This event, in which a prominent indigenous opera singer suffered a stroke at a Griffith University bus stop and was left semi-conscious and vomiting for hours on end by commuters and bus drivers alike, is a source of shame for Brisbane, and should be one for all Australians.
Obviously, despite being a well-dressed visitor to a university, Delmae Barton’s skin colour was enough to create the assumption that she was drunk. I don’t want to throw too many stones at the individuals involved: the fact that we live in a society where drunken black people are a fairly common sight is just as shameful as the episode itself. And I don’t have any easy answers. But it’s something for which all Australians need to take some responsibility.
John Quiggin 
http://images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/imagedata/0,1658,5119181,00.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,18374377%25255E3102,00.html&h=285&w=190&sz=18&tbnid=OE2rERPJ4htjnM:&tbnh=110&tbnw=73&hl=en&start=7&prev=/images%3Fq%3DDelmae%2BBarton%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG
Delmae Barton’s skin color is lighter than mine.
It is often a fair assumption that people vomiting at university bus-stops are drunk, indigenous or otherwise. While some people might have been affected by her (fairly light) skin colour, I suspect most simply did not think she needed help. It sounded like a terrible ordeal for her, and clearer thinking people should have helped her sooner, but there is insufficient evidence to start calling people racist.
One of my friend was victim of a severe food intoxication and ended in the streets vomiting. He had exactly the same experience as the one told here. Though he asked politely several bystanders if they could call an ambulance or the hospital, none answered. That happened in Germany. My friend was German but of Cameroon origin. I agree with posters that it is hard to ascertain racism a priori, but on the basis of that personal story, I would be inclined to believe it was indeed the case.
Unfortunately seeing people passed out in the gutter is an all to common experience. Most of the people I see in such a state are not black. To be honest it has never occured to me that they may be anything other than intoxicated. I suppose if I saw a sober looking person suddenly collapse in the street I would react differently than if I merely saw somebody in the street unconscious and being ignored by the passing pedestrians.
The other day I was in Burger King in Pitt Street (I don’t normally eat junk but that day was an exception). I was approached by a homeless man whilst I ate my burger. He asked for a dollar so he could buy a burger (he already had some loose change). I obliged. Shortly afterwards he left without buying a burger. It reaffirmed my prejudice against giving money to homeless people.
Surviving in the big city means judging people to some extent by the circumstance in which you encounter them. I have seen people suffer as a result of being too friendly to strangers so I can understand the impulse to keep walking.
Terje,it takes more than a dollar to buy a burger. You ol’benevolent guy.
Terge, the homeless man had obviously been reading about the negative aspects of eating junk food.
I commend your generosity!
I agree Ian – I saw the lady on the news and she didn’t look that much like an Aboriginie to me. I suspect this was a lot deeper than racism or anything like that. There is a relatively large psychological literature on bystander behaviour in response to the distress of others, much of which illustrates that people tend to avoid getting involved when others are in distress. Its nothing new, but I do believe we should be better than this.
What I am struggling with most is that nobody thought to do a simple thing like call an ambulance, despite the fact that everyone seems to have a mibile phone nowadays.
Interestingly, the letters to the ed. in today’s Curious Snail mainly picked up that, as a society, we regularly ignore bodies, apparently intoxicated/drugged/etc, regardless of the colour. It’s probably partly fear of law suits/endless hours giving details to the police etc, along with the inevitable fear of the ‘unknown’: what will happen if I try to rouse etc this person?
It would be good to have a number to call. But what is the number? Do you call 000 for someone sleeping at a bus stop?
Unless someone is clearly calling for help (and looking relatively non-dangerous), I hesitate to get involved if they are ‘simply’ throwing up. I can only think of a few times when I have got involved in situations like this.
If someone is ‘sleeping’ in public – and even if it is during daylight hours with other people around – I honestly have never got involved.
I have walked passed people ‘sleeping’ in and around the Brunswick and Queen St malls during daytime many times.
Last week there was guy ‘sleeping’ on Elizabeth St near the bus stop outside the Wintergarden food court. Myself and (dozens of) others walked passed.
Maybe I am just a bad person. But there is risk in getting involved. There is also the thought that some people sleeping on the streets don’t want to be disturbed (at least not at that time or in the manner you think is appropriate).
If the sight of someone ‘sleeping’ or vomiting in public was uncommon – maybe things would be different. But, unfortunately, these signals aren’t usually sufficient for many people to become involved in major city centres.
The cause should be of more concern than the effect.
I once called 000 because Ziggy the bagman who lives on the footpath at Toowong (and is well known in Brisbane through newspaper reports etc, including when some youths tried to set fire to him) looked a bit worse than usual – I was in peak hour traffic and couldn’t stop. The person answering the 000 call was in Ballarat or somewhere and had no idea what I was talking about.
Several years ago I was heading to my bus stop when
I encountered a young pregnant Aboriginal woman lying down on the steps behind the very long queue. I stopped to see whether she needed help and ascertained that she wasn’t drunk- no smell, that she wasn’t dead – some reaction to a pinched ear – but that she needed an ambulance as she would barely rouse. Another stranger stopped at that point to help.
I called out to those in the queue seeking to find someone with a mobile phone. There was no response at first but eventually a young man did ring for an ambulance which took her to hospital. However I do wonder to this day how so many people could continue to queue and never try to find out what was wrong. Was it racist or the result of people who just don’t want to get involved in the misery of strangers?
QUOTE: Terje,it takes more than a dollar to buy a burger. You ol’benevolent guy.
RESPONSE: I am not sure if you are attempting to be a jerk but at a guess I would say that you are. I gave him what he asked for. I probably gave him more. As I said he already had loose change and asked for extra to make up the price of a burger. I don’t begrudge him the money, however I suspect that it was in the end spent in the pursuit of self destruction which in my view is pretty tragic. As it was I had no cash in my wallet and he got all the coins in my pocket. Are you suggesting that I should have asked him to visit an ATM with me?
There was a good article in the Guardian a while back by a woman who was on a bus during the day and who helped someone who had been stabbed on the bus – most people left the bus as soon as they could after the event happened and she had trouble getting anyone to help her. I unfortunately agree – I don’t think this sort of thing is a race issue. If it was it might be easier to solve. I do think it is a matter of behaviour which is reinforced every day – be afraid of strangers and focus on your own issues. As Jill says, it is still hard to get other people to pay attention or help even when someone “respectable” has made the first move.
Dear John
There is much to reflect on here regarding ‘bystander behaviour’ but the hard thing to swallow is that this materialistic, individualistic, ‘me-first’ society produces people who are insensitive to the plight of others, particularly if they are ‘other’.
This lack of empathy is just what John Howard relies on, and he is actually rewarded for having policies that deny personhood to asylum seekers, indigenous Australians, prisoners, Muslims, unemployed people. The JH government daily demonstrates that it has no ‘values’, although it endlessly talks about these ‘values’ (when will someone resign over Vivian Solon, Cornelia Rau or the AWB scandal?).
What we should do is set this government a good example by demonstrating civility to our fellow citizens, whoever they are. It could even raise awareness. We could even have a more pleasant society in which to live. Our political leaders would have to behave better too, otherwise they could be out of line with our expectations. Do you think we could stop them from lying?
Willy, I kind of agree with your sentiment. Polls have repeatedly shown that people think the Howard government is dishonest and in general ethically moribund. The same polls have said that people want to keep on voting for them. It’s a clear example of a kind of collective Faustian deal: keep giving us the goods, and we’ll give you a license to lie, dispossess, torture and kill in “the National Interest” (and we’ll try to avert eyes).
But is the Auntie Delmae case anything to do with this? I am under the impression that Bystander Effects are pretty well-confirmed in social psychology across cultures. It may not have much to do with our particular version of the “materialistic, individualistic, ‘me-first’ society”.
A lot of people I’ve talked to said that “this sort of thing wouldn’t have happened in the old days”… Not quite sure to which old days they are referring to…
Anyway, lets apply economics to the problem!
There is a negative externality of seeing someone in distress. There is a benefit to assisting this person, but also an associated cost. If the benefit – cost > negative externality, then you will help this person in distress.
Now compared to these ‘old days’, the benefit may have shrunk, the cost risen, or a combination of the two. You could argue that the benefit has shrunk because people are more selfish than they used to be, or the cost of ‘getting involved’ is just too high. Nothing new so far.
What if people don’t KNOW their own benefits or costs? They’ll seek some other way to determine if helping is actually worth it, so when other people walk by the person in distress, then they too will think “Aha! It’s not worth it for them to help, so its probably not worth it for me to help.” Thus, effectively NOT helping the person in distress effects other people not to help either. (Think Prisoner’s dilemma in game theory.)
The solution? I don’t know… build a time machine to go back to these ‘old days’?
I must say I’m uncomfortable with the easy assumption that it would have been ok to leave an elderly woman lying in a pool of vomit if she _had_ been drunk. Are drunks so undeserving of assistance? Is it fine to impose a deserving/undeserving poor calculus on rendering help to someone in need?
It’s really not that bloody hard with a mobile phone or a small bit of nous to call the relevant authorities. It always appals me to hear these stories – I don’t think it’s John Howard’s fault, or racism, it is to do with a lack of empathy and a cult of individualism however. John Howard has promoted this, but it was already a strengthening theme in the west, rising since the 60s.
That’s why i can’t stand libertarianism, I think it is an evil ideology – because as a libertarian it is entirely your choice to stop and help or not, based on the level of convenience to you – whereas under communitarian values it’s not your choice, it’s something you do because you recognise that the other person is part of your community and you are responsible for them as they are for you.
My question is, how do I inculcate these values in a child, make them one of the people that will stop?
Wilful, I agree with you about libertarianism (though I think it has largely been replaced by an incoherent but convenient corporate-oligarchist+consumer-fundamentalist ideology).
But, still, if you are blaming these things for the Delmae case, why do you think bystander apathy studies tend to show similar results across cultures (if indeed I’m right in remembering that they do)?
Alpaca, nice satire.
Alpaca says, ‘Let’s apply economics to the problem.’
Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me!
I’d have to check the studies. I agree that it’s not unique to this time and place, but I suspect there’s a lot of variation between cultures.
I found Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone to be profoundly enlightening on this issue. To grossly simplify, I blame television.
Wilful, I will check into the studies. As I say, what I think they showed is precisely that there is not a “lot of variation between cultures” (on this particular issue of bystander apathy in anonymous public situations, as opposed to selfishness or individualism in general).
Having said that, a lot of purported ‘cross-cultural’ studies work by comparing Americans only to ex-pat Japanese or Chinese folk at US research universities, which seems pretty limiting.
The selfish problem is that I might have a heart attack and lie on the road while people assume I am drunk. So this is not an academic problem – it could prove fatal.
To solve that, we need a convention that says anyone who is distressed in public should be visited by an ambulance.
Then people would stop being drunk on the road, because they don’t want the attention. It is private behaviour which becomes public because we ignore it.
There is a related but distinguishable issue about drunkenness and distressed homeless people. Do we want to help them because they are drunk? Does our compassion and responsibility extend that far?
We all implicitly draw limits, or we end up living in houses full of otherwise homeless people.
My actual response, here in St Kilda which has a fair bit of public distress, is to draw back and think “you dirty person” and avoid them. I notice in the chemist shop that I generally admire and am courteous to the people on the methadone program, because I think they are doing something for themselves. And I got very angry when one of the staff said they should be left on the tram line to die.
So my actual intuitive socialised position is a) I help people who help themselves, b) I ignore people who “bring this on themselves” c) I support people who I see being victimised and d) people who come into my neighbourhood and get pissed and eat pizza and chuck on our pavements are despicable and dirty.
Why do we Australians find it so hard to admit that racism is alive and thriving in Australia? To my mind the only people who can decide whether or not a particular incident has racial overtones are those who are subjected to racism. Auntie Delmae believes there is a racist element to what happened to her and that is probably because she experineces it every day, whether she be sick at a bus stop or trying to get service in a shop or waiting for a taxi at night, in short, any time, anywhere. It’s time we faced up to the fact that Australia is built on racism.
“built on” racism? Not quite.
but yeah, Austrlia ahs a racism problem. Whether it’s greater or lesser than any other supposedly advanced nations isn’t something I’ve seen any reliable analysis or commentary about.
Of course Howard was overstating the case about “black armband history”, he was making a divisive and manipulative point (he is a politician after all). But there was a grain of truth in his statement, which was why it got carriage, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about our faults, we should work to fix them.
As a whitey I probably inherently blind to this, but when I look at my suburb (Footscray), my train line, my workplace, I don’t see any racism whatsoever. I do see racism in our services for outback aborigines – I want my taxes to be spent equitably on them as well. Our third world country in our midst should be a national scandal and shame. But it’s not.
Rae, the trouble is, ‘we’ Australians are deeply devided. In reality, there is no ‘we’. Howard’s ‘mainstream’ cannot admit to racism because it would be a threat to its privilege. Australia’s wealth is still largely generated from stolen Aboriginal property, and under the current (yes, racist) federal government, Australia is not going to move towards a more intelligent or responsible economy.
Perhaps whether racism was involved in this particular incident isn’t as important as considering, to Australia’s shame, that it is entirely believable that it was. Across the board, mainstream Australian is determined to permit a racist stance towards indigenous people (amongst others), and there is no sign of that changing.
this is the BBC report
Aborigine singer ‘left for dead’ , BBC, 03-07-06
“An investigation has been launched after a prominent Aboriginal woman in Australia was left for dead after collapsing at a busy city bus stop.
Singer Delmae Barton, 62, says she lay for more than five hours in a pool of her own vomit after suffering a suspected stroke or diabetes attack.
Her plight was ignored by hundreds of commuters who passed by in the Queensland city of Brisbane.
State officials have apologised and promised an urgent inquiry.
Ms Barton, a well-respected opera singer and indigenous elder, says she believes she was left unattended because of her race.
“I think it did make a difference,” she told ABC radio.
Apology in parliament
Ms Barton said that after collapsing at the bus stop, near a university campus, one man moved his briefcase away from her.
“And there were girls and young women who sat on the seat next to me and other seats around, they never came around to help,” she added.
Japanese students eventually came to her rescue, calling an ambulance to take her to hospital.
Queensland Premier Peter Beattie apologised to Ms Barton in parliament, and urged people not to ignore those who find themselves in similar situations.
“We should not leave them lying there,” he said. “Australians are noted for their giving of a fair go, their commitment and their compassion. We should never lose it.”
Sometimes known as the Dreamtime Opera Diva, Ms Barton has been involved in many ballets, operas and orchestras at home and abroad over the years.
She represented Australia at the Canadian Arts Festival in 2002, and her son, William, is a high-profile didgeridoo player.”
so she was lying in a pool of vomit for 5 hours. and who was it that helped her in the end? a group of Japanese overseas students! all it took was to dial a phone but that is too much for some people – seemingly every Australian at the scene.
Australians are full of garbage the way they bray on about being a ‘fair go’, friendly country. “Australians are noted for their giving of a fair go, their commitment and their compassion. We should never lose it”, sorry but I don’t buy it. it brings to mind an encounter I had a couple of years back when getting off a train at Fairfield station, I was last in the line of several dozen people who walked out of the station and past an elderly blind woman, with sunglasses and walking cane, who had walked herself into a bush and was flailing around obviously unable to find her way out. it was too much for them to walk over and take her out? I was last in the line of people and I was the one that took her out and showed her to the bus stop that she was trying to find, no effort, and yet she was unbelievably thankful, who knows how long she had been there? Australians MAY be no worse than any other group of people but they should quit with the stupid myth that they are better.
PS the blind woman I was talking about before was white
I once rescued a roghly 9 year old girl who was being raped in a house on my street in inner Sydney. When I arrived her mother was outside screaming for help. This woman was indeed an alcoholic; nevertheless the girl could clearly be heard crying inside. There was a crowd gathered including several grown men. None of them even followed me in.
When I got home and made the phone call, I learned that no one who got there before me had so much as called the cops, either.
Also, when I was eleven I rode my skateboard head first into a telegraph pole. No helmet, head injury, blood everywhere. No offers of assistance.
People: they’re crap.
No Terje, do not go to a.t.m., with alleged “homeless”. But remember ,it could have been ‘you’.
Having relieved yourself of your change and maintained your “prejudice”, maybe you could have asked this individual whether he would like moral judgement with that order?
Joe2,
Strangely enough you seem happy to sit in moral judgement of me. You feel able to pass judgement on what I might think or feel or remember about the possibility of it being me in the homeless mans situation. You are presuming a whole stack of things about my capacity for empathy and sympathy and my ability to interprete the plight of others. In so doing you would appear to reveal your own stack of “prejudice”.
You sermonising and your air of moral superiority satisfies me that you were in fact being a jerk. Although perhaps it has not dawned on you yet.
Regards,
Terje.
So if you call me a “lieing bastard” or apply any other term of abuse and I decide that your motive stems from not liking people of Norweigen descent, then it is accurate for me to call you a racist?
I have no doubt that real racist acts occur every day in Australia. However I am also pretty sure that on any typical Australian day many acts occur and people imagine that they are racist acts when they are not.
In my mind the only person that can know with certainty if a particular act is racist is the perpetrator of the act. The rest of us are left to guess.
This may be true, although it seems to be jumping to conclusions. Surely the fact that she was semi-conscious, lying in a pool of vomit and in a public shelter was surely the main thing that created the assumption that she was drunk, rather than her skin colour.
When I lived in St Kilda I many times saw non-blacks lying dead drunk by the side of the road amongst their own wastes. Passers by would ignore them for lenghthy periods of time. For all they knew these wayside-fallers might have suffered a medical emergency.
Occasionally I pulled them out of the gutter and onto the grass, with a quick “DRABC“. But it was an unpleasant thankless task and I dont really blame anyone for not doing it.
Also, waking up a drunken Aboriginal, if that was what passers by thought was the case, is a ticklish operation. Sometimes they are liable to get cranky. Up north the SOP is to ring the police and cart them off to the tank. But that is not exactly a perfect solution either.
Still, its sad to see the Good Samaritan spirit not really thriving in the Me Millenia.
wilful, for it to be “not your choice” you’d have to be forced into giving assistance. Doing it “because you recognise that the other person is part of your community” is _choosing_ to do it because it is right. So how is that incompatible with libertarianism?
Libertarianism might be primarily concerned with what is legitimately enforcable, but that does not exclude a place for values beyond what is enforcable – kindness, communitarianism, etc.
Terje,my “sermons” are brief.
Regards, Fr, Joe2
Eric is correct: libertarianism does not prevent altruism, although many would argue that the correlation between liberatarianism and altruism is suspiciously low.
Eric, the underlying ethos of libertarianism is the question, how do I benefit? And that is construed by all the moral pygmies to mean me, the individual, what’s in it for me, in a shallow transaction sense of whether I can see any direct benefit to taking action right here right now. There is no deeper sense of what is right for the world and the larger group and the existence of virtuous circles of action.
Libertarians would never have enlisted in world war two.
This in my view is a quite incorrect interpretation of what Libertarianism represents. Libertarians in my experience argue a rational line that is typically quite separate to their own material or social status.
Non smoking libertarians will defend the rights of smokers. Libertarians that have never handled a firearm in their life will defend the rights of shooters. Libertarians that are decidedly hetrosexual will argue in favour of freedom for homosexuals. Libertarians that will never occupy the top tax bracket will argue that it is too high. Libertarians that will never use illicit drugs will argue for legalisation. Libertarians that will never sleep with a prostitute or sell their own body for sex will argue for the right for adults to buy and sell sexual services. Libertarians that don’t know anybody at all with a terminal illness and are unlikely to suffer such a thing themselves will argue that euthanasia should be legal.
In short libertarians take a position on a huge number of issues that has very little immediate bearing on them as individuals.
The major traights of libertarians that I can discern are:-
a) In temperament an inclination towards rationalism over and above sentamentalism.
b) In morality an inclination towards human rights over and above utilitarianism.
c) In values a very strong emphasis on freedom.
There is no inconsistency between being a communitarian and a libertarian. I regard myself as both.
A most reasonable value to pass onto your kids. However I also hope you spend a little time teaching them how not to be a drunk that is dependent on the goodwill of others. Single minded narrow selfishness is surely an ugly and destructive character traight, however so is learned helplessness.
There is no underlying ethos of Libertarianism. Rather, on the one hand, it supposes that the only way to give true expression to any system of ethics is to allow it to operate (i.e., free will in fact not just in theory), and on the other it recognises that to force something is ipso facto at least presumptive evidence that wrong is on that side. After that it gets murkier.
I heard of a very similar case once, of two Glasgow policemen hauling a stroke victim off a bus to sleep it off in the cells. An understandable error, but not in any sense a failure of charity.
On each of the occasions I found someone in much that situation, I asked if they wanted help. One of the two lying in the gutter said no (two different gutters at two different times). The man staggering in the street bleeding also said no, and when I went out of my way to find a police station to tell them, in case he had been confused, they wanted me to fill up forms; I felt all that was needful was to lay it on them, so I walked away at that point.
On the other hand, I think I’ve mentioned the deranged Rumanian who wanted to see the Queen before. Him, I got past security late at night into the West German Embassy where I left him after sundry discussions.
But I only gave my sympathy to the man who told me he had been left in the middle of London by friends and needed taxi fare to get the rest of the way to a hospital where they were going to amputate his legs in the morning (which was why he couldn’t walk there).
What to do? What to do?
Of course, altrusism can get out of hand…
Obviously. I mean, it couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the fact that she was vomiting, lying in the gutter, and semi-conscious. They’re obviously symptoms of stroke, not drunkeness.
Speak for yourself JQ. How am I responsible for the actions of an unknown group of people at a Brisbane bus stop? How am I responsible for a welfare system that provides an endless supply of money with which to buy alcohol?
Terje, a more satisfying response when a drunk or addict asks for money is to tell them that you already contributed with your last paycheck, and if that is insufficient to support their habit, they need to take it up with John Howard, not you.
Willfull says: “That’s why i can’t stand libertarianism, I think it is an evil ideology – because as a libertarian it is entirely your choice to stop and help or not, based on the level of convenience to you – whereas under communitarian values it’s not your choice, it’s something you do because you recognise that the other person is part of your community and you are responsible for them as they are for you.”
Willfull, you are combining ignorance with intolerance — and it’s not pretty.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a moral philosophy. The ideas of compassion, love, altruism, empathy etc are issues of moral philosophy and most libertarians have strong commitments to these ideas. I’m a libertarian currently working as a volunteer lecturer at a rural university for poor people in rural Cambodia… and there is no inconsistency there.
The libertarian political philosophy is concerned simply with the role of institutionalised violence (ie government) in society. We tend to think that government does more harm that good. Whether that is true or not is grounds for reasonable debate — but you cannot have reasonable debate if you don’t even know what you’re debating against!
I am offended by your biggoted and hateful views. But I forgive you.
Dogz, there’s not much point in restating, in a gratuitously aggressive fashion, points that have been made and debated at length much earlier in the thread.
John Humphreys – no-one could read libertarians like Nozick (or, a fortiori, Rand, but surely no-one reads her any more?) and believe their political proposals are genuinely neutral on moral issues. Philosophy couched as ‘political’ is easily found out as actually tilted at one narrow set of values when it proposes extreme political means on the basis of very thin evidence. Libertarianism sneaks in an extremist, and adolescent, ethical individualism under the guise of political philosophy.
Having said that, libertarianism is more genus than specie, making it hard to generalise about it per se. Can you nominate a thinker who vaunts political libertarianism without espousing extremist ethical individualism?
CB, try looking here and the places it links to. The thing is, it is quite possible for an ethical position to take the self as the position of assessment – the only available instrument for assessing ethical situations without abdication – without the self being the object to serve. It’s just that the latter is an easy trap to fall into, and the position is a natural lure for those who only ever wanted a gloss for self interest.
PM Lawrence, sure, I’ll have a look around the mutualist blog. But I should just point out that by my brisk reference to ‘ethical individualism’ didn’t necessarily imply selfishness. I’m referring rather to the fact that the libertarians I have read (and I admit that’s only two) take for granted a rather naive view of the self, which implies a particular kind of meta-ethical position. That meta-ethical position is only compatible with a subset of possible substantive ethical theories. I was denying John Humphreys’ notion that libertarianism is pure, morally-neutral, political philosophy. Perhaps such a purely political libertarianism is possible, I’m not sure.
Terje: “The major traights of libertarians that I can discern are:-
a) In temperament an inclination towards rationalism over and above sentamentalism.
b) In morality an inclination towards human rights over and above utilitarianism.”
And you see know contradiction between these?
Okay.
You meant to type “NO” not “KNOW”.
Personally I don’t see that there is necessarily any contradiction.
Of course racism comes into this scenario,as does ignorance of first aid
moral intestinal fortitude,civic responsiblity and the like.
Societies that look after each other in these situations improve everyones
“feel good” factors about the country ,society they live in.Not to mention
the tourism -word of mouth factors that bring people to Brisbane-just imagine the kudos
“Brisbane Bus driver and Passengers save Aboriginal Elders life etc
The more in touch with others points of view,culture, opinions etc perhaps
the more likely we are to give a damn about the valued elders of our multi clutured society.
The rule of thumb is to regard all people unconscious at bus shelters
as in need of assistance,ASAP without any thought of gender,race etc
Is this not the human response?