Hard News: Not such as to engender confidence
113 Responses
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And what is this"viable export industry" based around ? Encouraging tourists to trample on the mana of the local people by climbing all over their sacred mountain, Uluru.
Fucking awesome.
To be fair, people all over the world make a dollar by controlling and charging access to their holy places.
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To be fair, people all over the world make a dollar by controlling and charging access to their holy places.
true. but, it doesn't cost anything to visit uluru. the local people have some kind of nominal traditional ownership, but it's mostly ceremonial.
there's also a big sign at the base of the rock that says,"this place is sacred, please don't climb it".
thousands take a picture of the sign, then climb the rock.
as for $$. i'm pretty sure there's no aboriginal money invested in yulara, or any of the tourist ventures surrounding the rock. i did see one aboriginal guide though.
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All I claim is that paid work tends (many other things being equal) to make it easier to be happy, well-adjusted people.
Can I broaden this a little bit and say income=choices ?
To be fair, people all over the world make a dollar by controlling and charging access to their holy places.
RB - I think you would agree that an important issue here, is giving respective cultures the choice to make what compromises they see as apporpriate.
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I saw The Proposition (at last) during the weekend.
I thought it was awful to be honest; gratuitious violence overdone, spoiling a plot with potential.
Shame, I rate Nick Cave as a musician.
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Work creates wealth, and a sense of purpose, and of a better future. Which creates communities. Who set and enforce norms. By themselves.
James, I agree with you too a point but, ultimately, it's more complicated than that.
Firstly, there's work and there's work. My own job maintains my current level of wealth and provides purpose etc. but there are plenty out there that don't (or do so only marginally).
Secondly, by all accounts, the lives of most indigenous Australians prior to colonisation were rich in social capital, bound by norms, and purposeful. This took place for the most part without anything resembling a formalised labour market.
Thirdly, there's cause and effect: work may generate wealth and purpose, but it's also much easier to get work if you are endowed with both in the first place.
With regards to the John Howard's chest beating intervention (which strikes me as a blend of Tampa and RAMSI) I thought that John Quiggin made some good points at Crooked Timber.
1. Alcohol is already officially banned in most of the effected communities.
2. X-rated pornography is banned in all the states and territories except ACT.
and
3. Given what just happened on Palm Island, flooding these communities with police might be problematic to say the least.As for alternative solutions, one that springs to mind is looking at what works in functional indigenous Australian communities (they do exist).
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As for alternative solutions, one that springs to mind is looking at what works in functional indigenous Australian communities (they do exist).
hmmm.. can we ride into town with one of those alterative solutions and have the media get it on film?
does it have a snappy uniform? i think not.
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Che,
yes - I've often said, "good community development starts with a good uniform". But I may be a hopeless idealist.
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yes. true. all good efforts to indoctrinate need some decent spats. and perhaps jodhpurs.
definitely a riding crop is in order, wot.
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Mikaere
Apologies for quibbling but Dingos were domesticated and it's not hard to do the same to a Magpie either.Aboriginal people across the continent adopted the dingo as a companion animal, using it to assist with hunting and for warmth on cold nights. (The terms "two-dog night" and "three-dog night" are believed to come from Aboriginal idiom, describing the overnight temperature.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DingoI draw no conclusions regarding colonisation but there is a major difference in society of Clans in the West Island vs Iwi over this side of the ditch.
On topic here's a wee wikiword
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship -
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Michael, you say
"Ben you are sooo wrong on this point:
"Such wholesale oppression didn't happen here, at least not nearly to the same scale."
Can I recommend popping along to your local marea and having a wee chat on the issue. "
I'm not saying the Maori did not suffer in many ways from colonization. I'm just trying to put the difference between the countries in perspective. That there even is a marae to go and have a wee chat about the issue at is indicative. If you think there's just no difference between the way the indigenous people were treated in the two countries, then it's you who are sooo wrong. Perhaps some of it comes down to differences in the natures of the indigenous peoples, and where the Maori fought the Aboriginals withdrew. But I don't think it's entirely that. I do think the Aboriginals were treated worse, either through their own weakness or greater cruelty in the invaders of the time. Or both, more likely.
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I do think the Aboriginals were treated worse, either through their own weakness or greater cruelty in the invaders of the time. Or both, more likely.
Weakness being numerical inferiority, perhaps?
Whatever Ben, overall I'd pretty much agree. It's hard to live and travel in Australia for any length of time without accumulating a host of anecdotal stories of past horrors - for example, the great rock near Dorrigo, NSW, where the local people were reputedly rounded up and forced to jump from to their deaths.Still, we regularly came across human bones among the gravel of the North Island river I swam in as a kid, but that was held to be Te Rauparaha's doing.
I don't believe that it's any exaggeration to describe Keith Windschuttle, Howard's favourite historian, as morally equivalent to a holocaust denier.
I'm cautious about making easy comparisons between the situation here and in Australia. In the late '80s I was in Sydney, talking with a tertiary educated, politically astute civil servant. The Bulletin had ran an article about Winston Peters, and she was genuinely interested in how someone from NZ saw him. We talked about the similarites and differences between Oz and Nz, and how Peters fitted in to all of this.
Then, suddenly, she asked 'Would he have come up through the mission system?'From an Australian standpoint it was a perfectly reasonable question, but I found myself struck by the sheer gulf of understanding.
While I've spent a major chunk of my adult life in Oz, I sometimes wonder if I'm any better informed than she was. -
Ben
I don't mean to compare holocausts (or the Shoah for that matter). But please let us not forget Maori were considered a dying people. A question of genocide/eugenics was actively discussed by such luminaries as Plunket.There was no need to overtly kill Maori due to disease and deprivation of land and resources was expected to take up this cause by itself.
My family history (a little earlier in the blog) does point to Indigenous Australians fighting and massed organised warfare. That the gun won over the spear is surely no surprise and that the crime of genocide and evidence of resistance was covered up should be no surprise either.
Ben and anyone else interested - pop along to a marae near you and have a chat. The stories are known and will be shared.
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I don't believe that it's any exaggeration to describe Keith Windschuttle, Howard's favourite historian, as morally equivalent to a holocaust denier.
he is a denier.
his argument is, "i can't find clear evidence of said massacres, therefore they never happened. those aborigines must have died of the vapours".
this ignores things like the black line, and the black "war"
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I am interested does anyone know if there is mounting concern in Australia about the child abuse blitz, and if it is likely to come to anything remotely near to modifying or stop the testing?
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I agree, a witch hunt for pedophiles and abusers is not the answer. It will cause great fear. Sure, do justice when it's found necessary, but going after injustice in the form Howard is proposing is creating another injustice. (However, I can't see the links to the Iraq war in this argument, Neil).
I do think that the Aboriginal community and many in this blog may need to stop seeing this community as 'victims' supreme. Perhaps they do need the encouragement of their proud past or an appeal to their inherent goodness. Some might say too many are too far gone. No one's ever to far gone for a bit of courage to spark their hearts and start taking back their lives.
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I don't know how many jobs it provides, but the money must be pretty good.
True, but mining is capital intensive with comparatively few jobs. Some mining money does get back to aboriginal land owners, I'm not sure how much but undoubtably less than what they should get, but that money gets back to the communities via the Federal govt as welfare. Mining, and I'm mostly pro-mining, can play funny tricks on local economies if not handled right which it hasn't.
Being locked out of the tourism industry is pretty shocking.
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This issue is getting a lot of press in the UK/America as well, largely negative too. I've had to try and explain it to people in the pub a bit as well, so if Howard was looking to make his whole country look like bad, Mission Accomplished!
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does it have a snappy uniform? i think not.
Oh ... I was expecting this
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No one's ever to far gone for a bit of courage to spark their hearts and start taking back their lives.
If only that were held true.
The movie "The Grey Zone" has a wee scene that addresses a portion of a community not wanting to go on. Those who survived the camps in Europe had a high rate of suicide afterwards.
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Being locked out of the tourism industry is pretty shocking
Neil/Che, this is a bit strong. I'm not claiming that its anywhere near perfect, but I think tourism as an industry per se is far more open to indigenous ownership and participation than probably any other industry in Australia.
Check out http://www.aboriginaltourism.com.au/ for more details.
On top of that Tourism Australia and all the various state and regional tourism bodies all invest shit-loads of time and money assisting local operators to get off the ground.
Granted it may be motivated by the massive amount of potential money in indigenous tourism, but like NZ, as a tourism destination they have to maximise any point of difference to get over the tyranny of distance for the lucrative Asian, American and European markets.
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InternationalObserver
Good point on the Maori Warden.
If Howie was serious (and we all know he's not) a community based structure with resources to take on the community as a whole is a great start. -
I agree, a witch hunt for pedophiles and abusers is not the answer. It will cause great fear. Sure, do justice when it's found necessary, but going after injustice in the form Howard is proposing is creating another injustice.
Expect to see selected 'abusers' identified and publicly vilified, just as asylum seekers were in the manufactured 'children overboard' election rort of 2001. There'll be the usual Howard dog-whistle message of what-can-you-expect-of-people-who-do-this-to-their-kids.
Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough on Tuesday said concerns were being whipped up by people who themselves had something to fear from the reforms.
"It is the very typical scaremongering, standover, bully-boy tactics and lies that some have perpetrated upon their people for too long, to keep them scared of authority, to keep them in a state of desperation," he said.
There you have it - everyone who opposes this plan is an abuser.
I do think that the Aboriginal community and many in this blog may need to stop seeing this community as 'victims' supreme.
It'll take more than positive thinking to counter the Howard government's opportunistic attacks on aboriginals.
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Good point on the Maori Warden.
If Howie was serious (and we all know he's not) a community based structure with resources to take on the community as a whole is a great start.Like most good ideas it's been thought of before - over and over and over again, as it happens, right back to the Queensland 'native police' of the 19th century.
See here, for example:http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/alrc/publications/reports/31/Ch_32.html
Not sure what you mean by 'taking on the community' - if there's no economic base then 'wardens' will be no better than jailers.
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rl, i agree, there is indigenous tourism. but there is a long way to go before aboriginal people stop being locked out. in cairns they round up anyone aboriginal and drop them a number of km outside town. in this day and age.
otherwise,
If Howie was serious (and we all know he's not) a community based structure with resources to take on the community as a whole is a great start.
imagine that. a structure that reinforced indigenous leadership, and was directed to directly aid aboriginal communities... perhaps we could call it atsic. sigh.
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aljazeera quoted Howard saying:
"We should have been more humble. We have our Katrina, here and now,"
Thats a very strange way of looking at Alcoholism, child abuse and poverty.
If banning alcohol, sexually explicit imagery is the remedy to child abuse, or if as claimed alcohol and pornography are the cause, Why all Australians have a dam good look at there own behavior.
Why don't there just invite the Taliban to convince the "affected areas" to just snap out of it.
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