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

Police in Alice Springs are under fire for moving on topless dancers

ATSIC’s only female commissioner, Alison Anderson, is considering a formal complaint to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. She said she would defy authorities to dance topless at a ceremony in Alice Springs yesterday afternoon. “This is part of our law, this is part of our culture, this is what makes us Aboriginal,” she said.

I’d normally have no hastles with girls going topless although I have a preference for the toplessees to be young nubiles but in this case I think we need to think it through. If a group of white girls went topless in public in a group they would be charged with indecent exposure. I’m not defending the law on indecent exposure only to say it exists and police are duty bound to apply the law without fear or favour. It comes down to this – one country – one law. The tribal cultural thing is frought with danger as witnessed by the creep who claimed his male privelidges over a 12 or 13 year old ‘promised bride’. To Commissioner, Alison Anderson’s statement This is part of our law, this is part of our culture, this is what makes us Aboriginal I must add; and one law, this is what makes us Australian. So, until parliament changes the law to something like…it is an offence for people to go naked in public except for groups of aborigine women… then the police at Alice are correct.

Our Kiwi cousins are showing signs of coming out of the long white cloud of left wing ideology as they begin to question Helen Clark’s distorted idea of nationality.

A revolt against special privilege for Maori has begun across NZ, led by bold new Opposition Leader Don Brash and fuelled by years of simmering resentment among white Kiwis about welfare, land claims and political correctness. Suddenly, race relations between white and Maori have become the only issue in NZ politics, propelling the Opposition to the top of the polls, sending the Government into frantic reverse and prompting violent clashes between Maori protesters and police.

And;

The vast majority of Kiwis are saying they want one law applied equally to white and brown, according to a new survey by Massey University social policy researcher Phil Gendall.

It’s not often that our cousins lead the pack but Canberra might like to preempt a similar ground swell in Australia and consider one law applied equally to white, black, brown or brindle. More>> Sounds reasonable to me. Update: After posting this I noticed an article by Andrew Bolt on the same subject. It’s worth the read.