If you happen to hear any news from NSW, you might be aware that we are lumbered with a putrefying albatros of a government. It has the Midas touch - in reverse. Everything it touches turns to shit. Health, education, little abused kiddies, transport and now property development.
And we are stuck with them for another 3 years, because Clover Moore, in a spark of absolute stupidity, strong armed a former government into legislating fixed four year terms.
Clover's finest hour is called the "Charter of reform of government", and she foisted it on us along with two other independents - Tony Windsor and Peter McDonald.
May all three of them rot in hell.
I wonder how long it will be before the media (especially the Daily Telegraph) picks up on the fact that this useless pack of nuf-nufs is essentially unremoveable and decides to rip into our three holier-than-thou independents?
Probably forever.
Showing posts with label Political diatribe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Political diatribe. Show all posts
Sunday, 2 March 2008
Saturday, 23 February 2008
Our local MP - Angela Tripodi
With all the muck swirling around the career of Joe Tripodi at the moment, it is no wonder that his sister in law prefers to go by her maiden name of Angela D'Amore. I'm not sure how many people know that she has married into that particular den of iniquity.
I was never able to figure out how she was pre-selected for our seat, until I was told that she had been parachuted in by head office - presumably after a bit of arm twisting by her brother in law.
Unfortunately, she shows many of the signs of someone that has been dropped into the job, rather than earning it by merit - with merit excluding marrying into the right faction.
As I was driving around today, I spotted her running a kerbside stand where she was spruiking the benefits of another Iron Cove Bridge. If you're going to blow $150 million of our money (yes, money provided by long suffering taxpayers), then the least you could do would be to spend it on something worthwhile. Building another bridge at that spot is like giving a 90 year old smoker a heart transplant - yes, it might work for a while, but you could do better by sticking the heart somewhere else. You could stick the heart up a cow's bum and still get more societal benefit than opening up an old gasper and stuffing in a new ticker (at great expense).
So there you have it - building a second Iron Cove Bridge is like sticking $150 million up the backside of a cow.
I didn't stop to have a chat with Angela, since it would do no good. Apart from giving the impression that she is a 15 watt lightbulb (of the old variety), she is not a good listener. She is a talker, and she will stand there all day trying to tell you what you should have, rather than listening to what I actually want. The righteously stupid should never be allowed into Parliament. Or any other position of power for that matter.
A mate of mine has been corresponding with Angela of late in regard to the bridge, so I drove around to his place, banged on the door and told him to put his underwear on (not on his head) and shoot down there to have a chat with her. Preferably waving a sheaf of her completely useless correspondence. He's sent her a couple of letters, which spell out a certain position, and she has blithely ignored most of what he has said and responded about things which don't concern him at all.
It's like he wrote suggesting that we should graze goats in the local park to keep the grass down, and she responded with a screed about a new MRI machine at Concord Hospital. She's that far off the ball.
Unless we are now using MRI machines to look at the insides of goats that have eaten a sprinkler at the local park.
I hope a comment will appear shortly describing his interaction with the Dense One today.
I was never able to figure out how she was pre-selected for our seat, until I was told that she had been parachuted in by head office - presumably after a bit of arm twisting by her brother in law.
Unfortunately, she shows many of the signs of someone that has been dropped into the job, rather than earning it by merit - with merit excluding marrying into the right faction.
As I was driving around today, I spotted her running a kerbside stand where she was spruiking the benefits of another Iron Cove Bridge. If you're going to blow $150 million of our money (yes, money provided by long suffering taxpayers), then the least you could do would be to spend it on something worthwhile. Building another bridge at that spot is like giving a 90 year old smoker a heart transplant - yes, it might work for a while, but you could do better by sticking the heart somewhere else. You could stick the heart up a cow's bum and still get more societal benefit than opening up an old gasper and stuffing in a new ticker (at great expense).
So there you have it - building a second Iron Cove Bridge is like sticking $150 million up the backside of a cow.
I didn't stop to have a chat with Angela, since it would do no good. Apart from giving the impression that she is a 15 watt lightbulb (of the old variety), she is not a good listener. She is a talker, and she will stand there all day trying to tell you what you should have, rather than listening to what I actually want. The righteously stupid should never be allowed into Parliament. Or any other position of power for that matter.
A mate of mine has been corresponding with Angela of late in regard to the bridge, so I drove around to his place, banged on the door and told him to put his underwear on (not on his head) and shoot down there to have a chat with her. Preferably waving a sheaf of her completely useless correspondence. He's sent her a couple of letters, which spell out a certain position, and she has blithely ignored most of what he has said and responded about things which don't concern him at all.
It's like he wrote suggesting that we should graze goats in the local park to keep the grass down, and she responded with a screed about a new MRI machine at Concord Hospital. She's that far off the ball.
Unless we are now using MRI machines to look at the insides of goats that have eaten a sprinkler at the local park.
I hope a comment will appear shortly describing his interaction with the Dense One today.
Wednesday, 20 February 2008
Is Australia a religious country?
Plenty of people think not. I don't think we are especially religious or observant.
But check out this war memorial (in Burwood). The inscription at the top says "Thanks be unto God who gave us the victory".
That tells me that we were once a religious country, given how many memorials are dotted around the country with similar sentiments. Try and raise a memorial these days with the word "God" on it and see how far you get.
Things like this are all around us, and they should remind us that our forebears were a lot more Godly than we are today. However, some people like to act like we were never a religious country, and that religion had no part to play in our history.
Well, here is a rather large fact, carved in stone and set in a prominent location - making it a bit hard to ignore. But modern revisionist historians can walk past things like this all day and never take the slightest bit of notice.
Never trust a historian who can't see what is right in front of his fucking nose.
But check out this war memorial (in Burwood). The inscription at the top says "Thanks be unto God who gave us the victory".
That tells me that we were once a religious country, given how many memorials are dotted around the country with similar sentiments. Try and raise a memorial these days with the word "God" on it and see how far you get.
Things like this are all around us, and they should remind us that our forebears were a lot more Godly than we are today. However, some people like to act like we were never a religious country, and that religion had no part to play in our history.
Well, here is a rather large fact, carved in stone and set in a prominent location - making it a bit hard to ignore. But modern revisionist historians can walk past things like this all day and never take the slightest bit of notice.
Never trust a historian who can't see what is right in front of his fucking nose.
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
How much culture is sufficient
I like to leave the odd comment over at Tim Blair. I would like to think that I recently coined a new phrase, describing the Policies of the Mungbeans as creating Potemkin villages of Aboriginal culture.
A Potemkin village has been described thusly:
The term is now widely used to describe elaborate and superficial constructions designed to pass official inspection, but lacking any real substance...
Well, as far as dinky-di Aboriginal culture goes, that sounds fairly good to me.
But perhaps we should be asking a deeper question - how much culture is enough?
J's background is Croatian. Her uncle is a tremendous supporter of the local Croatian club, which is presumably one of the favourite methods around here for preserving an element of Croat culture in Australia.
But what does that mean - "preserving some Croat culture?"
Having briefly studied her relatives, I think it includes the following:
I think they deliberately turned their back on Croatian culture because they didn't like what they saw before they left, and they split Croatia for a good reason - war, death, pestilence and all that sort of thing. They didn't like the things that their old culture led to, like lots of people being killed, so they took on a new culture - the Australian culture - which didn't get off on things like killing every Serb in artillery range.
The thing is though, people can live here for 5 or 6 generations and still hang onto many elements of their parent culture. Just look at the Chinese or Italians or Greeks that have been here for yonks. They're as Australian as me, with my British background (from about 150 years ago), yet they still follow many of their old cultural traditions when at home or at a festival.
Culture dies hard.
At least the core elements die hard. Various unimportant bits might be dropped pretty quickly when one culture meets another, but the core continues.
So how much Aboriginal culture is it necessary to hang onto in order for "Aboriginality" to survive? Do we need to have people living in communes in the middle of nowhere, supposedly with the aim of them keeping alive 100% of their cultural traditions? If muslims can move here from Iraq and manage to hang onto a huge swag of cultural baggage whilst living in Sydney or Melbourne, why do we think that Aboriginal culture is so fragile that it will not survive contact with the urbanised world?
If anything, we tend to be more worried about cultural traits amongst certain immigrants groups that have proven so resistant to elimination - like slicing bits off vaginas at an early age.
If people are really interested in maintaining their culture, they will go to extraordinary lengths to sustain it. Groups of like minded people will get together and form a club, subscribing funds towards buying a clubhouse. They'll spend inordinate amounts of time publishing newspapers in the old lingo, organising festivals, running language schools on the weekends, ensuring that the religion is sustained and all that sort of thing. Culture will only survive if the members of that culture want it to, and culture can survive in very hostile environments (just think about being a Christian in Iraq at the moment).
We should not presume that Aboriginal culture is so fragile that it needs to be put on life support in some socialist utopia cocoon in the middle of nowhere. If anything, these nirvanas are probably killing it off.
I'll know there is hope for it when I flick open the yellow pages one day and find that alongside the Gaelic Club and the Italian Club and the Macedonian Club, there is an Aboriginal Club.
Until then, all we can expect is for it to fade away to a hollow shell, listlessly subsiding in the Potemkin Villages of Culture.
A Potemkin village has been described thusly:
The term is now widely used to describe elaborate and superficial constructions designed to pass official inspection, but lacking any real substance...
Well, as far as dinky-di Aboriginal culture goes, that sounds fairly good to me.
But perhaps we should be asking a deeper question - how much culture is enough?
J's background is Croatian. Her uncle is a tremendous supporter of the local Croatian club, which is presumably one of the favourite methods around here for preserving an element of Croat culture in Australia.
But what does that mean - "preserving some Croat culture?"
Having briefly studied her relatives, I think it includes the following:
- knowing enough language to hold a conversation with grandma, who knows very little English
- being able to read a Croat newspaper (equivalent difficulty of say the Daily Telegraph)
- having a liking for traditional foods - but not necessarily be able to prepare them (that's what grandma does)
- attending the appropriate church on a regular basis (ie, more than Easter and Christmas)
- drinking too much grappa at the club each week
- turning up at the various annual festivals and knowing how to do a few of the old dances
I think they deliberately turned their back on Croatian culture because they didn't like what they saw before they left, and they split Croatia for a good reason - war, death, pestilence and all that sort of thing. They didn't like the things that their old culture led to, like lots of people being killed, so they took on a new culture - the Australian culture - which didn't get off on things like killing every Serb in artillery range.
The thing is though, people can live here for 5 or 6 generations and still hang onto many elements of their parent culture. Just look at the Chinese or Italians or Greeks that have been here for yonks. They're as Australian as me, with my British background (from about 150 years ago), yet they still follow many of their old cultural traditions when at home or at a festival.
Culture dies hard.
At least the core elements die hard. Various unimportant bits might be dropped pretty quickly when one culture meets another, but the core continues.
So how much Aboriginal culture is it necessary to hang onto in order for "Aboriginality" to survive? Do we need to have people living in communes in the middle of nowhere, supposedly with the aim of them keeping alive 100% of their cultural traditions? If muslims can move here from Iraq and manage to hang onto a huge swag of cultural baggage whilst living in Sydney or Melbourne, why do we think that Aboriginal culture is so fragile that it will not survive contact with the urbanised world?
If anything, we tend to be more worried about cultural traits amongst certain immigrants groups that have proven so resistant to elimination - like slicing bits off vaginas at an early age.
If people are really interested in maintaining their culture, they will go to extraordinary lengths to sustain it. Groups of like minded people will get together and form a club, subscribing funds towards buying a clubhouse. They'll spend inordinate amounts of time publishing newspapers in the old lingo, organising festivals, running language schools on the weekends, ensuring that the religion is sustained and all that sort of thing. Culture will only survive if the members of that culture want it to, and culture can survive in very hostile environments (just think about being a Christian in Iraq at the moment).
We should not presume that Aboriginal culture is so fragile that it needs to be put on life support in some socialist utopia cocoon in the middle of nowhere. If anything, these nirvanas are probably killing it off.
I'll know there is hope for it when I flick open the yellow pages one day and find that alongside the Gaelic Club and the Italian Club and the Macedonian Club, there is an Aboriginal Club.
Until then, all we can expect is for it to fade away to a hollow shell, listlessly subsiding in the Potemkin Villages of Culture.
Monday, 18 February 2008
Government
Why is it that you often read of "government advisors" in the press, but never hear about the following job descriptions:
- Government Decision Maker
- Government Buck Stops Here
Sunday, 17 February 2008
How useful are you?
Mirande Devine rightly puts the boot into the idiotic Jenny Macklin today in the SMH:
Why, asked Kerry O'Brien, had the Government made housing the priority of its new policy commission on indigenous disadvantage?
On the other hand, I have friends who have lived in rather small weatherboard houses - accommodation that must rank as a much worse alternative - who have lived a normal family existence.
The quality of the housing stock that you live in does not appear to be a good indicator to me of how well your children will perform at school (assuming you bother to send them to one), how much money you earn or how many times DOCS comes knocking at your door.
I reckon if some horrible disaster struck Five Wog and we were all forced to live in a tent city erected on one of the local parks, that life would go on much as before. It would be harder, but the kids would still go to school, I would still go to work, and things like washing, homework, cooking and all the rest of it would continue to be done on a daily basis.
I can state that because I have spent several months living under canvas, cooking in the open air, crapping in an outdoor latrine dug into the ground, and working off a trestle table and reading by a gas lantern at night. Yes, showers are not as comfortable when they are cold and only last 3 minutes and have to be taken under a showerhead strung from a tree, and it's a pain to queue up to do a bundle of laundry at the communal washing machine, but it's not an excuse for sitting on your bum doing nothing.
There would of course be some people that would sit around on their arse all day, expecting "the government" to do everything for them. That's just human nature - on the great bell curve of life, there are those that make things happen, those that watch things happen and those that go "what the fuck just happened?"
Personally, unless they were 90 years old (like my neighbour) or struggling with a bunch of kids under the age of 5, I'd leave them sitting there - once they get hungry and cold enough, they might get off their arse and do something about it.
On the other hand, having worked with some world class whingers that wouldn't work in an iron lung, I think all that would happen is that the volume of whinging would steadily increase until those of us that had been working all day got sick of it and went and helped them out. Probably by whacking them over the head with a shovel.
Why, asked Kerry O'Brien, had the Government made housing the priority of its new policy commission on indigenous disadvantage?
"So that children can sleep safely at night, so that kids can do their homework in the afternoon, so that mothers and fathers can get ready for work the next day," she said.
What planet is she talking about where bricks and mortar can create such miracles?
How right she is. Housing is not the problem. The problem is the behaviour of the people residing in that housing. We've spent billions over the past decade on building very nice brick and tile houses for poor trash, both black and white, and the behaviour of the recipients of much of that largess has not improved one iota.On the other hand, I have friends who have lived in rather small weatherboard houses - accommodation that must rank as a much worse alternative - who have lived a normal family existence.
The quality of the housing stock that you live in does not appear to be a good indicator to me of how well your children will perform at school (assuming you bother to send them to one), how much money you earn or how many times DOCS comes knocking at your door.
I reckon if some horrible disaster struck Five Wog and we were all forced to live in a tent city erected on one of the local parks, that life would go on much as before. It would be harder, but the kids would still go to school, I would still go to work, and things like washing, homework, cooking and all the rest of it would continue to be done on a daily basis.
I can state that because I have spent several months living under canvas, cooking in the open air, crapping in an outdoor latrine dug into the ground, and working off a trestle table and reading by a gas lantern at night. Yes, showers are not as comfortable when they are cold and only last 3 minutes and have to be taken under a showerhead strung from a tree, and it's a pain to queue up to do a bundle of laundry at the communal washing machine, but it's not an excuse for sitting on your bum doing nothing.
There would of course be some people that would sit around on their arse all day, expecting "the government" to do everything for them. That's just human nature - on the great bell curve of life, there are those that make things happen, those that watch things happen and those that go "what the fuck just happened?"
Personally, unless they were 90 years old (like my neighbour) or struggling with a bunch of kids under the age of 5, I'd leave them sitting there - once they get hungry and cold enough, they might get off their arse and do something about it.
On the other hand, having worked with some world class whingers that wouldn't work in an iron lung, I think all that would happen is that the volume of whinging would steadily increase until those of us that had been working all day got sick of it and went and helped them out. Probably by whacking them over the head with a shovel.
Local government 101
Why does the media have such a problem reporting the plight of many aboriginals?
Partly because they fly in and fly out and have a very limited amount of time to grab a story - and they want a story with plenty of blood - something that will generate a headline with a bit of luck. They need a story with a strong emotional hook, and have no interest in something as boring as the machinations of local government.
Local government is generally laughed at as a repository of lots of little wanna-be Napoleons and ridiculously jumped up shopkeepers, but it's the layer of government that probably has more impact on your life than the other two.
The federal government could probably all decamp to Tasmania for a decade and we probably wouldn't notice that they've gone. But if the local council is a day late in collecting the garbage, you'll know all about it.
Here's something interesting - I have been in contact with various arms of government for multifarious reasons over the last 10 years, and I've found time and time again that the local mob are the most responsive. The mayor and the councillors and probably most of the staff live here. They care about say the state of the local park as much as I do - because they use it to. We share common vested interests, and when they intersect, things happen remarkably quickly.
State governments are more removed from the local action, and by definition, the commonwealth mob are so removed, they might as well be operating from Moonbase Alpha.
Here in whitey-land (as in that part of Australia inhabited largely by white or yellow people of some description), local government gets things done because that is their job. If I ask the Council to fix a pot hole in our street, they don't ask me which family I am member of, which party I voted for at the last election or whether I am a drinking buddy of a councillor. They just fix the flipping thing, because most of us are treated reasonably equally most of the time.
I'm not saying that a bit of favouritism isn't applied from time to time - human nature says that favours will be done in all organisations at all levels. However, basic service delivery is not predicated on you being on the right side of the Mayor. I can sling as much shit at the greasy little bastard as I like, and my rubbish will still be emptied once a week. That's the nature of things. Service delivery is as apolitical as it can be made.
In short, we do not suffer from the "big man" syndrome here in whitey-land. The idea of paramount chiefs or lords doling out favours on a whim disappeared from our culture so long ago, we are no longer able to accept that such a thing exists in any human society. We've grown up believing that the rest of the planet is as polite and civilised as we are.
Well, sorry to break it to you, but most of the planet runs on the spoils system. Why is Kenya in the shit at the moment? Because the mob that are in power, and have been raping the state for the last 30 years, have been unelected, and they don't want to let go of the piggy bank. They've been doling out fat to their supporters, and only their supporters, for years. Those that have benefited don't want to give up the spoils either.
The big man still exists in Australia, but only in blackfella-land. I guess we rationalise it by dropping it in "culture" bucket - as in, "It's ok if they do that - it's part of their culture".
Funny how the activities that we have long accepted of some Aboriginal big men would get a white man locked up for about 50 offences involving corruption, nepotism, favouritism and all the other -isms that I can't think of right now.
Maybe it's time the tilty heads woke up to the fact that one reason why we have an advanced society is because we ditched the idea of the big man a long time ago. It is an impediment to progress. If you go to an aboriginal community and find that some people are living very well (thank you very much) whilst others are suffering all sorts of appalling deprivation, it's a sure sign of the big man syndrome in operation, because the big man always creams off plenty for himself and his family (leaving a much smaller cake for the plebs).
I would not be surprised to find the 80/20 rule operating in a lot of fucked-up communities - 80% of the resources are gobbled up by 20% of the ruling elite, leaving the remaining 80% of the people to get by on 20% of the cake.
Socialists and their ilk are always raving about income distribution and how skewed it is in white society (the paypackets of CEO's vs the average worker), but they've never bothered to study real income distribution in an aboriginal community. I'm not talking about what people get paid officially - I'm talking about what they end up with in reality after various nefarious schemes and lurks have redistributed the money. And I don't mean redistrbution along the lines of our progressive tax system - I mean redistribution from the have-nots to the haves, and from the poor to the rich. I'm sure a reverse Robin Hood is in action in a lot of these places.
Think I'm barmy? How else can you explain how so much money can be tipped into these places, yet there is so little to show for it (apart from some very new and shiny Landcruisers and aircraft being bought on a regular basis by the select few).
You want to fix up some of these shit holes? Give the people the same type of local government that you and I are used to. If that means smashing up the "culture" then so be it. We did it to ourselves a few hundred years ago, and the results were good. Why are we so hesitant to demolish the worst aspects of aboriginal culture?
What's good enough for white people is good enough for black people.
Partly because they fly in and fly out and have a very limited amount of time to grab a story - and they want a story with plenty of blood - something that will generate a headline with a bit of luck. They need a story with a strong emotional hook, and have no interest in something as boring as the machinations of local government.
Local government is generally laughed at as a repository of lots of little wanna-be Napoleons and ridiculously jumped up shopkeepers, but it's the layer of government that probably has more impact on your life than the other two.
The federal government could probably all decamp to Tasmania for a decade and we probably wouldn't notice that they've gone. But if the local council is a day late in collecting the garbage, you'll know all about it.
Here's something interesting - I have been in contact with various arms of government for multifarious reasons over the last 10 years, and I've found time and time again that the local mob are the most responsive. The mayor and the councillors and probably most of the staff live here. They care about say the state of the local park as much as I do - because they use it to. We share common vested interests, and when they intersect, things happen remarkably quickly.
State governments are more removed from the local action, and by definition, the commonwealth mob are so removed, they might as well be operating from Moonbase Alpha.
Here in whitey-land (as in that part of Australia inhabited largely by white or yellow people of some description), local government gets things done because that is their job. If I ask the Council to fix a pot hole in our street, they don't ask me which family I am member of, which party I voted for at the last election or whether I am a drinking buddy of a councillor. They just fix the flipping thing, because most of us are treated reasonably equally most of the time.
I'm not saying that a bit of favouritism isn't applied from time to time - human nature says that favours will be done in all organisations at all levels. However, basic service delivery is not predicated on you being on the right side of the Mayor. I can sling as much shit at the greasy little bastard as I like, and my rubbish will still be emptied once a week. That's the nature of things. Service delivery is as apolitical as it can be made.
In short, we do not suffer from the "big man" syndrome here in whitey-land. The idea of paramount chiefs or lords doling out favours on a whim disappeared from our culture so long ago, we are no longer able to accept that such a thing exists in any human society. We've grown up believing that the rest of the planet is as polite and civilised as we are.
Well, sorry to break it to you, but most of the planet runs on the spoils system. Why is Kenya in the shit at the moment? Because the mob that are in power, and have been raping the state for the last 30 years, have been unelected, and they don't want to let go of the piggy bank. They've been doling out fat to their supporters, and only their supporters, for years. Those that have benefited don't want to give up the spoils either.
The big man still exists in Australia, but only in blackfella-land. I guess we rationalise it by dropping it in "culture" bucket - as in, "It's ok if they do that - it's part of their culture".
Funny how the activities that we have long accepted of some Aboriginal big men would get a white man locked up for about 50 offences involving corruption, nepotism, favouritism and all the other -isms that I can't think of right now.
Maybe it's time the tilty heads woke up to the fact that one reason why we have an advanced society is because we ditched the idea of the big man a long time ago. It is an impediment to progress. If you go to an aboriginal community and find that some people are living very well (thank you very much) whilst others are suffering all sorts of appalling deprivation, it's a sure sign of the big man syndrome in operation, because the big man always creams off plenty for himself and his family (leaving a much smaller cake for the plebs).
I would not be surprised to find the 80/20 rule operating in a lot of fucked-up communities - 80% of the resources are gobbled up by 20% of the ruling elite, leaving the remaining 80% of the people to get by on 20% of the cake.
Socialists and their ilk are always raving about income distribution and how skewed it is in white society (the paypackets of CEO's vs the average worker), but they've never bothered to study real income distribution in an aboriginal community. I'm not talking about what people get paid officially - I'm talking about what they end up with in reality after various nefarious schemes and lurks have redistributed the money. And I don't mean redistrbution along the lines of our progressive tax system - I mean redistribution from the have-nots to the haves, and from the poor to the rich. I'm sure a reverse Robin Hood is in action in a lot of these places.
Think I'm barmy? How else can you explain how so much money can be tipped into these places, yet there is so little to show for it (apart from some very new and shiny Landcruisers and aircraft being bought on a regular basis by the select few).
You want to fix up some of these shit holes? Give the people the same type of local government that you and I are used to. If that means smashing up the "culture" then so be it. We did it to ourselves a few hundred years ago, and the results were good. Why are we so hesitant to demolish the worst aspects of aboriginal culture?
What's good enough for white people is good enough for black people.
Saturday, 16 February 2008
The past is a third world country
The whole "sorry" thing is an exercise in judging the actions of the past by the conditions of the present.
And that, my friends, is frogshit.
The past is the past. The conditions of the day that motivated people to do certain things are different to the conditions of today. Lefties always go on about "context", but I am yet to hear anyone use that word when it comes to saying sorry. Context has become the dirty word as far as the sorry shock troops are concerned.
I hate using the "c" word as well, since I think it has been horribly overused, so I will not use it again. But keep it in the back of your mind.
I'll start with an analogy. When I was a student 20 years ago, this was our idea of a pretty flash car. A 1979 Commodore, three speed auto with a 3.3 litre carby engine. Out of all the cars my friends had, it was the only one to have air conditioning.
Until Trendyman wrote his off by smashing it into a tree in Kings Park (during what I suspect was a blowjob), it was the ducks nuts of cars in our troupe.
But look at it now. If you told a kiddie these days that a friend owned this car, they'd look at you oddly and then say, "What the hell were you thinking?" By the standards of today, it is a total bucket of shit. The engine was underpowered, the styling attrocious, it had the handling characteristics of a delivery van and the interior was designed by bogans. It also lacked ABS, cruise control, climate control, an MP3 player and possibly power steering (I don't recall any of our cars back then having cruise control - I think obesity became a problem when we stopped having to work hard to park our cars).
In 20 years, our country has come a long way. We are much, much richer than we were back in 1987. Engineering improvements have delivered incredible jumps in the standard of the things that we have at our fingertips. Humble items like washing machines have more computing power than the XT computers that I did my uni work on back in '87.
The era that I grew up in is quite different from today in terms of attitudes, wealth, technology, communications and all that. The only thing that doesn't seem to have changed is that people are still beastly to each other.
If you consider how much has changed in 20 years, then try and think how much things have changed since the 1930's.
The 1930's might as well be a different country. If today is Australia, the 1930's are Kenya, Uganda or perhaps the highlands of PNG. We are talking about a country that by the standards of today, would be considered decidely third world. A simple thing to imagine is that the street outside your house is unpaved gravel, rather than tarmac (this does not apply if you are living on a farm).
If you think that's a bit of a stretch, I recently looked at some photos of Haberfield, which is a very nice suburb just around the corner. It's hard to buy a 3 bedroom house there for under a million bucks. It was one of the first "garden suburbs" to be developed in Australia. All the streets in the photos are gravel, and the blocks had laneways at the back for the dunny cart.
If your definition of the first world is where your shit gets taken away in a bucket by a horse drawn cart, then you need to update your view of the world. If you look at all the indicators of wealth that define a modern country today - the percentage of kids that go to secondary school, infant mortality rates, the prevalence of certain diseases, percentage of income spent on food, square metres of living space per person, access to clean drinking water and a proper sewerage system, then by any definition, my parents grew up in a third world country.
Most people walked to work. The last place I saw that was South Africa in 1994, and the only people walking to work were the blacks who lived in mud houses without electricity on the outskirts of the towns. (I recall driving past entire villages at night that failed to show a single light. Once the sun went down, everyone went to bed. It was like medieval England).
The infant mortality rate had dropped quite substantially by 1930, but in 1900, it was up around where the Congo is today, and the Congo is a country completely fucked by civil war, misgovernment and banditry.
Steam trains were the high-tech way to get around.
Most cooking was still done with wood fired stoves. Gas and electric cooking would not make serious inroads into the middle class home until after WWII. Again, the last time I saw a lot of people cooking at home over a wood fired stove was in Soweto, which we drove into by accident.
Drugs like penicillin had not been invented. Medicine was still pretty crude. Most homes did not have a telephone. Mum grew up on a farm out in the wheatbelt, and it was pretty much on the edge of civilisation - if not beyond it. The walls of the house were made of hessian, the uprights of bush poles. Meat was kept in a meat safe - refrigeration was beyond their reach. Hot water did not come out of a tap - it came out of a kettle that you boiled over a fire. Given that she grew up during the Depression, her experience was probably a little rougher than that had by many, but not untypical.
But note that she still grew up with a good education - good enough to get a Masters degree later in life. Her handwriting is beautiful to behold - far better than mine. She is a human calculator - I think my generation are the last of a breed that can add up a supermarket docket in their head - and she leaves me for dead when it comes to spelling, grammar and punctuation.
I mention these things because although both my parents grew up in environments that would no doubt be defined as "deprived" these days, they turned out to be tough, self-reliant, well adjusted people, and they have gone on to achieve a lot in their lives, including bringing up me and my siblings as succesful, happy, well adjusted people (although sometimes my rantings might give you reason to question that last item).
They did things differently back then. They thought differently. They acted differently, because it was a different country to the one we live in today.
Take Dad. He dropped out of school because WWII had been declared, and he knew that he would be signing up, along with every other male of his age - and he figured that if WWI was any guide, a lot of them would not be coming back, so doing the year 12 exams did not rate high on his list of priorities.
Imagine that - every 17 year old male knowing that they had a duty to serve, even after living with the results of WWI for their entire lives up until then. Fathers and uncles that did not return from France, neighbours hopping around on one leg and some crutches, or the local shopkeeper with only one arm. The enormous repatriation hospitals housing thousands of those that had been gassed or too badly wounded to live a normal life. Seeing men with one arm or one leg was the norm - not an oddity.
And you know what? They all went and queued up and off they went, and thankfully most of them came back in one piece.
But I digress. Or do I? Can you imagine the same thing happening today? Do we live in a country that contains hundreds of thousands of patriotic young Australians who are willing to risk it all for freedom?
I hope we do. I grew up as one of them, and I'd like to think that I grew up with people like that. But I sometimes think that we are a shrinking breed, slowly being squeezed out of existence by the social engineers with the tilty heads.
Those young men and women who queued up at the recruitment centres back in 1939, 1940 and 1941 like my father, his brother and pretty much everyone they knew, looked at the world differently to the way we see it today. Sure, they think a bit differently today to how they thought in 1940, but that's because they have adapted and changed as the world has changed around them. But the reasons for why they did the things they did back then have not changed, because those things were done back then - 60 years ago or more. The reasons have not changed or adapted over that time, because the decisions were made with respect to the thinking,the culture, the attitudes, the technology and the resources that existed at that time.
Once a decision is made, it is made. You can't go back later on and change the reasoning behind why you made that choice. The reasoning is fixed in stone, cemented in the time in which that decision was made.
People have such a bad habit of looking at the past and deriding the decisions that were made because we think we know so much better today. But when you make a decision, you make it with the information you have at the time - not the information you have 50 years down the track. They say that the future is uncertain with good reason. We have no information about the future. We have information about the past, and information about now, but the future is guesswork. Judging the past is the height of intellectual masturbation.
I will wrap up with these thoughts. I have been through a lot of historical houses in my time, and it strikes me that the ones that we have kept are generally those of the elite of that time - we have preserved the houses that were owned by the equivalents of the 1890's Kerry Packer. There are some places around that are a bit further down the scale, but they were probably owned by the upper middle class - think of homes today that are worth say $1.5 million or more.
We have not preserved the hovels of the poor, and with good reason. As soon as we could afford it, we flattened them. Some of the inner city suburbs still have plenty of examples of where the poor white trash lived back in say 1920, but even they have been scrubbed up by bringing the toilet inside, adding a hot water system and a gas stove. Most of us have no conception of how the poor really lived 80 years ago, because we have done away with the shabby infrastructure which housed them. The rat infested, typhoid ridden shacks that made up most of The Rocks were flattened to build the Harbour Bridge. Several generations of renovators and rebuilders have flattened and rebuilt or gutted and renovated the warrens of the lower classes, and instead of a family of 10 living in a cramped, narrow two bedroom terrace, we now have a couple of trendy arty types luving it up in a gentrified existence in Newtown.
We don't see real poverty in the city anymore. You can see a bit of it if you want to - just visit the Block down at Redfern, but most people are not game to visit, since the chance of being mugged by a drug-fucked young fool seems to be abnormally high. The Block is shuttered away so that people like us can safely ignore it. And we do.
When I think of poverty, I think of the mental cases that you occasionally see wandering the streets of the CBD. They're usually drunk, they are badly dressed and filthy, they stink (generally having pissed in their clothes in their sleep, or even crapped in them) and they are all completely off their heads, hearing voices and talking back in an animated fashion. Those people are poor - they lack a roof over their heads, they can easily go hungry, they lack access to washing facilities and toilets and it is doubtful they will ever be gainfully employed.
Now, consider this. Almost all the nutbags are white. None are asian. Their accents indicate that they were born here - none seem to be immigrants. They are home grown nutters.
If one of them had a kid in tow - say four years old - would you think it appropriate to allow them to hang onto that kid?
I doubt it.
The kid would be whisked away before you could say 'boo', and you'd be hard pressed to find someone that would think that unfair and unwise.
Now travel down the road a bit to the park opposite Central. On most days, that park will contain up to a dozen blackfellas, who will be happily getting on the turps and pestering those passing by for change. Most of them appear to sleep rough. Like the white winos, they smell. Some have clearly fried all their remaining brain cells. The only difference between black and white drunks is that the whites seem to be happy on their own, whilst the blacks are a more sociable bunch. I might have to think on that one day.
But let's imagine that the gaggle of blackfellas also have a couple of 4 year old kids with them. Would we think it appropriate that they should continue to grow up in such a fashion? Or should the authorities take them away?
Let's assume that you have voted for removal.
Now transpose the scene to a 'township' out in the NT somewhere. The drunks are the same, except a bit dustier, and all the circumstances are the same except that there are no white people walking past every day. The place is entirely black, and whilst some people are making a go of it, they're constantly dragged down by their drunken, violent, destructive kith and kin.
Would we leave kids in that environment, or take them away?
Me, I'd be stuffing them on a bus and heading for a boarding school in Darwin as fast as the speed limit would allow. And I'd fight tooth and nail to stop the little buggers from escaping and running away to head back to a shit hole like that - a shit hole with no future. Who in their right mind would let them go back to that?
Whilst you ponder this, I'll add something else into the mix. Remember what I told you about the 'country' that my parents grew up in? Try and imagine what the black townships looked like before the government started pouring in money for housing, Landcruisers, phones, electricity, water supplies, sewerage, schools, medical centres, roads, washing machines, sinks, beds, kitchen tables, chairs, fridges and all the other things that we take for granted today.
Imagine growing up in a place without any of that stuff, but instead of growing up with religious, deeply moral and hardworking parents that have very little (like my parents), imagine growing up surrounded by drunks, raised by your mum because your dad has shot through, and without a welfare system to support you, your mum and your sibblings.
I don't have a problem with anyone being removed from a place like that, no matter what their colour.
So all I can say Kevin, is that you can stick your sorry up your arse.
And that, my friends, is frogshit.
The past is the past. The conditions of the day that motivated people to do certain things are different to the conditions of today. Lefties always go on about "context", but I am yet to hear anyone use that word when it comes to saying sorry. Context has become the dirty word as far as the sorry shock troops are concerned.
I hate using the "c" word as well, since I think it has been horribly overused, so I will not use it again. But keep it in the back of your mind.
I'll start with an analogy. When I was a student 20 years ago, this was our idea of a pretty flash car. A 1979 Commodore, three speed auto with a 3.3 litre carby engine. Out of all the cars my friends had, it was the only one to have air conditioning.
Until Trendyman wrote his off by smashing it into a tree in Kings Park (during what I suspect was a blowjob), it was the ducks nuts of cars in our troupe.
But look at it now. If you told a kiddie these days that a friend owned this car, they'd look at you oddly and then say, "What the hell were you thinking?" By the standards of today, it is a total bucket of shit. The engine was underpowered, the styling attrocious, it had the handling characteristics of a delivery van and the interior was designed by bogans. It also lacked ABS, cruise control, climate control, an MP3 player and possibly power steering (I don't recall any of our cars back then having cruise control - I think obesity became a problem when we stopped having to work hard to park our cars).
In 20 years, our country has come a long way. We are much, much richer than we were back in 1987. Engineering improvements have delivered incredible jumps in the standard of the things that we have at our fingertips. Humble items like washing machines have more computing power than the XT computers that I did my uni work on back in '87.
The era that I grew up in is quite different from today in terms of attitudes, wealth, technology, communications and all that. The only thing that doesn't seem to have changed is that people are still beastly to each other.
If you consider how much has changed in 20 years, then try and think how much things have changed since the 1930's.
The 1930's might as well be a different country. If today is Australia, the 1930's are Kenya, Uganda or perhaps the highlands of PNG. We are talking about a country that by the standards of today, would be considered decidely third world. A simple thing to imagine is that the street outside your house is unpaved gravel, rather than tarmac (this does not apply if you are living on a farm).
If you think that's a bit of a stretch, I recently looked at some photos of Haberfield, which is a very nice suburb just around the corner. It's hard to buy a 3 bedroom house there for under a million bucks. It was one of the first "garden suburbs" to be developed in Australia. All the streets in the photos are gravel, and the blocks had laneways at the back for the dunny cart.
If your definition of the first world is where your shit gets taken away in a bucket by a horse drawn cart, then you need to update your view of the world. If you look at all the indicators of wealth that define a modern country today - the percentage of kids that go to secondary school, infant mortality rates, the prevalence of certain diseases, percentage of income spent on food, square metres of living space per person, access to clean drinking water and a proper sewerage system, then by any definition, my parents grew up in a third world country.
Most people walked to work. The last place I saw that was South Africa in 1994, and the only people walking to work were the blacks who lived in mud houses without electricity on the outskirts of the towns. (I recall driving past entire villages at night that failed to show a single light. Once the sun went down, everyone went to bed. It was like medieval England).
The infant mortality rate had dropped quite substantially by 1930, but in 1900, it was up around where the Congo is today, and the Congo is a country completely fucked by civil war, misgovernment and banditry.
Steam trains were the high-tech way to get around.
Most cooking was still done with wood fired stoves. Gas and electric cooking would not make serious inroads into the middle class home until after WWII. Again, the last time I saw a lot of people cooking at home over a wood fired stove was in Soweto, which we drove into by accident.
Drugs like penicillin had not been invented. Medicine was still pretty crude. Most homes did not have a telephone. Mum grew up on a farm out in the wheatbelt, and it was pretty much on the edge of civilisation - if not beyond it. The walls of the house were made of hessian, the uprights of bush poles. Meat was kept in a meat safe - refrigeration was beyond their reach. Hot water did not come out of a tap - it came out of a kettle that you boiled over a fire. Given that she grew up during the Depression, her experience was probably a little rougher than that had by many, but not untypical.
But note that she still grew up with a good education - good enough to get a Masters degree later in life. Her handwriting is beautiful to behold - far better than mine. She is a human calculator - I think my generation are the last of a breed that can add up a supermarket docket in their head - and she leaves me for dead when it comes to spelling, grammar and punctuation.
I mention these things because although both my parents grew up in environments that would no doubt be defined as "deprived" these days, they turned out to be tough, self-reliant, well adjusted people, and they have gone on to achieve a lot in their lives, including bringing up me and my siblings as succesful, happy, well adjusted people (although sometimes my rantings might give you reason to question that last item).
They did things differently back then. They thought differently. They acted differently, because it was a different country to the one we live in today.
Take Dad. He dropped out of school because WWII had been declared, and he knew that he would be signing up, along with every other male of his age - and he figured that if WWI was any guide, a lot of them would not be coming back, so doing the year 12 exams did not rate high on his list of priorities.
Imagine that - every 17 year old male knowing that they had a duty to serve, even after living with the results of WWI for their entire lives up until then. Fathers and uncles that did not return from France, neighbours hopping around on one leg and some crutches, or the local shopkeeper with only one arm. The enormous repatriation hospitals housing thousands of those that had been gassed or too badly wounded to live a normal life. Seeing men with one arm or one leg was the norm - not an oddity.
And you know what? They all went and queued up and off they went, and thankfully most of them came back in one piece.
But I digress. Or do I? Can you imagine the same thing happening today? Do we live in a country that contains hundreds of thousands of patriotic young Australians who are willing to risk it all for freedom?
I hope we do. I grew up as one of them, and I'd like to think that I grew up with people like that. But I sometimes think that we are a shrinking breed, slowly being squeezed out of existence by the social engineers with the tilty heads.
Those young men and women who queued up at the recruitment centres back in 1939, 1940 and 1941 like my father, his brother and pretty much everyone they knew, looked at the world differently to the way we see it today. Sure, they think a bit differently today to how they thought in 1940, but that's because they have adapted and changed as the world has changed around them. But the reasons for why they did the things they did back then have not changed, because those things were done back then - 60 years ago or more. The reasons have not changed or adapted over that time, because the decisions were made with respect to the thinking,the culture, the attitudes, the technology and the resources that existed at that time.
Once a decision is made, it is made. You can't go back later on and change the reasoning behind why you made that choice. The reasoning is fixed in stone, cemented in the time in which that decision was made.
People have such a bad habit of looking at the past and deriding the decisions that were made because we think we know so much better today. But when you make a decision, you make it with the information you have at the time - not the information you have 50 years down the track. They say that the future is uncertain with good reason. We have no information about the future. We have information about the past, and information about now, but the future is guesswork. Judging the past is the height of intellectual masturbation.
I will wrap up with these thoughts. I have been through a lot of historical houses in my time, and it strikes me that the ones that we have kept are generally those of the elite of that time - we have preserved the houses that were owned by the equivalents of the 1890's Kerry Packer. There are some places around that are a bit further down the scale, but they were probably owned by the upper middle class - think of homes today that are worth say $1.5 million or more.
We have not preserved the hovels of the poor, and with good reason. As soon as we could afford it, we flattened them. Some of the inner city suburbs still have plenty of examples of where the poor white trash lived back in say 1920, but even they have been scrubbed up by bringing the toilet inside, adding a hot water system and a gas stove. Most of us have no conception of how the poor really lived 80 years ago, because we have done away with the shabby infrastructure which housed them. The rat infested, typhoid ridden shacks that made up most of The Rocks were flattened to build the Harbour Bridge. Several generations of renovators and rebuilders have flattened and rebuilt or gutted and renovated the warrens of the lower classes, and instead of a family of 10 living in a cramped, narrow two bedroom terrace, we now have a couple of trendy arty types luving it up in a gentrified existence in Newtown.
We don't see real poverty in the city anymore. You can see a bit of it if you want to - just visit the Block down at Redfern, but most people are not game to visit, since the chance of being mugged by a drug-fucked young fool seems to be abnormally high. The Block is shuttered away so that people like us can safely ignore it. And we do.
When I think of poverty, I think of the mental cases that you occasionally see wandering the streets of the CBD. They're usually drunk, they are badly dressed and filthy, they stink (generally having pissed in their clothes in their sleep, or even crapped in them) and they are all completely off their heads, hearing voices and talking back in an animated fashion. Those people are poor - they lack a roof over their heads, they can easily go hungry, they lack access to washing facilities and toilets and it is doubtful they will ever be gainfully employed.
Now, consider this. Almost all the nutbags are white. None are asian. Their accents indicate that they were born here - none seem to be immigrants. They are home grown nutters.
If one of them had a kid in tow - say four years old - would you think it appropriate to allow them to hang onto that kid?
I doubt it.
The kid would be whisked away before you could say 'boo', and you'd be hard pressed to find someone that would think that unfair and unwise.
Now travel down the road a bit to the park opposite Central. On most days, that park will contain up to a dozen blackfellas, who will be happily getting on the turps and pestering those passing by for change. Most of them appear to sleep rough. Like the white winos, they smell. Some have clearly fried all their remaining brain cells. The only difference between black and white drunks is that the whites seem to be happy on their own, whilst the blacks are a more sociable bunch. I might have to think on that one day.
But let's imagine that the gaggle of blackfellas also have a couple of 4 year old kids with them. Would we think it appropriate that they should continue to grow up in such a fashion? Or should the authorities take them away?
Let's assume that you have voted for removal.
Now transpose the scene to a 'township' out in the NT somewhere. The drunks are the same, except a bit dustier, and all the circumstances are the same except that there are no white people walking past every day. The place is entirely black, and whilst some people are making a go of it, they're constantly dragged down by their drunken, violent, destructive kith and kin.
Would we leave kids in that environment, or take them away?
Me, I'd be stuffing them on a bus and heading for a boarding school in Darwin as fast as the speed limit would allow. And I'd fight tooth and nail to stop the little buggers from escaping and running away to head back to a shit hole like that - a shit hole with no future. Who in their right mind would let them go back to that?
Whilst you ponder this, I'll add something else into the mix. Remember what I told you about the 'country' that my parents grew up in? Try and imagine what the black townships looked like before the government started pouring in money for housing, Landcruisers, phones, electricity, water supplies, sewerage, schools, medical centres, roads, washing machines, sinks, beds, kitchen tables, chairs, fridges and all the other things that we take for granted today.
Imagine growing up in a place without any of that stuff, but instead of growing up with religious, deeply moral and hardworking parents that have very little (like my parents), imagine growing up surrounded by drunks, raised by your mum because your dad has shot through, and without a welfare system to support you, your mum and your sibblings.
I don't have a problem with anyone being removed from a place like that, no matter what their colour.
So all I can say Kevin, is that you can stick your sorry up your arse.
Friday, 15 February 2008
Silencing the chattering classes
Rudd is a sly dog.
He's found a way to silence the chattering classes. Or at least a method to stop them from yelling abuse at him.
Keating must have given him some advice - that the greatest threat to his government in the early days would be from the Left, not the opposition. He had to shut the left up, or their raucous demands would drown out the message of competence etc that the government would be preaching.
He's shut them up now, so he is preaching to a quiet, somnolescent audience. They gaze upon the Messiah in rapture.
Whaling, Kyoto and now Sorry are three relatively cheap ways of giving the dog a bone. Yes, I can call Kyoto cheap because now that Rudd has "done something" by signing the protocol, he can actually forget about it for a year or two. Since Lefties believe that fairy dust will magically step in now to save the planet, the government can do nothing whilst appearing to do something. A couple of lefties might wake from their Rudd-induced slumber in a few years and wonder why our CO2 emmissions are not declining, but at least he has bought their peace and quiet until then.
The same with whaling. Plenty of nice headlines for very little outlay. That story has a fantastic cost/benefit ratio.
Same with Sorry. Again, he can do nothing for a few years now and the left will stay off his back, because to then, Sorry was the main issue. Doing something concrete was not the main issue. Symbolism is more important to them than action (like beating drums to ward off bushfires instead of bulldozing firetrails), and he has given them the symbolism they crave. So what if mainstream Australia doesn't give a fuck? The left has been silenced.
The left is like a fat chick. They've been ignored for a long time. Fat chicks absolutely adore men who have sex with them.
Rudd's screwed the fat chick three times now, and the fat chick is in love. Or should I say, luuurve. They've fallen for him hard. He's such a consumate performer, he didn't even feel the need to wear a paper bag. I reckon he's got two years at least before the fat chick works out she's been conned.
Hang on, they're lefties. They'll never work out they're being conned.
He's found a way to silence the chattering classes. Or at least a method to stop them from yelling abuse at him.
Keating must have given him some advice - that the greatest threat to his government in the early days would be from the Left, not the opposition. He had to shut the left up, or their raucous demands would drown out the message of competence etc that the government would be preaching.
He's shut them up now, so he is preaching to a quiet, somnolescent audience. They gaze upon the Messiah in rapture.
Whaling, Kyoto and now Sorry are three relatively cheap ways of giving the dog a bone. Yes, I can call Kyoto cheap because now that Rudd has "done something" by signing the protocol, he can actually forget about it for a year or two. Since Lefties believe that fairy dust will magically step in now to save the planet, the government can do nothing whilst appearing to do something. A couple of lefties might wake from their Rudd-induced slumber in a few years and wonder why our CO2 emmissions are not declining, but at least he has bought their peace and quiet until then.
The same with whaling. Plenty of nice headlines for very little outlay. That story has a fantastic cost/benefit ratio.
Same with Sorry. Again, he can do nothing for a few years now and the left will stay off his back, because to then, Sorry was the main issue. Doing something concrete was not the main issue. Symbolism is more important to them than action (like beating drums to ward off bushfires instead of bulldozing firetrails), and he has given them the symbolism they crave. So what if mainstream Australia doesn't give a fuck? The left has been silenced.
The left is like a fat chick. They've been ignored for a long time. Fat chicks absolutely adore men who have sex with them.
Rudd's screwed the fat chick three times now, and the fat chick is in love. Or should I say, luuurve. They've fallen for him hard. He's such a consumate performer, he didn't even feel the need to wear a paper bag. I reckon he's got two years at least before the fat chick works out she's been conned.
Hang on, they're lefties. They'll never work out they're being conned.
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Conventions, rights and no obligations
Don't ask me why, but I had a sudden urge this morning to read the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Yes, there are times when I think I am going mad as well.
Here is one chunk of it:
But where are the obligations? Where does it say that if the state makes education available to all, that the child has an obligation to attend? An obligation to turn up on time? To pay attention and to not disrupt the class? To knuckle down and learn?
I re-read the convention from top to bottom, and looked for fine print, but couldn't find anything in there about obligations. I guess I could search the fullstops to see if they are in fact microdots containing text regarding obligations, but I don't have all day you know.
Madness.
I think that article of the convention is usually quietly forgotten about. Is there any education system in Australia where the schools are explicitly directed to teach children to respect their parents? I doubt it. Most of the leftist cant that passes for curriculums these days seems to be directed at undermining respect for parents and the national values of the country.
I'm glad I found this. Next time I am confronted by some sandal wearing, hemp be-decked soy-drinking "teacher", I will pull out this particular article and accuse him/her of "breaching the UN convention on the Rights of the Child". That should be sufficient to put the wind up them. God, can you imagine the look on the face of some mungbean eating, Socialist Left reading, bicycle riding weird beard when they are accused of breaching a UN convention? That would put them right up there with the likes of Slobodan Milosevic and George W Bush. Oh, the delicious irony.
Can't wait to try it out.
The thing is, that's not true.
There's nothing wrong with blackfellas growing up learning the language of their parents. J's parents came from Croatia, so she grew up with a bit of Croatian at home. I bet all the wog kids around here grow up being fairly fluent in one of the wog languages. Most of J's cousins went to Croatian school on the weekends to work on their language skills.
The thing is though, whilst her parents wanted her to know enough Croatian to get by (ie, to be able to talk to the relatives still living in the old country), it was more important to them for her to be fully fluent and conversant in English. That's the only way to get ahead in this country, and I bet that the next generation of relatives growing up in Croatia will all be pretty fluent in English, so there will be no need for anyone living here to learn the language. It's only needed to speak to the old ducks.
My point is that her cousins, who all seem to be very fluent, learnt the language by going to a special school for a few hours each weekend. That's all you need to get a reasonably grip on a language. You don't need to be immersed in it 24 hours a day for 18 years. Which is why I don't see why Aboriginal kids need to stay in their remote townships in order to get an education. They should be able to go to a boarding school in say Darwin or Brisbane and then get language lessons during the holidays (when they are home) or on weekends (if they are at boarding school).
Yes, there are times when I think I am going mad as well.
Here is one chunk of it:
Article 28
1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular:
(a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all;
(b) Encourage the development of different forms of secondary education, including general and vocational education, make them available and accessible to every child, and take appropriate measures such as the introduction of free education and offering financial assistance in case of need;
(c) Make higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means;
(d) Make educational and vocational information and guidance available and accessible to all children;
(e) Take measures to encourage regular attendance at schools and the reduction of drop-out rates.
2. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child's human dignity and in conformity with the present Convention.
Yes, plenty of lovely motherhood statements in there about the right to this and the right to that. Nothing that any right-thinking tilty headed person could object to. Because we have to think of the children.But where are the obligations? Where does it say that if the state makes education available to all, that the child has an obligation to attend? An obligation to turn up on time? To pay attention and to not disrupt the class? To knuckle down and learn?
I re-read the convention from top to bottom, and looked for fine print, but couldn't find anything in there about obligations. I guess I could search the fullstops to see if they are in fact microdots containing text regarding obligations, but I don't have all day you know.
Article 29
1. States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:
(a) The development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;
(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations;
(c) The development of respect for the child's parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different from his or her own;
(d) The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin;
(e) The development of respect for the natural environment.
Madness.
I love part (c):
(c) The development of respect for the child's parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living,I think that article of the convention is usually quietly forgotten about. Is there any education system in Australia where the schools are explicitly directed to teach children to respect their parents? I doubt it. Most of the leftist cant that passes for curriculums these days seems to be directed at undermining respect for parents and the national values of the country.
I'm glad I found this. Next time I am confronted by some sandal wearing, hemp be-decked soy-drinking "teacher", I will pull out this particular article and accuse him/her of "breaching the UN convention on the Rights of the Child". That should be sufficient to put the wind up them. God, can you imagine the look on the face of some mungbean eating, Socialist Left reading, bicycle riding weird beard when they are accused of breaching a UN convention? That would put them right up there with the likes of Slobodan Milosevic and George W Bush. Oh, the delicious irony.
Can't wait to try it out.
Article 30
In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities or persons of indigenous origin exist, a child belonging to such a minority or who is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to profess and practise his or her own religion, or to use his or her own language.
I think Article 30 has been taken too far by some who believe that Aboriginal children should be educated in their own language, or that they have to grown up in remote townships in order to fully enjoy their culture.
The thing is, that's not true.
There's nothing wrong with blackfellas growing up learning the language of their parents. J's parents came from Croatia, so she grew up with a bit of Croatian at home. I bet all the wog kids around here grow up being fairly fluent in one of the wog languages. Most of J's cousins went to Croatian school on the weekends to work on their language skills.
The thing is though, whilst her parents wanted her to know enough Croatian to get by (ie, to be able to talk to the relatives still living in the old country), it was more important to them for her to be fully fluent and conversant in English. That's the only way to get ahead in this country, and I bet that the next generation of relatives growing up in Croatia will all be pretty fluent in English, so there will be no need for anyone living here to learn the language. It's only needed to speak to the old ducks.
My point is that her cousins, who all seem to be very fluent, learnt the language by going to a special school for a few hours each weekend. That's all you need to get a reasonably grip on a language. You don't need to be immersed in it 24 hours a day for 18 years. Which is why I don't see why Aboriginal kids need to stay in their remote townships in order to get an education. They should be able to go to a boarding school in say Darwin or Brisbane and then get language lessons during the holidays (when they are home) or on weekends (if they are at boarding school).
Sunday, 10 February 2008
Some comments on Aboriginal culture
I think the next time someone says the words "Aborginal culture", I am going to lose it.
There never was a single "Aboriginal culture". There were dozens, if not hundreds of cultures, and I bet they were all pretty different from each other.
Why?
Because there were hundreds of different tribes, all speaking different languages. My bet is that if you speak a different language from the mob in the valley next door, you'll have a different culture.
Don't believe me? Then think about the French and us. Do we speak the same language?
No.
Do we share the same culture?
No.
Then why on earth would we think that all blackfellas would be part of this all encompassing "culture" of Aboriginality? It's bonkers.
If you want to take the French example a bit further, consider the fact that France is made up of many regions (or Departments if you want to use the right term) and each Department has it's own distinct culture. Consider say Burgundy vs Alsace. The French state has been around now for a few hundred years, and it is one of the strongest states around (and the most centralised), yet France still has a multitude of cultures. How can one think that in a country with no state, and therefor no centralised control, that a single culture could develop?
In other words, the use of the term "Aborginal culture" is frogshit.
Then we have religion. Different tribes followed different gods. Some worshipped a snake, others a croc and I guess some were into fish. When I think of how those religious practices must have co-existed, I think of Iraq today. It's bad enough with just shia and shiite. Imagine what it must have been like with a couple of hundred different deities. Constant religious warfare I would imagine, which might account for the lack of technological development. It's pretty hard to invent the wheel or writing when you're fighting fulltime with the Catholic nutters down the creek.
Then we have other cultural things, like dancing. Soft headed floppy brains always go all mushy between the ears when describing Aboriginal dance. To me, it looks like a bunch of Parkinson's patients shuffling around a ward. Or should that be Alzheimer's patients? Whatever. I am not impressed. I often get the feeling that most of those participating actually have no idea of the steps, and they are all keeping an eye on the one person that they think has some conception of what they should be doing in terms of footwork etc. Anyone that has participated in a school dance or musical would recognise the look.
Don't get me started on rock paintings. I took one look at the paintings in Arnhem Land and went "they're maps". There's nothing particularly special about most of them - ok, they look nice and all that, but they are in the main purely functional directions as to where to get a feed.
Or how not to become a feed for a croc.
If you don't believe me, try this. Imagine the route from your house to say the local bakery (or cafe or pub - whatever takes your fancy).
Now, try to describe how to get there without using any words. You draw pictures which are symbolic markers along the route.
So if there are plenty of barra in the waterhole that has three trees and an egg shaped rock next to it, you draw something like that. It's so simple, even I can understand it.
As a concept though, it seems to go right over the heads of the tilty-headed crowd. Maybe I'm used to the symbol idea because everytime I try a new bike route, I have to look out for bike symbols that have been stenciled on the tarmac.
If you're so bloody primitive that you don't have an alphabet, then drawing crude pictures of plants and animals as a guide to how to get fed is the next best thing. I could see the sense in climbing up onto a rocky outcrop in the middle of a broad valley and painting all the larder objects around me so that they could be explained to the next generation. I stood on a particular outcrop in Kakadu a couple of years ago and looked at the paintings and instantly had a pretty good idea of where to go fishing. And where not to go fishing.
I am sure that some soft-brained numbnut will get upset at me describing Aboriginal "culture" as such, but I fail to see why it has become off limits to take the occasional poke at it. Leftist commentators feel free to constantly have a go at US culture, or Australian culture, but as soon as you start prodding or poking at Aboriginal culture, the cry of "racism" goes up. It's not racism - it's criticism or analysis, and I see no reason why some "special" cultures should be off limits to a reasoned critique.
The problem with the tilty-heads is that they get all wrapped up in the "mystique" of these "ancient" cultures. I don't - I look at them in the same rather hard headed way that I look at the Catholic Church and Mormons and Scientologists. It's funny that the same people that go apeshit at Mormons and their "mad beliefs" in some sky fairy are the same people that go apeshit if someone dares to poke a stick at an ancient, mystical and wonderous emu dance, or tribal marriage ceremony.
My ancestors, who were Celtic and the like, ran around naked and painted their bodies with woad and sacrificed virgins in forest glades and worshipped the sun and were ministered to by druids and all that. I don't see that as mystical or magical or as being in harmony with Gaia and ley lines and all that - I just see a bunch of naked savages running around doing what naked, unlettered, unsophisticated savages do. It's not that long ago (in geological terms) since the rather sophisticated and civilised Romans turned up under Caesar and dragged most of my lot kicking and screaming into the "modern world" (as it was back then).
There are some nutters in western society who look longingly at Stonehenge and want to run around playacting as druids, dancing naked in the moonlight and muttering mystical chants in a long dead language, but they are rightly seen as nutters. Why is it then that as soon as a black man does it, it becomes a ceremony that is cloaked with reverance and awe? I am awed by a cathedral like St Paul's. I am not awed by a bunch of naked people shuffling around to some drums in the moonlight, no matter what the colour of their skin. Anyone that goes all misty-eyed at the thought of it should be stuffed in a straightjacket and locked in a rubber room.
Hell, I've run around naked in the moonlight with my mates, and I can tell you what it is. It's a hoot, particularly when you are drunk and 18. It's a great way to blow off steam and yahoo around like idiots. It's also a great way of keeping those annoying women away when you just want to hang out with the boys and do boys stuff.
That's about as mystical as it gets.
There never was a single "Aboriginal culture". There were dozens, if not hundreds of cultures, and I bet they were all pretty different from each other.
Why?
Because there were hundreds of different tribes, all speaking different languages. My bet is that if you speak a different language from the mob in the valley next door, you'll have a different culture.
Don't believe me? Then think about the French and us. Do we speak the same language?
No.
Do we share the same culture?
No.
Then why on earth would we think that all blackfellas would be part of this all encompassing "culture" of Aboriginality? It's bonkers.
If you want to take the French example a bit further, consider the fact that France is made up of many regions (or Departments if you want to use the right term) and each Department has it's own distinct culture. Consider say Burgundy vs Alsace. The French state has been around now for a few hundred years, and it is one of the strongest states around (and the most centralised), yet France still has a multitude of cultures. How can one think that in a country with no state, and therefor no centralised control, that a single culture could develop?
In other words, the use of the term "Aborginal culture" is frogshit.
Then we have religion. Different tribes followed different gods. Some worshipped a snake, others a croc and I guess some were into fish. When I think of how those religious practices must have co-existed, I think of Iraq today. It's bad enough with just shia and shiite. Imagine what it must have been like with a couple of hundred different deities. Constant religious warfare I would imagine, which might account for the lack of technological development. It's pretty hard to invent the wheel or writing when you're fighting fulltime with the Catholic nutters down the creek.
Then we have other cultural things, like dancing. Soft headed floppy brains always go all mushy between the ears when describing Aboriginal dance. To me, it looks like a bunch of Parkinson's patients shuffling around a ward. Or should that be Alzheimer's patients? Whatever. I am not impressed. I often get the feeling that most of those participating actually have no idea of the steps, and they are all keeping an eye on the one person that they think has some conception of what they should be doing in terms of footwork etc. Anyone that has participated in a school dance or musical would recognise the look.
Don't get me started on rock paintings. I took one look at the paintings in Arnhem Land and went "they're maps". There's nothing particularly special about most of them - ok, they look nice and all that, but they are in the main purely functional directions as to where to get a feed.
Or how not to become a feed for a croc.
If you don't believe me, try this. Imagine the route from your house to say the local bakery (or cafe or pub - whatever takes your fancy).
Now, try to describe how to get there without using any words. You draw pictures which are symbolic markers along the route.
So if there are plenty of barra in the waterhole that has three trees and an egg shaped rock next to it, you draw something like that. It's so simple, even I can understand it.
As a concept though, it seems to go right over the heads of the tilty-headed crowd. Maybe I'm used to the symbol idea because everytime I try a new bike route, I have to look out for bike symbols that have been stenciled on the tarmac.
If you're so bloody primitive that you don't have an alphabet, then drawing crude pictures of plants and animals as a guide to how to get fed is the next best thing. I could see the sense in climbing up onto a rocky outcrop in the middle of a broad valley and painting all the larder objects around me so that they could be explained to the next generation. I stood on a particular outcrop in Kakadu a couple of years ago and looked at the paintings and instantly had a pretty good idea of where to go fishing. And where not to go fishing.
I am sure that some soft-brained numbnut will get upset at me describing Aboriginal "culture" as such, but I fail to see why it has become off limits to take the occasional poke at it. Leftist commentators feel free to constantly have a go at US culture, or Australian culture, but as soon as you start prodding or poking at Aboriginal culture, the cry of "racism" goes up. It's not racism - it's criticism or analysis, and I see no reason why some "special" cultures should be off limits to a reasoned critique.
The problem with the tilty-heads is that they get all wrapped up in the "mystique" of these "ancient" cultures. I don't - I look at them in the same rather hard headed way that I look at the Catholic Church and Mormons and Scientologists. It's funny that the same people that go apeshit at Mormons and their "mad beliefs" in some sky fairy are the same people that go apeshit if someone dares to poke a stick at an ancient, mystical and wonderous emu dance, or tribal marriage ceremony.
My ancestors, who were Celtic and the like, ran around naked and painted their bodies with woad and sacrificed virgins in forest glades and worshipped the sun and were ministered to by druids and all that. I don't see that as mystical or magical or as being in harmony with Gaia and ley lines and all that - I just see a bunch of naked savages running around doing what naked, unlettered, unsophisticated savages do. It's not that long ago (in geological terms) since the rather sophisticated and civilised Romans turned up under Caesar and dragged most of my lot kicking and screaming into the "modern world" (as it was back then).
There are some nutters in western society who look longingly at Stonehenge and want to run around playacting as druids, dancing naked in the moonlight and muttering mystical chants in a long dead language, but they are rightly seen as nutters. Why is it then that as soon as a black man does it, it becomes a ceremony that is cloaked with reverance and awe? I am awed by a cathedral like St Paul's. I am not awed by a bunch of naked people shuffling around to some drums in the moonlight, no matter what the colour of their skin. Anyone that goes all misty-eyed at the thought of it should be stuffed in a straightjacket and locked in a rubber room.
Hell, I've run around naked in the moonlight with my mates, and I can tell you what it is. It's a hoot, particularly when you are drunk and 18. It's a great way to blow off steam and yahoo around like idiots. It's also a great way of keeping those annoying women away when you just want to hang out with the boys and do boys stuff.
That's about as mystical as it gets.
Friday, 8 February 2008
The black economy
By black economy, I refer to the economy (or lack of it) in many Aboriginal communities.
I blogged a while back on how 26% of Aboriginies live out in the sticks somewhere. My guess is that they are living in places that have no natural driver of employment. By that, I mean that the townships are not underpinned by say a mine, tourism, the pastoral industry or some other form of activity that generates employment throughout the wider area. In short, they would not exist unless government money was rained upon them like fertilizer in a greenhouse.
I got to thinking about this after reading an article on ghost towns in the US last week. There are thousands of ghost towns in the US. Something happened to attract people (a mining strike, opening of a factory etc) and a town was built. Then things changed, the mine closed over whatever and the town evaporated. All the people moved away, and the houses were also carted away to places where someone could make use of them.
Many inland towns in Australia are shrinking as farms get larger and larger with each passing generation. With larger farms, there are fewer families out on the farms, so demand shrinks in the towns for services like hair dressing and so on and the businesses slowly fold up and move away, and the place goes into a downward spiral until perhaps only a petrol station or roadhouse is left where there was once a thriving town.
That's life. It's the impact of creative destruction.
I imagine that when the iron ore up north eventually runs out, people will abandon towns like Mt Newman as soon as they can. Without the mine, the town has no purpose. No reason to exist. Who the fuck would want to live there unless the mine was paying them $100,000 a year to drive a truck?
So the natural pattern for white people is that if it is not viable to live in an area, then you don't. You up stumps and move to somewhere that is viable, like the city. Cities have been sucking in people from the countryside for about 5,000 years now. Just look at the enormous migrations in China, where hundreds of millions of peasants have moved in to the big cities from the countryside. It's a normal process in most societies. Tokyo and Mexico City didn't get to have 10 million people each by the residents having lots of kids. All those people moved there from somewhere else, generally as increases in agricultural productivity displaced surplus labour from the land.
I sometimes wonder whether Aboriginals are the only society on the planet that are immune to this phenomena. Why the hell are they staying put in dumpy shit holes in the back of beyond where the social services are crap, there is never a hope in hell of having a proper job, and the future for the kids is bleak.
For a group of people that like to go walkabout, they are the most stubbornly immobile people on the face of the planet.
Hell, look at non-Aboriginal Australia. There are about 19.5 million of us. Where did we all come from? Some of us were born here, but an awful lot of us are here because we moved from somewhere else in search of economic betterment and freedom. My in-laws came here from the other side of the planet. I've worked with people who came from an uncountable number of countries - people are always on the move from here to there and back again.
Except blackfellas it seems.
And don't give me this crap about being attached to the land as an excuse. I just don't buy it (and I will blog on that at some later date). I like my possessions, but if I had a choice between losing everything I own (in say a fire) and losing my family, I'd say "bugger the possessions - they are not that important". I would happily sacrifice everything I've got for my family.
I don't love the stuff I have that much.
The blackfellas have a choice. They say they are attached to their land. But their kids are growing up in shockingly shit conditions. So what do they care about more? A bit of dusty dirt or their offspring?
If they really loved their kids, they'd close down and abandon every back of beyond non-viable township tomorrow and move to a place where work is a possibility, schools are a-plenty and hospitals and all those things dot the landscape.
No patch of dirt is worth the future of my family. Fuck the dirt. They come first. So what the hell are these blackfellas thinking?
I blogged a while back on how 26% of Aboriginies live out in the sticks somewhere. My guess is that they are living in places that have no natural driver of employment. By that, I mean that the townships are not underpinned by say a mine, tourism, the pastoral industry or some other form of activity that generates employment throughout the wider area. In short, they would not exist unless government money was rained upon them like fertilizer in a greenhouse.
I got to thinking about this after reading an article on ghost towns in the US last week. There are thousands of ghost towns in the US. Something happened to attract people (a mining strike, opening of a factory etc) and a town was built. Then things changed, the mine closed over whatever and the town evaporated. All the people moved away, and the houses were also carted away to places where someone could make use of them.
Many inland towns in Australia are shrinking as farms get larger and larger with each passing generation. With larger farms, there are fewer families out on the farms, so demand shrinks in the towns for services like hair dressing and so on and the businesses slowly fold up and move away, and the place goes into a downward spiral until perhaps only a petrol station or roadhouse is left where there was once a thriving town.
That's life. It's the impact of creative destruction.
I imagine that when the iron ore up north eventually runs out, people will abandon towns like Mt Newman as soon as they can. Without the mine, the town has no purpose. No reason to exist. Who the fuck would want to live there unless the mine was paying them $100,000 a year to drive a truck?
So the natural pattern for white people is that if it is not viable to live in an area, then you don't. You up stumps and move to somewhere that is viable, like the city. Cities have been sucking in people from the countryside for about 5,000 years now. Just look at the enormous migrations in China, where hundreds of millions of peasants have moved in to the big cities from the countryside. It's a normal process in most societies. Tokyo and Mexico City didn't get to have 10 million people each by the residents having lots of kids. All those people moved there from somewhere else, generally as increases in agricultural productivity displaced surplus labour from the land.
I sometimes wonder whether Aboriginals are the only society on the planet that are immune to this phenomena. Why the hell are they staying put in dumpy shit holes in the back of beyond where the social services are crap, there is never a hope in hell of having a proper job, and the future for the kids is bleak.
For a group of people that like to go walkabout, they are the most stubbornly immobile people on the face of the planet.
Hell, look at non-Aboriginal Australia. There are about 19.5 million of us. Where did we all come from? Some of us were born here, but an awful lot of us are here because we moved from somewhere else in search of economic betterment and freedom. My in-laws came here from the other side of the planet. I've worked with people who came from an uncountable number of countries - people are always on the move from here to there and back again.
Except blackfellas it seems.
And don't give me this crap about being attached to the land as an excuse. I just don't buy it (and I will blog on that at some later date). I like my possessions, but if I had a choice between losing everything I own (in say a fire) and losing my family, I'd say "bugger the possessions - they are not that important". I would happily sacrifice everything I've got for my family.
I don't love the stuff I have that much.
The blackfellas have a choice. They say they are attached to their land. But their kids are growing up in shockingly shit conditions. So what do they care about more? A bit of dusty dirt or their offspring?
If they really loved their kids, they'd close down and abandon every back of beyond non-viable township tomorrow and move to a place where work is a possibility, schools are a-plenty and hospitals and all those things dot the landscape.
No patch of dirt is worth the future of my family. Fuck the dirt. They come first. So what the hell are these blackfellas thinking?
Thursday, 7 February 2008
White Bay Hotel
Too bad if you are feeling thirsty on the way to work - this is one pub that has not served beer in a long time. I guess this is where the wharfies that used to work at White Bay would have had a drink when the wharves were packed with bludgers stealing cargo and skimming overtime. Not the place I probably would have chosen for a refreshing ale.
The smoke stacks of the old White Bay powerstation can be seen jutting up behind the hotel, and the grey monstrosity to the left rear of the pub is part of the powerstation building - broken windows and all.
If this was London, the powerstation would have been redeveloped into an art gallery and the pub would be a very flash gastro-pub by now serving lambs brains with black pudding. But it is Sydney, and stuff like this is left to rot on the edge of the CBD.
I wish they'd flatten the pub, just to widen the footpath so that cyclists and pedestrians could avoid killing each other during the morning and evening rush hours. The footpath alongside Victoria Rd is supposed to be a bike route. It's not. It's a fucking joke, and riding on Victoria Rd is a death wish for anyone but the insanely fit and fittingly insane. The footpath is obstructed with badly placed bus shelters, bins and signs - and it's too narrow in places for one pedestrian to get past the street furniture, let alone someone on a bike, or a bike and pedestrian trying to get past each other.
Flattening this useless old pub could provide a bit more path width at a spot where it is particularly narrow and stupid. But I suppose it is protected by some sort of heritage order or green ban. That's irony for you. Cycling, a green form of transport, is being heniously held up by a green ban on a building that no one likes or wants.
Modern fucking life in all its stupid glory.
The smoke stacks of the old White Bay powerstation can be seen jutting up behind the hotel, and the grey monstrosity to the left rear of the pub is part of the powerstation building - broken windows and all.
If this was London, the powerstation would have been redeveloped into an art gallery and the pub would be a very flash gastro-pub by now serving lambs brains with black pudding. But it is Sydney, and stuff like this is left to rot on the edge of the CBD.
I wish they'd flatten the pub, just to widen the footpath so that cyclists and pedestrians could avoid killing each other during the morning and evening rush hours. The footpath alongside Victoria Rd is supposed to be a bike route. It's not. It's a fucking joke, and riding on Victoria Rd is a death wish for anyone but the insanely fit and fittingly insane. The footpath is obstructed with badly placed bus shelters, bins and signs - and it's too narrow in places for one pedestrian to get past the street furniture, let alone someone on a bike, or a bike and pedestrian trying to get past each other.
Flattening this useless old pub could provide a bit more path width at a spot where it is particularly narrow and stupid. But I suppose it is protected by some sort of heritage order or green ban. That's irony for you. Cycling, a green form of transport, is being heniously held up by a green ban on a building that no one likes or wants.
Modern fucking life in all its stupid glory.
Sunday, 3 February 2008
Loonies
Great snippet from an article from The Economist.
In 1950, the UK had 150,000 places in mental hospitals.
It is now 30,000.
In 1950, the UK had 50 million people. Now it has 61 million.
So whilst the general population has swelled by 18% (and presumably the number of loonies has grown faster as all sorts of new mental maladies have been invented), the capacity of the loony bins has dropped by 80%.
I presume a similar thing has happened in Australia, which is why our prisons are full of inmates with mental health problems, our hospitals are over run with mad people, housing commission areas are complete sinkholes, certain sections of the CBD have loonies on every corner and possibly why the trade in hard drugs has exploded.
Are junkies driven mad by smack and ice for instance, or are they only attracted to smack and ice because they are mad to start with? Can a certain level of mental instability be a good predicator of drug taking behaviour? If so, is it reasonable to say that we had less demand for drugs 50 years ago because all the potential smackheads were locked up in rubber rooms and having electrodes attached to their brains?
I have heard time and time again that drug addiction is an illness. Fine. But is it a physical illness or a mental illness, and is it curable?
If it's not curable, I'd prefer those house breaking, car stealing, bag snatching, shoplifting little turds to be despatched to a nice place in the country for a bit of R&R. Preferably until they are about 78.
In 1950, the UK had 150,000 places in mental hospitals.
It is now 30,000.
In 1950, the UK had 50 million people. Now it has 61 million.
So whilst the general population has swelled by 18% (and presumably the number of loonies has grown faster as all sorts of new mental maladies have been invented), the capacity of the loony bins has dropped by 80%.
I presume a similar thing has happened in Australia, which is why our prisons are full of inmates with mental health problems, our hospitals are over run with mad people, housing commission areas are complete sinkholes, certain sections of the CBD have loonies on every corner and possibly why the trade in hard drugs has exploded.
Are junkies driven mad by smack and ice for instance, or are they only attracted to smack and ice because they are mad to start with? Can a certain level of mental instability be a good predicator of drug taking behaviour? If so, is it reasonable to say that we had less demand for drugs 50 years ago because all the potential smackheads were locked up in rubber rooms and having electrodes attached to their brains?
I have heard time and time again that drug addiction is an illness. Fine. But is it a physical illness or a mental illness, and is it curable?
If it's not curable, I'd prefer those house breaking, car stealing, bag snatching, shoplifting little turds to be despatched to a nice place in the country for a bit of R&R. Preferably until they are about 78.
Saturday, 26 January 2008
Who is killing indigenous Australia?
Who is killing indigenous Australia?
That's the title of an article by some dick at Socialist Alliance. Our indignant leftie quotes the following stats:
Tilty-headed leftie then quotes some more stats:
I guess the inference here is that Aboriginals are locked up so often because they commit crimes against white people, and it is unfair for them to be locked up for say bashing, robbing or raping a white person. Or just being drunk and laying a turd on their front lawn, before smashing up the letter box and keying the car in the driveway.
The second inference is that some horrible group of unmentionable people (presumably white) is running around assaulting, raping and murdering Aboriginals like there is no tomorrow.
Um, wrong. If you are an Aboriginal, and you've just been bashed or raped or murdered, chances are the perpetrator was another Aboriginal. Similarly, if you are an Aboriginal interested in doing a bit of burglary or car theft, chances are you will be stealing from other Aboriginals (but that probably depends on where you live).
The biggest victims of crime are always the poor. White, middle class people like me and my friends rarely run around raping women, stealing cars, breaking into houses (we're too unfit to get through a window) and generally murdering and vandalising etc. We live in neighbourhoods where not much of that sort of thing goes on, because crims are generally lazy, so they won't go far to commit a crime if they have to. If they can rob the old pensioner next door, why travel 30 kilometres to rob me?
I never said they were that smart.
Anyway, the reason there are a lot of Aboriginals in prison is that they have commited an awfully large number of assaults, bashings etc on their kith and kin. White people are not getting in cars and driving out to say Brewarrina with the intention of doing a bit of raping and pillaging amongst the Aboriginal community. It's black on black.
So let's say we get all tilty headed and compassionate and let all those innocent blackfellas out of prison. How do you think that will make their victims, who are also largely Aboriginal, feel about things? Do you think they'll feel safe and secure knowing that Jimmy the drunken axe murderer is back on the streets, and roaming around with a cask of Coolabah and a machete?
In short, a lot of Aboriginals are locked up because they have been perfectly beastly to other Aboriginals.
These fucking lefties have no idea.
That's the title of an article by some dick at Socialist Alliance. Our indignant leftie quotes the following stats:
* Aborigines are imprisoned at 16 times the rest of the population and, consistently since 1999, have made up 20% of the prison population - a rise of 6% since 1991.
Ooh, bad white people. Stop being mean to our black brothers. Etc etc etc.Tilty-headed leftie then quotes some more stats:
* Indigenous people also suffer higher rates of crime. A 2001 study in New South Wales found that Aborigines are 5.5 times more likely to suffer domestic violence, 3.4 times more likely to suffer assault, 2.8 times more likely to suffer sexual assault, and 2.5 times more likely to be murdered.
Right. So on the one hand, Aboriginals are getting locked up lots. On the other hand, they are much more likely to be a victim of crime.I guess the inference here is that Aboriginals are locked up so often because they commit crimes against white people, and it is unfair for them to be locked up for say bashing, robbing or raping a white person. Or just being drunk and laying a turd on their front lawn, before smashing up the letter box and keying the car in the driveway.
The second inference is that some horrible group of unmentionable people (presumably white) is running around assaulting, raping and murdering Aboriginals like there is no tomorrow.
Um, wrong. If you are an Aboriginal, and you've just been bashed or raped or murdered, chances are the perpetrator was another Aboriginal. Similarly, if you are an Aboriginal interested in doing a bit of burglary or car theft, chances are you will be stealing from other Aboriginals (but that probably depends on where you live).
The biggest victims of crime are always the poor. White, middle class people like me and my friends rarely run around raping women, stealing cars, breaking into houses (we're too unfit to get through a window) and generally murdering and vandalising etc. We live in neighbourhoods where not much of that sort of thing goes on, because crims are generally lazy, so they won't go far to commit a crime if they have to. If they can rob the old pensioner next door, why travel 30 kilometres to rob me?
I never said they were that smart.
Anyway, the reason there are a lot of Aboriginals in prison is that they have commited an awfully large number of assaults, bashings etc on their kith and kin. White people are not getting in cars and driving out to say Brewarrina with the intention of doing a bit of raping and pillaging amongst the Aboriginal community. It's black on black.
So let's say we get all tilty headed and compassionate and let all those innocent blackfellas out of prison. How do you think that will make their victims, who are also largely Aboriginal, feel about things? Do you think they'll feel safe and secure knowing that Jimmy the drunken axe murderer is back on the streets, and roaming around with a cask of Coolabah and a machete?
In short, a lot of Aboriginals are locked up because they have been perfectly beastly to other Aboriginals.
These fucking lefties have no idea.
Friday, 25 January 2008
Aboriginal health stats and other misinformation
I have been looking at a number of reports into Aborginal health, or a lack of it, and trying to make some sense of the numbers.
According to the Human Rights Commission, Aborginals made up 2.2% of the population at the last census. That's 410,000 people out of say 19 million.
One of the reasons given for poor health outcomes is that 26% of Aboriginals live in remote or very remote areas, as opposed to 2% for the rest of the population.
Now when you read a stat like that, you go, "Wow, that's a big difference in percentages - that must be a root cause of bad health outcomes".
However, do the maths.
26% of 410,000 people is about 100,000 Aboriginals living in remote areas.
2% of the remaining 18,600,000 non-Aboriginal population is 372,000.
Right. So whitefellas outnumber Aboriginals in remote areas by over 3:1. But are the health outcomes for the whitefellas in remote areas as bad as for the Aborginal population in that area?
I doubt it. If it was, I'm sure we'd know about it.
So let's forget about the "remote" argument for a minute. It looks like a crock of shit. If white people can live in the same location without horrible health problems, then remoteness is not a causal factor.
But if it is a factor, then we should immediately close down all the remote townships and ship everyone off to places that are less remote. If you can't get good services to the people, move the people to the services. The WA government closed the town of Wittenoom because of asbsestos. If remote townships are as "toxic" as asbestos, then they should be abandoned. Is it worth staying where you are if it's killing you?
How about another statistic - that of low birth weight.
According to the Department of Health:
Low birthweight infants (weighing less than 2,500 grams at birth) are more at risk of developing conditions such as coronary heart disease and stroke when older. In 2000-02, live-born babies of Indigenous mothers were twice as likely to be of low birthweight as babies born to non-Indigenous mothers (12.9% compared to 6.1%)
Indigenous infant and child health is significantly poorer than that of non-Indigenous infants and children. A 'low birth weight baby' weighs less than 2500 grams at birth[41] indicating, among other things, foetal malnutrition. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests a malnourished foetus will program its body in a way that will incline it to chronic diseases later in life.[42] Beyond infancy, normal growth is considered vital for good health in adulthood. Significant numbers of Indigenous children demonstrate failure to thrive
OK then, why are so many Aboriginal babies low birth weight?
High fertility at younger ages contributes to the relatively high fertility of Indigenous women. Teenage births are more common among Indigenous women than among other women. In 2003, the teenage (15–19 years) birth rate among Indigenous women was more than four times the overall Australian teenage birth rate. Teenage pregnancies are associated with low birth weight.
So what they are saying really is that some Aboriginal kids are fucking each other silly and popping out kids at an amazing rate.
So what is the government to do about that? Say sorry and issue a chastity belt? How about they take the kids away and put them in a boarding house where they can be supervised and controlled and taught a few morals?
Oops, can't do that anymore. Strike that thought.
But why are Aboriginal teenagers getting pregnant so often?
I thought about this last night. It must be boredom.
When I was a teenager, I was as randy as the next kid. I spent most of my teenage years trying to get laid, mainly without result. It was the same for most of my friends. The reason we were unsuccesful is that the girls we knew were remarkably reticent about opening their legs. It's as simple as that - unless a girl consents, there is no sex, so the chances of getting pregnant are pretty low. I'd say they are zero, but then I'm a stickler for the facts.
What kept their legs closed?
I'd say the main factors were these:
So what the hell is happening in Aboriginal communities? Well, I think we know that in some cases, the parents are getting drunk or stoned and don't give a fuck what their kids do, the kids aren't going to school or doing any sport so they are just BORED. Perfectly respectable friends of mine did a bit of burglary when they were teenagers because they were BORED. Committing crime is quite exciting, you know. I've committed the odd criminal act, and thinking about some of the more extreme things that I got away with still gets the heart racing.
But do you know how much input the government had into keeping me active as a kid?
Nil. Not one iota. It was all down to my parents, the parents of my friends, and some dedicated teachers. Government and government agencies had nothing to do with it. They are not the answer.
If kids are stuck in some bumhole and they're bored, yank them out of there and send them to a boarding school in the city. By force if necessary. I went to boarding school with kids that came from some pretty remote sheep and cattle stations from the boondocks of WA, and they were pretty wild when they arrived. Being out in the sticks your entire life can mess with your head.
Stuffing kids into boarding school was of course the sort of thing that we did up until about 1970, until some people started having "issues" with it. They complained about things like kids being caned for being naughty. Well I got caned for being naughty - got six of the best across the arse from a nasty ex-Rhodesian teacher who was notorious for being the hardest caner in school, and let me tell you this - I never fucked up again. It was humiliating and it hurt like hell and yes, I cried. Everyone did. It was supposed to make you cry - the idea being that if it hurt that much, you'd never forget it, and you might think twice about doing something naughty next time you got a stupid idea into your head.
Got that? It was supposed to hurt. You remember painful lessons really, really well. Unless you are a complete and utter blockhead.
Another statistic - the death rate.
According to NT Health:
The overall death rate for the Indigenous population is more than twice that for the total Australian population. The greatest differences occur in the middle age group of 25 to 54 years. In 2000 the leading causes of death among the Indigenous population were diseases of the circulatory system, external causes of injuries and poisoning and malignant neoplasms. These accounted for 26%, 14% and 14% of Indigenous death respectively.
It is premature adult death and not excess infant death that accounts for the reduced life expectancy of Indigenous people.
So what's the cause of all these people dropping off in middle age?
After reading some of this stuff, I am starting to think that we should just say: "Sorry. Yep, we're sorry for stuff that happened a long time ago. But that's over - now sort your sorry fucking lives out and pull up your socks and get on with it. You've gotten your apology - you've got no excuses left now."
So, how do we solve these diet, smoking, drinking and exercise problems - particulary amongst those under 18?
Grab the little fuckers and send them to a boarding school where they are kept active, closely supervised and mixing with a peer group that provides positive images.
Actually, I'd scrap the last item. The kids that we looked up to where those that could get laid on a regular basis, were good at sculling beer and tops at fighting Catholics when we played sport agains the Micks. Clean living swats like me where not the preferred role model.
I'm starting to see a repeating pattern here - something about kids and boarding schools..... hmm, wonder if that's been tried before?
This is just a lovely set of numbers:
In the NT, Indigenous infant mortality has declined substantially since the early 1980s. In 1981 to 1983 there were 31.3 infant deaths per 1 000 live births and in 1997 to 2000 the rate reduced to 16.9. There are many reasons for this fall in Indigenous infant mortality rates. The main reason is increased access and better resourcing of primary health care services. There is, however, still great disparity between the rates for Indigenous and non Indigenous infants with the Indigenous infant mortality rate almost 4 times the non Indigenous rate. The 35 Indigenous infant deaths recorded in the NT in 2000 comprised 81% of total infant deaths
Infant mortality 4 times the whitefella rate! Hells bells. That number just kicks you in the balls.
It must be a lack of money. Something must be done....
Per capita expenditure for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was estimated $4 936 per person compared with $1 433 per person for the rest of the population.
Ok then, I got that wrong. It's not a lack of money. We are spending just under 3.5 times as much on blackfellas health as whitefellas. Maybe too much money is the problem?
Language barriers? Maybe language barriers prevent them from talking to doctors etc?
My in-laws arrived in this country without a word of English between them. Somehow, they figured it out and raised three healthy kids. I went to school with a lot of kids whose parents came out from Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece and all those places without a word of English between them, and somehow they turned out fit, healthy and morally centred kids. All the parents also became pretty fluent in English, even though many of them started learning it at the age of 25 or 30 - and that's a hard time to learn a language. I have never seen a lack of English as an impediment. If half the planet can learn enough English to do business with us and the rest of the planet, then I don't see why it is so hard for people who are born in an English speaking country to learn a bit of English.
I could rant on about learning English all day, but think about it. You can travel to just about any country on the planet and find that all your needs will be serviced by someone that speaks English. I've sat in a restaurant in Italy with people from Japan, Germany, Holland, South America, South Korea and numerous other countries where they speak something else at home and everyone conversed in English. Maybe not very well, but well enough that we could all understand each other.
Hell, in a job I had a few years ago, about half my team where from a non-English speaking background. And by that, I mean they arrived from Cambodia about 10 years before with no English at all. Some had utterly rotten spoken English - but they could understand me, and I could understand them. I had guys that grew up in Vietnam, China, Yugoslavia and other places like that where they didn't start learning English until they arrived in Australia as adults. Not only were they functioning pretty well, they were all earning at least $60,000 per year doing fairly skilled work.
What is the best way to ensure that kids are fluent in English?
Get them out of the remote communities where it is not spoken regularly and immerse them in a 100% English speaking environment. That sounds remarkably like a boarding school to me.
Crummy housing is also given as a reason for poor Aboriginal health, with overcrowding being cited as a big problem.
But is overcrowding really a cause of poor health?
When I lived in London in the early 1990's, 8 friends of mine lived in a 3 bedroom flat - a very small 3 bedroom flat. They had bunk beds in each room, and 2 of them shared a single bed as one worked nightshift and the other dayshift. Now that was overcrowding!
Did any of them get horribly sick?
Only when they drank too much Newcastle Brown Ale. Overcrowding did not seem to affect their health.
My parents grew up during the Depression, and they had a stack of siblings - and they both grew up in small houses. The house that Mum spent her childhood in was a dirt floored shack made of hessian on a farm out on the far edge of the WA wheatbelt. All the kids slept on the verandah, which was enclosed with fly screens, and they slept on pretty horrible beds made of bush poles and the like. Mum likes to tell the story of how her Mum was cooking one day, found the kitchen to be oppresively hot and cut a window in the kitchen wall with a pair of scissors.
In short, she grew up in housing conditions that today would be considered..... unbelievable.
As for poverty, well, my in-laws arrived from the former Yugoslavia with the shoes and clothes that they were wearing and not much else. You can imagine the kind of conditions Mum grew up in - her family walked off the farm during the Depression because they went broke. I guess they were homeless for a while. Some of your ancestors probably walked off a ship in leg irons. They started with nothing but the convicts clothing on their backs.
Poverty is something that you can pull yourself out of. But only if you want to.
Then we have infant mortality rates. I have been Googling all over the interweb looking for stats on infant mortality. The good news is that it is way down. I had lots of trouble finding stats that I could understand, but have a look at these numbers.
In 1978, PNG had an infant mortality rate of 110 per 1000. That's enormous. But back in 1900, the rate in Australia was 103 per 1000. In 1950, that had been reduced to 25 per 1000. These days, Australia has an infant mortality rate of about 5 per 1000, except amongst Aboriginals, where it is around 20 per 1000. Cuba has an infant mortality rate of around 6 per 1000.
In Afghanistan, before us nasty people invaded and overturned the Taleban, it was around 165 per 1000. Yikes.
So, what do I make of all that?
If you have poor sanitation, bad hygenic practices, a poor diet, bad water and a lack of basic medical attention, you have a horrendous infant mortality rate. I have been trying to find numbers for Australia and the UK for before 1900, but I imagine that if you go back to say 1850, the infant mortality rate in inner-city Sydney was probably comparable to Afghanistan under the Taleban.
Lowering the infant mortality rate is pretty simple - so simple, they were able to do it in Tasmania 100 years ago, when they didn't have the medical sophistication that we have now, or the fabulous wealth that we now enjoy.
'sheer ignorance on the part of mothers of the elementary principles of child-feeding and child-care'
What do those words really mean? What is "child feeding" and child care"?
I can comment on these as I am now a Dad. I had no idea what they meant a few years ago.
I'll summarise it as follows:
Doing this does not require money. It does not require education. It doesn't require you to live in a major coastal city. It just requires commitment and discipline and effort. I don't like having to do three loads of washing every day - but it has to get done. It just has to. Your job as a parent is to ensure that it's done, because no one else is going to do it. I want to flop on the couch in front of the TV as much as the next person, but there is no getting away from doing some basic chores on a daily basis. Shopping for food. Cooking meals. Washing dishes. Changing nappies. Getting the kids out of bed in the morning, feeding them and taking them to school. Nagging them to do homework. Tidying up. Taking Monkey to the park/pool/playground etc for an hour a day.
Being poor is not an excuse for nothing doing the washing. When I was at Uni, I was poor. I stacked shelves at Coles for about $10 an hour between 10pm and 2am, I worked the late shift in a video hire shop and spent my holidays weighing wheat trucks in the middle of nowhere. At one point, our washing machine blew up, so me and my two flatmates chipped in and bought one from the Trading Post.
I think we paid $100 for it. Washing machines were worth real money back then, back before China started making stuff. The classic thing is that we, the children of middle and upper-middle class parents, bought a washing machine from a bloke in a Housing Commission house. I guess the government had given him a new one, so he was selling the old one.
That washing machine represented a good night at the pub for the three of us, but we recognised where our priorities lay, and we spent our cash on a washing machine. Because we were still thirsty, we spent the small amount of money that we had left on a home brew kit, and that saw the start of a major exercise in brewing high strength rocket fuel. But that's another story. Being on the bones of your arse is no impediment to keeping clean.
All it really takes is a bit of selflessness. Kind of what the missionaries did when they gave up a comfortable life in suburbia and treked out to the back blocks of nowhere to start schools for the native kids. Apart from teaching lessons, I'm sure it involved an enormous amount of work in cooking meals (without a microwave or gas stove), doing laundry (without a washing machine), washing up without a dish washer etc etc etc. How is it that we have come to despise those people, rather than admiring them?
In the end though, is the simple explanation for the difference between black and white mortality rates explained by the proposition that some Aboriginal parents do not give a flying fuck about their kids? If they cared enough, they'd stop smoking, cut back on the drinking, cook a proper meal at least once a day and clean the fucking house. Is it really that hard to do a bit of washing and cleaning? Does it really come down to a lack of that?
I lived with a flatmate years ago that I called "Couchy", because she never left the couch. She had a job, which required her to turn up for 7.5 hours per day, but once home, she turned on the TV and lay on her couch with her cat on her lap.
In the year we shared a place, she never cleaned the house (as in ran a vaccuum cleaner around, dusted or scrubbed the bathroom and kitchen), never mowed the lawn, never took the rubbish out, never did the washing up. Her diet consisted mainly of fast food or fish fingers.
In essence, she was just fucking lazy. Nice, good fun to drink with on Friday night, but bone idle. Utterly disinterested in anything that took her away from her beloved TV and couch.
She had a job that put reasonable money into her pocket. Our house was dingy, but clean and spacious and liveable and close to Bondi. She could afford overseas travel and was certainly able to afford some binge drinking every Friday and Saturday night. She was educated to a diploma level, was kind of comfortably well off, but just bone fucking idle.
So if kids are dying because their parents are as bad as Couchy (or probably much worse), why are we leaving them in those circumstances? What would you prefer:
This is why I think the whole 'stolen generations' and the need to say sorry is a load of bollocks. We have nothing to apologise for, and there is an entire generation out there right now that should be whisked away from their parents and sent to boarding school as soon as possible. If that involves taking them away without their parents consent, then so be it. It's not as if they don't have telephones or a postal service in these remote towns. Mum can always ring up once a week to say hello.
If she's sober enough to remember.
The main causes of mortality among Aboriginal infants were infection (29%), SIDS (27%), prematurity (16%) and birth defects (15%). In the most recent years studied, the relative risk compared to non-Aboriginal infants of death due to infection was 9 times higher and the risk of SIDS was nearly 8 times higher. There are measures that can be taken in the current state of knowledge to reduce the number of deaths from SIDS or infection.
Overall, 51% of Aboriginal mothers smoked. In 60% of infant deaths, Aboriginal mothers smoked during pregnancy. The risk of SIDS for infants of Aboriginal mothers who smoked was nearly three times that of Aboriginal mothers who did not smoke.
According to the Human Rights Commission, Aborginals made up 2.2% of the population at the last census. That's 410,000 people out of say 19 million.
One of the reasons given for poor health outcomes is that 26% of Aboriginals live in remote or very remote areas, as opposed to 2% for the rest of the population.
Now when you read a stat like that, you go, "Wow, that's a big difference in percentages - that must be a root cause of bad health outcomes".
However, do the maths.
26% of 410,000 people is about 100,000 Aboriginals living in remote areas.
2% of the remaining 18,600,000 non-Aboriginal population is 372,000.
Right. So whitefellas outnumber Aboriginals in remote areas by over 3:1. But are the health outcomes for the whitefellas in remote areas as bad as for the Aborginal population in that area?
I doubt it. If it was, I'm sure we'd know about it.
So let's forget about the "remote" argument for a minute. It looks like a crock of shit. If white people can live in the same location without horrible health problems, then remoteness is not a causal factor.
But if it is a factor, then we should immediately close down all the remote townships and ship everyone off to places that are less remote. If you can't get good services to the people, move the people to the services. The WA government closed the town of Wittenoom because of asbsestos. If remote townships are as "toxic" as asbestos, then they should be abandoned. Is it worth staying where you are if it's killing you?
How about another statistic - that of low birth weight.
According to the Department of Health:
Low birthweight infants (weighing less than 2,500 grams at birth) are more at risk of developing conditions such as coronary heart disease and stroke when older. In 2000-02, live-born babies of Indigenous mothers were twice as likely to be of low birthweight as babies born to non-Indigenous mothers (12.9% compared to 6.1%)
Indigenous infant and child health is significantly poorer than that of non-Indigenous infants and children. A 'low birth weight baby' weighs less than 2500 grams at birth[41] indicating, among other things, foetal malnutrition. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests a malnourished foetus will program its body in a way that will incline it to chronic diseases later in life.[42] Beyond infancy, normal growth is considered vital for good health in adulthood. Significant numbers of Indigenous children demonstrate failure to thrive
OK then, why are so many Aboriginal babies low birth weight?
High fertility at younger ages contributes to the relatively high fertility of Indigenous women. Teenage births are more common among Indigenous women than among other women. In 2003, the teenage (15–19 years) birth rate among Indigenous women was more than four times the overall Australian teenage birth rate. Teenage pregnancies are associated with low birth weight.
So what they are saying really is that some Aboriginal kids are fucking each other silly and popping out kids at an amazing rate.
So what is the government to do about that? Say sorry and issue a chastity belt? How about they take the kids away and put them in a boarding house where they can be supervised and controlled and taught a few morals?
Oops, can't do that anymore. Strike that thought.
But why are Aboriginal teenagers getting pregnant so often?
I thought about this last night. It must be boredom.
When I was a teenager, I was as randy as the next kid. I spent most of my teenage years trying to get laid, mainly without result. It was the same for most of my friends. The reason we were unsuccesful is that the girls we knew were remarkably reticent about opening their legs. It's as simple as that - unless a girl consents, there is no sex, so the chances of getting pregnant are pretty low. I'd say they are zero, but then I'm a stickler for the facts.
What kept their legs closed?
I'd say the main factors were these:
- a strong moral upbringing by their parents
- a lack of loosening agents, like drugs and alcohol
- few opportunities to slip away unnoticed
So what the hell is happening in Aboriginal communities? Well, I think we know that in some cases, the parents are getting drunk or stoned and don't give a fuck what their kids do, the kids aren't going to school or doing any sport so they are just BORED. Perfectly respectable friends of mine did a bit of burglary when they were teenagers because they were BORED. Committing crime is quite exciting, you know. I've committed the odd criminal act, and thinking about some of the more extreme things that I got away with still gets the heart racing.
But do you know how much input the government had into keeping me active as a kid?
Nil. Not one iota. It was all down to my parents, the parents of my friends, and some dedicated teachers. Government and government agencies had nothing to do with it. They are not the answer.
If kids are stuck in some bumhole and they're bored, yank them out of there and send them to a boarding school in the city. By force if necessary. I went to boarding school with kids that came from some pretty remote sheep and cattle stations from the boondocks of WA, and they were pretty wild when they arrived. Being out in the sticks your entire life can mess with your head.
Stuffing kids into boarding school was of course the sort of thing that we did up until about 1970, until some people started having "issues" with it. They complained about things like kids being caned for being naughty. Well I got caned for being naughty - got six of the best across the arse from a nasty ex-Rhodesian teacher who was notorious for being the hardest caner in school, and let me tell you this - I never fucked up again. It was humiliating and it hurt like hell and yes, I cried. Everyone did. It was supposed to make you cry - the idea being that if it hurt that much, you'd never forget it, and you might think twice about doing something naughty next time you got a stupid idea into your head.
Got that? It was supposed to hurt. You remember painful lessons really, really well. Unless you are a complete and utter blockhead.
Another statistic - the death rate.
According to NT Health:
The overall death rate for the Indigenous population is more than twice that for the total Australian population. The greatest differences occur in the middle age group of 25 to 54 years. In 2000 the leading causes of death among the Indigenous population were diseases of the circulatory system, external causes of injuries and poisoning and malignant neoplasms. These accounted for 26%, 14% and 14% of Indigenous death respectively.
It is premature adult death and not excess infant death that accounts for the reduced life expectancy of Indigenous people.
So what's the cause of all these people dropping off in middle age?
- Half the adult Indigenous population aged 18 and over were current daily smokers, about twice the (age-standardised) rate for non-Indigenous adults.
- 16% of Indigenous adults aged 18 and over drank alcohol at risky or high risk levels, a similar (age-standardised) rate to non-Indigenous adults.
- Three quarters of Indigenous people aged 15 and over were sedentary or exercised at low levels.
- 57% of Indigenous people aged 15 and over were self-reported as overweight or obese, which (when adjusted for age differences between the two populations and for survey non-response) was 1.2 times higher than for non-Indigenous Australians.
- 14% of Indigenous people (20% in remote areas) aged 12 and over had no usual daily fruit intake, twice the rate for non-Indigenous people.
- 5% of Indigenous people (15% in remote areas) aged 12 and over had no usual daily vegetable intake, over six times the rate for non-Indigenous people.
After reading some of this stuff, I am starting to think that we should just say: "Sorry. Yep, we're sorry for stuff that happened a long time ago. But that's over - now sort your sorry fucking lives out and pull up your socks and get on with it. You've gotten your apology - you've got no excuses left now."
So, how do we solve these diet, smoking, drinking and exercise problems - particulary amongst those under 18?
Grab the little fuckers and send them to a boarding school where they are kept active, closely supervised and mixing with a peer group that provides positive images.
Actually, I'd scrap the last item. The kids that we looked up to where those that could get laid on a regular basis, were good at sculling beer and tops at fighting Catholics when we played sport agains the Micks. Clean living swats like me where not the preferred role model.
I'm starting to see a repeating pattern here - something about kids and boarding schools..... hmm, wonder if that's been tried before?
This is just a lovely set of numbers:
In the NT, Indigenous infant mortality has declined substantially since the early 1980s. In 1981 to 1983 there were 31.3 infant deaths per 1 000 live births and in 1997 to 2000 the rate reduced to 16.9. There are many reasons for this fall in Indigenous infant mortality rates. The main reason is increased access and better resourcing of primary health care services. There is, however, still great disparity between the rates for Indigenous and non Indigenous infants with the Indigenous infant mortality rate almost 4 times the non Indigenous rate. The 35 Indigenous infant deaths recorded in the NT in 2000 comprised 81% of total infant deaths
Infant mortality 4 times the whitefella rate! Hells bells. That number just kicks you in the balls.
It must be a lack of money. Something must be done....
Per capita expenditure for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was estimated $4 936 per person compared with $1 433 per person for the rest of the population.
Ok then, I got that wrong. It's not a lack of money. We are spending just under 3.5 times as much on blackfellas health as whitefellas. Maybe too much money is the problem?
Language barriers? Maybe language barriers prevent them from talking to doctors etc?
- 80% of Indigenous peoples reported speaking only English at home, which is about the same as the non-Indigenous population.
- 12% of Indigenous peoples reported speaking an Indigenous language at home; with three quarters of those recording they were also fluent in English.
My in-laws arrived in this country without a word of English between them. Somehow, they figured it out and raised three healthy kids. I went to school with a lot of kids whose parents came out from Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece and all those places without a word of English between them, and somehow they turned out fit, healthy and morally centred kids. All the parents also became pretty fluent in English, even though many of them started learning it at the age of 25 or 30 - and that's a hard time to learn a language. I have never seen a lack of English as an impediment. If half the planet can learn enough English to do business with us and the rest of the planet, then I don't see why it is so hard for people who are born in an English speaking country to learn a bit of English.
I could rant on about learning English all day, but think about it. You can travel to just about any country on the planet and find that all your needs will be serviced by someone that speaks English. I've sat in a restaurant in Italy with people from Japan, Germany, Holland, South America, South Korea and numerous other countries where they speak something else at home and everyone conversed in English. Maybe not very well, but well enough that we could all understand each other.
Hell, in a job I had a few years ago, about half my team where from a non-English speaking background. And by that, I mean they arrived from Cambodia about 10 years before with no English at all. Some had utterly rotten spoken English - but they could understand me, and I could understand them. I had guys that grew up in Vietnam, China, Yugoslavia and other places like that where they didn't start learning English until they arrived in Australia as adults. Not only were they functioning pretty well, they were all earning at least $60,000 per year doing fairly skilled work.
What is the best way to ensure that kids are fluent in English?
Get them out of the remote communities where it is not spoken regularly and immerse them in a 100% English speaking environment. That sounds remarkably like a boarding school to me.
Crummy housing is also given as a reason for poor Aboriginal health, with overcrowding being cited as a big problem.
But is overcrowding really a cause of poor health?
When I lived in London in the early 1990's, 8 friends of mine lived in a 3 bedroom flat - a very small 3 bedroom flat. They had bunk beds in each room, and 2 of them shared a single bed as one worked nightshift and the other dayshift. Now that was overcrowding!
Did any of them get horribly sick?
Only when they drank too much Newcastle Brown Ale. Overcrowding did not seem to affect their health.
My parents grew up during the Depression, and they had a stack of siblings - and they both grew up in small houses. The house that Mum spent her childhood in was a dirt floored shack made of hessian on a farm out on the far edge of the WA wheatbelt. All the kids slept on the verandah, which was enclosed with fly screens, and they slept on pretty horrible beds made of bush poles and the like. Mum likes to tell the story of how her Mum was cooking one day, found the kitchen to be oppresively hot and cut a window in the kitchen wall with a pair of scissors.
In short, she grew up in housing conditions that today would be considered..... unbelievable.
As for poverty, well, my in-laws arrived from the former Yugoslavia with the shoes and clothes that they were wearing and not much else. You can imagine the kind of conditions Mum grew up in - her family walked off the farm during the Depression because they went broke. I guess they were homeless for a while. Some of your ancestors probably walked off a ship in leg irons. They started with nothing but the convicts clothing on their backs.
Poverty is something that you can pull yourself out of. But only if you want to.
Then we have infant mortality rates. I have been Googling all over the interweb looking for stats on infant mortality. The good news is that it is way down. I had lots of trouble finding stats that I could understand, but have a look at these numbers.
In 1978, PNG had an infant mortality rate of 110 per 1000. That's enormous. But back in 1900, the rate in Australia was 103 per 1000. In 1950, that had been reduced to 25 per 1000. These days, Australia has an infant mortality rate of about 5 per 1000, except amongst Aboriginals, where it is around 20 per 1000. Cuba has an infant mortality rate of around 6 per 1000.
In Afghanistan, before us nasty people invaded and overturned the Taleban, it was around 165 per 1000. Yikes.
So, what do I make of all that?
If you have poor sanitation, bad hygenic practices, a poor diet, bad water and a lack of basic medical attention, you have a horrendous infant mortality rate. I have been trying to find numbers for Australia and the UK for before 1900, but I imagine that if you go back to say 1850, the infant mortality rate in inner-city Sydney was probably comparable to Afghanistan under the Taleban.
Lowering the infant mortality rate is pretty simple - so simple, they were able to do it in Tasmania 100 years ago, when they didn't have the medical sophistication that we have now, or the fabulous wealth that we now enjoy.
In 1908, the Chief Health Officer for Tasmania noted that Hobart had the second highest infant mortality rate to any other state capital. He attributed this high death rate (and an even higher rate in Launceston) to 'sheer ignorance on the part of mothers of the elementary principles of child-feeding and child-care' and recommended 'one carefully selected trained nurse' be employed for 'popular education of young wives and mothers in the health protection of thehome and the care of infants and children'.
At this time, Dr Truby King established the Karitane Mothercraft hospital in New Zealand to reduce the infant mortality rate through the education of mothers. In Dunedin, his statistics demonstrated a remarkable decline in infant mortality from diarrhoea:
- 1907: 25 babies died per 1000 live births
- 1913: 4 babies died per 1000 live births
- 1918: there were no infant deaths from diarrhoea
In 1917, the Chief Health and Quarantine Officer (Tasmania) recommended the employment of a nurse to home visit mothers and provide instruction on infant feeding. He surmised that the infant mortality rate could be significantly reduced by minimising deaths from diarrhoea. This was to be achieved by educating women to improve breastfeeding and hygienic food preparation.
His simple words spell it out for even simpletons to understand. I will repeat the important ones:'sheer ignorance on the part of mothers of the elementary principles of child-feeding and child-care'
What do those words really mean? What is "child feeding" and child care"?
I can comment on these as I am now a Dad. I had no idea what they meant a few years ago.
I'll summarise it as follows:
- Wash your hands
- Bathe your kids daily, or at most, every two days
- Change their nappies when they have done a poo
- Wash your dishes and the baby bottles
- Change and wash your clothes on a daily basis
- Keep your house clean and get rid of the more obvious risks to baby
- Feed your baby regularly (preferably via mum's tit)
- Mum is not to drink, smoke, do drugs or have a shitty diet
Doing this does not require money. It does not require education. It doesn't require you to live in a major coastal city. It just requires commitment and discipline and effort. I don't like having to do three loads of washing every day - but it has to get done. It just has to. Your job as a parent is to ensure that it's done, because no one else is going to do it. I want to flop on the couch in front of the TV as much as the next person, but there is no getting away from doing some basic chores on a daily basis. Shopping for food. Cooking meals. Washing dishes. Changing nappies. Getting the kids out of bed in the morning, feeding them and taking them to school. Nagging them to do homework. Tidying up. Taking Monkey to the park/pool/playground etc for an hour a day.
Being poor is not an excuse for nothing doing the washing. When I was at Uni, I was poor. I stacked shelves at Coles for about $10 an hour between 10pm and 2am, I worked the late shift in a video hire shop and spent my holidays weighing wheat trucks in the middle of nowhere. At one point, our washing machine blew up, so me and my two flatmates chipped in and bought one from the Trading Post.
I think we paid $100 for it. Washing machines were worth real money back then, back before China started making stuff. The classic thing is that we, the children of middle and upper-middle class parents, bought a washing machine from a bloke in a Housing Commission house. I guess the government had given him a new one, so he was selling the old one.
That washing machine represented a good night at the pub for the three of us, but we recognised where our priorities lay, and we spent our cash on a washing machine. Because we were still thirsty, we spent the small amount of money that we had left on a home brew kit, and that saw the start of a major exercise in brewing high strength rocket fuel. But that's another story. Being on the bones of your arse is no impediment to keeping clean.
All it really takes is a bit of selflessness. Kind of what the missionaries did when they gave up a comfortable life in suburbia and treked out to the back blocks of nowhere to start schools for the native kids. Apart from teaching lessons, I'm sure it involved an enormous amount of work in cooking meals (without a microwave or gas stove), doing laundry (without a washing machine), washing up without a dish washer etc etc etc. How is it that we have come to despise those people, rather than admiring them?
In the end though, is the simple explanation for the difference between black and white mortality rates explained by the proposition that some Aboriginal parents do not give a flying fuck about their kids? If they cared enough, they'd stop smoking, cut back on the drinking, cook a proper meal at least once a day and clean the fucking house. Is it really that hard to do a bit of washing and cleaning? Does it really come down to a lack of that?
I lived with a flatmate years ago that I called "Couchy", because she never left the couch. She had a job, which required her to turn up for 7.5 hours per day, but once home, she turned on the TV and lay on her couch with her cat on her lap.
In the year we shared a place, she never cleaned the house (as in ran a vaccuum cleaner around, dusted or scrubbed the bathroom and kitchen), never mowed the lawn, never took the rubbish out, never did the washing up. Her diet consisted mainly of fast food or fish fingers.
In essence, she was just fucking lazy. Nice, good fun to drink with on Friday night, but bone idle. Utterly disinterested in anything that took her away from her beloved TV and couch.
She had a job that put reasonable money into her pocket. Our house was dingy, but clean and spacious and liveable and close to Bondi. She could afford overseas travel and was certainly able to afford some binge drinking every Friday and Saturday night. She was educated to a diploma level, was kind of comfortably well off, but just bone fucking idle.
So if kids are dying because their parents are as bad as Couchy (or probably much worse), why are we leaving them in those circumstances? What would you prefer:
- Placed in a boarding school from age 10 to 17. Graduate with solid education, gain entrance into University, speak excellent English, have great job prospects and have a good social group. But spend 10 months of the year away from Mum.
- Stay in some dusty, crime ridden dump in the middle of nowhere with Mum, who is a drunk, and her current boyfriend, who changes every 3-4 months. Catch numerous infectious diseases each year. End up malnourished and filthy, attend school irregularly, start sniffing glue at 13, get into petty theft soon after, have no job prospects, get abused by "Uncle" Mike and barely speak English at 17. Spend more time in court than in school. But spend all the time with your Mum.
This is why I think the whole 'stolen generations' and the need to say sorry is a load of bollocks. We have nothing to apologise for, and there is an entire generation out there right now that should be whisked away from their parents and sent to boarding school as soon as possible. If that involves taking them away without their parents consent, then so be it. It's not as if they don't have telephones or a postal service in these remote towns. Mum can always ring up once a week to say hello.
If she's sober enough to remember.
The main causes of mortality among Aboriginal infants were infection (29%), SIDS (27%), prematurity (16%) and birth defects (15%). In the most recent years studied, the relative risk compared to non-Aboriginal infants of death due to infection was 9 times higher and the risk of SIDS was nearly 8 times higher. There are measures that can be taken in the current state of knowledge to reduce the number of deaths from SIDS or infection.
Overall, 51% of Aboriginal mothers smoked. In 60% of infant deaths, Aboriginal mothers smoked during pregnancy. The risk of SIDS for infants of Aboriginal mothers who smoked was nearly three times that of Aboriginal mothers who did not smoke.
Thursday, 24 January 2008
Pile of steaming bollocks
This came my way this week:
Apology to stolen generations – questions and answers
This material has been prepared by Reconciliation Australia to help Australians understand the background to the apology that will be made to the stolen generations by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
1. Who are the stolen generations?
2. How do we know these people’s stories are true?
3. Why is it important to apologise to the stolen generations?
4. Why should Australians today apologise for something we aren’t responsible for?
5. What does an apology mean to me as a non-Indigenous Australian?
6. Why should we apologise when many Aboriginal people are actually better off because they were removed from dysfunctional families?
7. Will an apology lead to claims for compensation from members of the stolen generations?
8. Why is the word ‘sorry’ important as part of the apology?
1. Who are the stolen generations?
The term ‘stolen generations’ refers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who were forcibly removed from their families and communities by government, welfare or church authorities as children and placed into institutional care or with non-Indigenous foster families. The forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children began as early as the mid 1800s and continued until 1970.
This removal occurred as the result of official laws and policies aimed at assimilating the Indigenous population into the wider community.
The 1997 Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found that between 1 in 10 and 3 in 10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from 1910 to 1970.
The Western Australian and Queensland governments have confirmed that in that period all Indigenous families in their States were affected by the forced removal of children. It’s not possible to know precisely how many children were taken because government records of these removals are poor and many government files are inaccurate.
The stolen generation should not be confused with other government policies which aimed to help Aboriginal children from remote areas to go to school with their parents full consent. It should also not be confused with the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children from dysfunctional families under welfare policies that continue to apply today.
2. How do we know these people’s stories are true?
All State and Territory governments have acknowledged past practices and policies of forced removal of Indigenous children on the basis of race. As part of this formal acknowledgement, all State and Territory governments have apologised for the trauma these policies have caused.
The report of the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, called the Bringing them Home report, contains extensive evidence of past practices and policies which resulted in the removal of children. It also details the conditions into which many of the children were placed and discussed the negative impact this has had on individuals, their families and the broader Indigenous community.
The Inquiry took evidence from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, government and church representatives, former mission staff, foster and adoptive parents, doctors and health professionals, academics, police and others. It received over 777 submissions, including 535 from Indigenous individuals and organisations, 49 from church organisations and 7 from governments.
3. Why is it important to apologise to the stolen generations?
The Bringing Them Home report found that the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities has had life-long and profoundly disabling consequences for those taken and has negatively affected the Indigenous community. For many of the children, removal meant that they lost all connection to family, traditional land, culture and language.
It never goes away. Just ‘cause we’re not walking around on crutches or with bandages or plasters on our legs and arms, doesn’t mean we’re not hurting. Just ’cause you can’t see it doesn’t mean …I suspect I’ll carry these sorts of wounds ’til I the day I die. I’d just like it to be not quite as intense, that’s all. Confidential evidence 580, Queensland. Bringing Them Home Report
The reality of Australia’s stolen generations is not a thing of the distant past. Children were being inappropriately removed from their families by Australian authorities until 1969. Many people affected by the tragedy of the stolen generations are still alive today and live with its effects.
The Bringing Them Home report recommended that the first step in healing is the acknowledgment of truth and the delivery of an apology. It is the responsibility of the Australian Government, on behalf of previous Australian governments that administered this wrongful policy to acknowledge what was done and apologise for it.
This issue is a ‘blank spot’ in the history of Australia. The damage and trauma these policies caused are felt everyday by Aboriginal people. They internalise their grief, guilt and confusion, inflicting further pain on themselves and others around them. It is about time the Australian Government openly accepted responsibility for their actions and compensate those affected. Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter (In Buti A, Bringing them home the ALSA way)
4. Why should Australians today apologise for something we aren’t responsible for?
Individual Australians are not providing the apology. The apology is being provided by the Australian Government in recognition of policies of past governments. Similarly, the former Australian Government apologised to Vietnam veterans for the policies of previous governments.
The current Government is apologising for wrongful policies of governments. No individual Australian is being asked to take personal responsibility for actions of past governments.
5. What does an apology mean to me as a non-Indigenous Australian?
Following on from apologies already made by all State and Territory governments and the churches, an official apology to members of the stolen generations by the Australian Government is an important step towards building a respectful new relationship between us as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Respectful relationships are essential if we are to solve persistent problems.
In this way, the apology will allow us to work together more effectively towards closing the 17-year life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children - the starkest evidence of how government policies have failed. It is an important starting point in healing the wounds and an historic step forward for our nation that we can be proud of.
The apology is not an expression of personal responsibility or guilt by individual Australians. But it does reflect our Australian values of compassion and a fair go, and allows the victims of bad policy to feel that their pain and suffering has been acknowledged. It’s important that Australians understand the background to the apology so they understand why it’s a good thing for the nation – it is this understanding that will realise the great potential of this historic moment to move our nation forward.
These days I don’t understand why it should be such a big deal to say sorry for the injustices that have been done to Indigenous people. I know some people feel differently but, to me, saying sorry just feels necessary as a first step towards moving forward together. Daniel Johns, lead singer of Silverchair
6. Why should we apologise when many Aboriginal people are actually better off because they were removed from dysfunctional families?
It is true that some Indigenous children were removed from their families on genuine welfare grounds. It is also true that some children who were removed received some advantages, for example in education, but the overwhelming impact of the forced removal policy was damaging. People involved in the removal of children genuinely believed they were doing the right thing. But as we now know, they were not.
It’s important to understand that the “stolen generations” refer to those children who were removed on the basis of their race alone. In contrast with the removal of non-Indigenous children, proof of neglect was not always required to remove Indigenous children. That one of their parents was of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent was enough.
The predominant aim of the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families was to absorb or assimilate children with mixed ancestry into the non-Indigenous community. As Brisbane's Telegraph newspaper reported in May 1937: Mr Neville [the Chief Protector of WA] holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the half-caste problem is increasing every year. Therefore their idea is to keep the pure blacks segregated and absorb the half-castes into the white population. Perhaps it will take one hundred years, perhaps longer, but the race is dying.
The Bringing Them Home report found that many children were removed solely on the basis of skin colour. Because of this, siblings from the one family who were considered to be of lighter skin colour would be removed when others were left.
The suggestion that stolen generations children were better off is untrue on any reasonable
assessment of the cases where they were placed in situations of deprivation, neglect and abuse.
People who were removed gave evidence to the Inquiry of their mistreatment under State care - this ranged from inadequate food and clothing, to physical, sexual and psychological abuse.
Almost a quarter of witnesses to the Inquiry who were fostered or adopted reported being physically abused. One in five reported being sexually abused. One in six children sent to institutions reported physical abuse and one in ten reported sexual abuse.
7. Will an apology lead to claims for compensation from members of the stolen generations?
The Bringing Them Home report recommended the establishment of a national compensation fund for people affected by the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. The aim of the fund would be to offer reparation to those affected and avoid the courts having to deal with costly individual litigation.
An official apology is not directly related to compensation. All State and Territory governments have apologised and this has not triggered any rush of compensation claims.
The Tasmanian Government has chosen to set up a compensation fund for members of the stolen generations in that State. It has provided $5 million in capped payments to be divided among eligible people and their families. http://www.premier.tas.gov.au/speeches/stolen.html
The Government of South Australia is also considering establishing a fund.
Queensland and New South Wales have ruled out stolen generations compensation funds,
although both States are providing reparations for policies under which Aboriginal people could be put to work but not paid.
The West Australian Government announced in late 2007 the ‘Redress WA’ program to provide
monetary and emotional support to people who were abused as children in State care, including
members of the stolen generations.
http://www.redress.wa.gov.au/
The Australia Government has said it will not establish a fund at the national level but will direct
funds to counselling services for members of the stolen generations and services that help people who were removed as children to find their families and communities.
Reconciliation for me is about recognising the past. Acting in the present. And building a better
future. The Hon. Paul Lennon MP, Premier of Tasmania
8. Why is the word ‘sorry’ important as part of the apology?
The word ‘sorry’ holds special meaning in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. In many Aboriginal communities, sorry is an adapted English word used to describe the rituals surrounding death (Sorry Business). Sorry, in these contexts, is also often used to express empathy or sympathy rather than responsibility.
During the 2007 election campaign, then Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd also recognised the
significance of the word sorry:
“… simply saying that you’re sorry is such a powerful symbol. Powerful not because it represents some expiation of guilt. Powerful not because it represents any form of legal requirement. But powerful simply because it restores respect”
9. Why didn’t the former Australian Government say sorry?
In 1997, the recommendation of the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Children from their Families for an official apology was not taken up by the new Australian Government led by John Howard. Mr Howard argued that it was not appropriate for the current Government to apologise for the actions of past governments. He also said he was concerned that a formal admission of wrongdoing would lead to compensation litigation.
All State and Territory governments did issue formal apologies in the period following the Inquiry and these did not generate a rush of compensation claims.
In 1999, the Australian Government moved a motion for reconciliation with an expression of:
“deep and sincere regret that indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practices of past generations, and for the hurt and trauma that many indigenous people continue to feel as a
consequence of those practices.”
10. Will the apology mean that reconciliation has been achieved?
An apology from the Australian Government to the stolen generations is one important step in
achieving the overarching objective of reconciliation which is to close the 17-year life expectancy
gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. It is important because it removes a barrier to us establishing a more respectful relationship as Indigenous and non-Indigenous fellow Australians.
Closing the life expectancy gap involves consistent, long term action by governments, and by all
Australians, in health, education, housing, employment etc and also in building respectful
relationships that generate better outcomes for us all.
Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton suggests that a formal apology will achieve two things: firstly it will aid in the restoration of a sense of dignity and legitimacy to those who have suffered, and secondly it will acknowledge the serious harm done by previous governments to a class of people on the grounds of their race.
True reconciliation between the Australian nation and its indigenous peoples is not achievable in
the absence of acknowledgment by the nation of the wrongfulness of the past dispossession,
oppression and degradation of the Aboriginal peoples. Sir William Deane, Governor-General of
Australia, 1997
Case Study: Canada's ‘Common Experience Fund’
Canada’s Indigenous population shares some of the experiences of Indigenous Australians. From
the early 1880s, Indigenous Canadian children were removed from their homes on the basis of their race and placed in church-run, government funded residential schools. From 1920 until early 1970 this removal was experienced by practically all Indigenous children. These schools were created to encourage assimilation and to suppress Indigenous culture and language.
The United Church of Canada recently apologised for this “horrendous period of Canadian history” and the Canadian Government also extended a formal apology in the form of an action plan. The action plan included a statement of reconciliation in which the Canadian Government recognised and apologised for “the single most harmful, disgraceful and racist act” in their history.
The apology led to a range of lawsuits and helped Ottawa’s Government to come to a settlement
with First Nation representatives. As a result of the settlement, the Canadian Government provided a $1.9 billion compensation fund for the ‘common experience’ of all people who were affected by the removal of Indigenous children. All residential school survivors are entitled to apply for the ‘common experience payment’. If the applicant is successful they receive a standard $10,000 in compensation and a further $3,000 for each year they were placed in the school. The Government has also provided an extra $3 billion in compensation to survivors who suffered sexual and physical abuse in the residential schools.
Currently 85,080 applications for the ‘common experience’ payment have been received. Of that number, 56,625 have been processed with 46,910 being successful.
Apology to stolen generations – questions and answers
This material has been prepared by Reconciliation Australia to help Australians understand the background to the apology that will be made to the stolen generations by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
1. Who are the stolen generations?
2. How do we know these people’s stories are true?
3. Why is it important to apologise to the stolen generations?
4. Why should Australians today apologise for something we aren’t responsible for?
5. What does an apology mean to me as a non-Indigenous Australian?
6. Why should we apologise when many Aboriginal people are actually better off because they were removed from dysfunctional families?
7. Will an apology lead to claims for compensation from members of the stolen generations?
8. Why is the word ‘sorry’ important as part of the apology?
1. Who are the stolen generations?
The term ‘stolen generations’ refers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who were forcibly removed from their families and communities by government, welfare or church authorities as children and placed into institutional care or with non-Indigenous foster families. The forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children began as early as the mid 1800s and continued until 1970.
This removal occurred as the result of official laws and policies aimed at assimilating the Indigenous population into the wider community.
The 1997 Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found that between 1 in 10 and 3 in 10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from 1910 to 1970.
The Western Australian and Queensland governments have confirmed that in that period all Indigenous families in their States were affected by the forced removal of children. It’s not possible to know precisely how many children were taken because government records of these removals are poor and many government files are inaccurate.
The stolen generation should not be confused with other government policies which aimed to help Aboriginal children from remote areas to go to school with their parents full consent. It should also not be confused with the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children from dysfunctional families under welfare policies that continue to apply today.
2. How do we know these people’s stories are true?
All State and Territory governments have acknowledged past practices and policies of forced removal of Indigenous children on the basis of race. As part of this formal acknowledgement, all State and Territory governments have apologised for the trauma these policies have caused.
The report of the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, called the Bringing them Home report, contains extensive evidence of past practices and policies which resulted in the removal of children. It also details the conditions into which many of the children were placed and discussed the negative impact this has had on individuals, their families and the broader Indigenous community.
The Inquiry took evidence from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, government and church representatives, former mission staff, foster and adoptive parents, doctors and health professionals, academics, police and others. It received over 777 submissions, including 535 from Indigenous individuals and organisations, 49 from church organisations and 7 from governments.
3. Why is it important to apologise to the stolen generations?
The Bringing Them Home report found that the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities has had life-long and profoundly disabling consequences for those taken and has negatively affected the Indigenous community. For many of the children, removal meant that they lost all connection to family, traditional land, culture and language.
It never goes away. Just ‘cause we’re not walking around on crutches or with bandages or plasters on our legs and arms, doesn’t mean we’re not hurting. Just ’cause you can’t see it doesn’t mean …I suspect I’ll carry these sorts of wounds ’til I the day I die. I’d just like it to be not quite as intense, that’s all. Confidential evidence 580, Queensland. Bringing Them Home Report
The reality of Australia’s stolen generations is not a thing of the distant past. Children were being inappropriately removed from their families by Australian authorities until 1969. Many people affected by the tragedy of the stolen generations are still alive today and live with its effects.
The Bringing Them Home report recommended that the first step in healing is the acknowledgment of truth and the delivery of an apology. It is the responsibility of the Australian Government, on behalf of previous Australian governments that administered this wrongful policy to acknowledge what was done and apologise for it.
This issue is a ‘blank spot’ in the history of Australia. The damage and trauma these policies caused are felt everyday by Aboriginal people. They internalise their grief, guilt and confusion, inflicting further pain on themselves and others around them. It is about time the Australian Government openly accepted responsibility for their actions and compensate those affected. Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter (In Buti A, Bringing them home the ALSA way)
4. Why should Australians today apologise for something we aren’t responsible for?
Individual Australians are not providing the apology. The apology is being provided by the Australian Government in recognition of policies of past governments. Similarly, the former Australian Government apologised to Vietnam veterans for the policies of previous governments.
The current Government is apologising for wrongful policies of governments. No individual Australian is being asked to take personal responsibility for actions of past governments.
5. What does an apology mean to me as a non-Indigenous Australian?
Following on from apologies already made by all State and Territory governments and the churches, an official apology to members of the stolen generations by the Australian Government is an important step towards building a respectful new relationship between us as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Respectful relationships are essential if we are to solve persistent problems.
In this way, the apology will allow us to work together more effectively towards closing the 17-year life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children - the starkest evidence of how government policies have failed. It is an important starting point in healing the wounds and an historic step forward for our nation that we can be proud of.
The apology is not an expression of personal responsibility or guilt by individual Australians. But it does reflect our Australian values of compassion and a fair go, and allows the victims of bad policy to feel that their pain and suffering has been acknowledged. It’s important that Australians understand the background to the apology so they understand why it’s a good thing for the nation – it is this understanding that will realise the great potential of this historic moment to move our nation forward.
These days I don’t understand why it should be such a big deal to say sorry for the injustices that have been done to Indigenous people. I know some people feel differently but, to me, saying sorry just feels necessary as a first step towards moving forward together. Daniel Johns, lead singer of Silverchair
6. Why should we apologise when many Aboriginal people are actually better off because they were removed from dysfunctional families?
It is true that some Indigenous children were removed from their families on genuine welfare grounds. It is also true that some children who were removed received some advantages, for example in education, but the overwhelming impact of the forced removal policy was damaging. People involved in the removal of children genuinely believed they were doing the right thing. But as we now know, they were not.
It’s important to understand that the “stolen generations” refer to those children who were removed on the basis of their race alone. In contrast with the removal of non-Indigenous children, proof of neglect was not always required to remove Indigenous children. That one of their parents was of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent was enough.
The predominant aim of the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families was to absorb or assimilate children with mixed ancestry into the non-Indigenous community. As Brisbane's Telegraph newspaper reported in May 1937: Mr Neville [the Chief Protector of WA] holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the half-caste problem is increasing every year. Therefore their idea is to keep the pure blacks segregated and absorb the half-castes into the white population. Perhaps it will take one hundred years, perhaps longer, but the race is dying.
The Bringing Them Home report found that many children were removed solely on the basis of skin colour. Because of this, siblings from the one family who were considered to be of lighter skin colour would be removed when others were left.
The suggestion that stolen generations children were better off is untrue on any reasonable
assessment of the cases where they were placed in situations of deprivation, neglect and abuse.
People who were removed gave evidence to the Inquiry of their mistreatment under State care - this ranged from inadequate food and clothing, to physical, sexual and psychological abuse.
Almost a quarter of witnesses to the Inquiry who were fostered or adopted reported being physically abused. One in five reported being sexually abused. One in six children sent to institutions reported physical abuse and one in ten reported sexual abuse.
7. Will an apology lead to claims for compensation from members of the stolen generations?
The Bringing Them Home report recommended the establishment of a national compensation fund for people affected by the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. The aim of the fund would be to offer reparation to those affected and avoid the courts having to deal with costly individual litigation.
An official apology is not directly related to compensation. All State and Territory governments have apologised and this has not triggered any rush of compensation claims.
The Tasmanian Government has chosen to set up a compensation fund for members of the stolen generations in that State. It has provided $5 million in capped payments to be divided among eligible people and their families. http://www.premier.tas.gov.au/speeches/stolen.html
The Government of South Australia is also considering establishing a fund.
Queensland and New South Wales have ruled out stolen generations compensation funds,
although both States are providing reparations for policies under which Aboriginal people could be put to work but not paid.
The West Australian Government announced in late 2007 the ‘Redress WA’ program to provide
monetary and emotional support to people who were abused as children in State care, including
members of the stolen generations.
http://www.redress.wa.gov.au/
The Australia Government has said it will not establish a fund at the national level but will direct
funds to counselling services for members of the stolen generations and services that help people who were removed as children to find their families and communities.
Reconciliation for me is about recognising the past. Acting in the present. And building a better
future. The Hon. Paul Lennon MP, Premier of Tasmania
8. Why is the word ‘sorry’ important as part of the apology?
The word ‘sorry’ holds special meaning in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. In many Aboriginal communities, sorry is an adapted English word used to describe the rituals surrounding death (Sorry Business). Sorry, in these contexts, is also often used to express empathy or sympathy rather than responsibility.
During the 2007 election campaign, then Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd also recognised the
significance of the word sorry:
“… simply saying that you’re sorry is such a powerful symbol. Powerful not because it represents some expiation of guilt. Powerful not because it represents any form of legal requirement. But powerful simply because it restores respect”
9. Why didn’t the former Australian Government say sorry?
In 1997, the recommendation of the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Children from their Families for an official apology was not taken up by the new Australian Government led by John Howard. Mr Howard argued that it was not appropriate for the current Government to apologise for the actions of past governments. He also said he was concerned that a formal admission of wrongdoing would lead to compensation litigation.
All State and Territory governments did issue formal apologies in the period following the Inquiry and these did not generate a rush of compensation claims.
In 1999, the Australian Government moved a motion for reconciliation with an expression of:
“deep and sincere regret that indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practices of past generations, and for the hurt and trauma that many indigenous people continue to feel as a
consequence of those practices.”
10. Will the apology mean that reconciliation has been achieved?
An apology from the Australian Government to the stolen generations is one important step in
achieving the overarching objective of reconciliation which is to close the 17-year life expectancy
gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. It is important because it removes a barrier to us establishing a more respectful relationship as Indigenous and non-Indigenous fellow Australians.
Closing the life expectancy gap involves consistent, long term action by governments, and by all
Australians, in health, education, housing, employment etc and also in building respectful
relationships that generate better outcomes for us all.
Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton suggests that a formal apology will achieve two things: firstly it will aid in the restoration of a sense of dignity and legitimacy to those who have suffered, and secondly it will acknowledge the serious harm done by previous governments to a class of people on the grounds of their race.
True reconciliation between the Australian nation and its indigenous peoples is not achievable in
the absence of acknowledgment by the nation of the wrongfulness of the past dispossession,
oppression and degradation of the Aboriginal peoples. Sir William Deane, Governor-General of
Australia, 1997
Case Study: Canada's ‘Common Experience Fund’
Canada’s Indigenous population shares some of the experiences of Indigenous Australians. From
the early 1880s, Indigenous Canadian children were removed from their homes on the basis of their race and placed in church-run, government funded residential schools. From 1920 until early 1970 this removal was experienced by practically all Indigenous children. These schools were created to encourage assimilation and to suppress Indigenous culture and language.
The United Church of Canada recently apologised for this “horrendous period of Canadian history” and the Canadian Government also extended a formal apology in the form of an action plan. The action plan included a statement of reconciliation in which the Canadian Government recognised and apologised for “the single most harmful, disgraceful and racist act” in their history.
The apology led to a range of lawsuits and helped Ottawa’s Government to come to a settlement
with First Nation representatives. As a result of the settlement, the Canadian Government provided a $1.9 billion compensation fund for the ‘common experience’ of all people who were affected by the removal of Indigenous children. All residential school survivors are entitled to apply for the ‘common experience payment’. If the applicant is successful they receive a standard $10,000 in compensation and a further $3,000 for each year they were placed in the school. The Government has also provided an extra $3 billion in compensation to survivors who suffered sexual and physical abuse in the residential schools.
Currently 85,080 applications for the ‘common experience’ payment have been received. Of that number, 56,625 have been processed with 46,910 being successful.
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