Sounds just like Canada
Colonies both, Canada and Australia have more in common than just the Queen on our money. They also have that little spot of bother with the natives…
Australian Aboriginal children remain vulnerable to sexual abuse a year after the government sent in police and soldiers to clean up their remote communities, the author of a report into the problem said on Friday.
Aboriginal groups are expected to hold weekend protests to mark a year since the former conservative administration ordered a sweeping intervention in outback towns and settlements to tackle chronic alcoholism from “rivers of grog” and child sexual abuse.
“They’re more vulnerable because they’re not in a school situation, they’re not in any disciplined situation. They’re just left in a house,” said Rex Wild, the co-author of the Little Children Are Sacred report which led to the intervention.
Wild’s government-sanctioned report found child sexual abuse was widespread in indigenous communities and alcohol posed the gravest threat to the safety of indigenous children in the outback Northern Territory.
Australia’s 460,000 Aborigines make up about 2 percent of the country’s 21 million population and have consistently higher rates of unemployment, substance abuse and domestic violence, and a life expectancy 17 years less than other Australians.
Rivers of Grog? Sounds like an Indie band… But I digress.
It’s a very long involved and sad story. The Nutshell is that 40 years ago laws were passed which passed responsibility for Aborignal welfare from the States to the Federal government.
Then a bunch of good intentioned left wing white beuracrats got in charge and they pumped buckets of money into indigenoous communities without any real oversight and then allowed the Aborigines to keep any non-aboriginal out of aboriginal communities. Money + No Control + No Responsibility = Inevitable consequences. The beuracracy was far more interested in white middle class symbolism than actually doing actual good.
The Governments of the day (left and right) let it run unchecked because there were no votes in fixing the problem and whenever someone riased the problems they were shouted down as racist if they weren’t suggesting the government spend even more money.
It finally got to a breaking point 12 months ago, and the intervention is still opposed by the Chardonnay set.
My personal experience of this is I was working for a mine in a remote location in Australia 20 years ago, and there was the mining town and a nearby aboriginal settlement. A 12 year old aboriginal girl was expelled from school because she was prostituting herself for beer in school hours. No outcry, No social services taking the girl from her parent’s ‘care’, no attempt by the aborignial community to identify the perverts preying on the girl. No one cared - the girl’s family didn’t care, her community didn’t care and the government agencies responsible to do something didn’t care. The local mining community, mainly white, got very cynical about this sort of thing and were exposed in the national press as being ‘racist’ a few weeks later when one of the known male predators (roughly equivalent to the mayor of the aboriginal settlement) who’d taken advantage of the girl was refused service by all the local businesses. The press didn’t care about the girl either, because they didn’t want to hear from the locals as to why they were refusing to deal with this scumbag, they only wanted to hear about how badly this poor helpless indigenous man had been treated by the dreadful redneck whiteys.
Comment by Pauly — June 22, 2008 @ 5:56 am
Will you be reprising your “Aboriginal Men taking a break from fucking their daughters” post this year? Always a fave.
Comment by balbulican — June 22, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
because the important and useful thing about this topic is to reinforce stereotypes of conservatives as uncaring and racist, right balbulican?
I end up wondering if the progressive types wouldn’t be let down by significant improvements in aborigional conditions. They’d just lose all their usefulness as a foil. And there would be one less victim class for lefties to cater to as a means to assuage their guilt.
My cousin works with an oil company and when they did work on a reserve they had to employ residents and they cannot fire them. At one site they hired around 5 guys. One actually stuck around for the entire project. They all got paid, although the tank they were supposed to watch was overflowing regularly.
If I wanted to destroy the motive of a people this is what I would do. This is the most brutal way I can imagine treating a people - with liberal compassion. When everything, or at least enough, is given to you free there is nothing to reach for and a community has no reason to coalesce or promote virtue in people or government. The worst reserves in Canada are examples of why C.S. Lewis’ hell in The Great Divorce was a place where you have no needs.
I am convinced that natives in Canada or Australia would be better off than they are under the ennerving kindness of white guilt if the rest of the population were actually actively discriminating against them. (consider the survival and successes of the Jewish people)
The trick is to stop what we are doing without alienating them.
Comment by generalwolfe — June 23, 2008 @ 7:46 pm