiots like yourself use it as a way to condemn the Aboriginals to a life of squalor, just so you have an underclass to ‘support’ and feel smugly superior to.
The Aboriginal culture is a dead end, their kids must be delighted with the prospect of a hunter gatherer existence, followed by a death by substance abuse when the despair gets to be too much, rather than the horrors of an education and a future as a part of a larger society.
The Celts were treated far, far worse by the Poms than the Aborigines were. Yet for some reason (and after some actual genocide rather than sporadic killings dressed up as “genocide”) we don’t have Celtic “sorry” movements, and all of the associated guilt baggage that comes with it.
We have instead one of the richest countries in the world. It is called Ireland. They have a thing called the rule of law under which they have prospered. We don’t have anything like the rule of law in indigenous Australia, a situation that must be rectified very, very soon.