Brendan Nelson’s career as Leader of the Opposition looks to be over before he has even faced the Rudd government in Parliament, thanks to his equivocation over the issue of an apology to the Stolen Generation. If Nelson was fair dinkum about supporting an apology, given the appropriate words, he could have made a positive virtue of it, saying something like “This apology needs to come from the Parliament, not just the government. I’m willing to work with Mr Rudd in preparing a statement that will have unanimous support”.
As it is, he will end up being forced through every possible position from outright opposition to conditional support to the final stage when he’ll be forced to deal with the hardline rejectionists in his own ranks.
A unanimous vote of Parliament is essential here. If Nelson fails to take firm action (expulsion and withdrawal of endorsement) against any Liberal who crosses the floor, his failure as a leader will be complete.
Nelson’s problem is that denouncing the Stolen Generation is a cause celebre for the hardliners who gave him for the job and for the culture war dinosaurs (Quadrant, the Bennelong Group and so on) who cheered them on for years. In this sector of their parallel universe, the treatment of Aboriginal Australians was a successful exercise in Christian philanthropy until leftist do-gooders took over in the 1960s. They won’t let Nelson, who is basically a decent person, do the right thing, at least not without a fight.
It’s a pity. Most people are ready to move beyond ideological pointscoring and embrace any policy option that will actually deliver improved living standards and reconciliation. If we are going to move forward, we need to acknowledge how badly our country has failed in the past, and an apology is an essential element of this process.
John Quiggin 
Very well said, John.
Though the point about taking firm action is perhaps moot because the Liberal Party claims that it gives its members the right to cross the floor without fear or favour. You might recall a number voted for Hawke’s motion (the exact terms of which I forget) in 88 which effectively condemned Howard’s anti-Asian sentiments. Including Phillip Ruddock. In general it might be a good thing if he loosened the “party line is the leader’s line” thing that ended up doing Howard so much damage. Though in particular, it wouldn’t be, not least because his party is actually split so many ways making his leadership (correctly, I think) look so weak.
Ooh dear. Maybe I only move in dinosaur circles but I think Dr N may have accurately assessed a large body of public opinion. I say smart move.
Even if that’s so, Hermit, I don’t think so. Nelson’s other problem is that this farce has been played out so publicly at the very time people are probably paying attention to politics again that he’s in the worst of three possible political worlds – he’s not avoiding any political fallout by making it a bipartisan gesture, he’s not getting any political traction from the diminishing crew of anti-apologists because he’s not sticking to that position, and he’s shooting himself in the put by displaying weak and inconsistent leadership for all to see.
Opposing an apology will secure for Nelson the rock-solid support of a constituency which is too small to win elections but which, as the lead post noted, is well and truly sedimented in the organised Right of Australian politics.
Hermit
“Maybe I only move in dinosaur circles”
I don’t think maybe comes into it.
cheers
Patrick.
Do we need to use phrases like “leftist do-gooders”? How many people seriously treat that as a neutral term meaning “well-meaning left-leaning individuals?”
It’s amazing how often left wing positions assert that right wing positions will fail to get right wing support for not being left wing enough. It’s the sort of thinking that assumes there can be no real disagreement on fundamentals, so any actual disagreement must mean things weren’t explained clearly enough. It even presupposes that this apology would be the “right thing”, when to me it seems clear that it falls short in several respects – some from not yet being clear, and some from being entirely too clear, such as the claim to speak for me in moral matters. It is impertinent, at the very least.
The parliamentary Liberal Party is not filled with people who will think worse of Nelson for staying clear of a Rudd initiative. The wider Liberal Party, and even some parliamentarians, would think worse of him for trying to make it a compulsory vote, even if it ever got that far, precisely because this sort of thing is a conscience issue.
“Most people are ready to move beyond ideological pointscoring and embrace any policy option that will actually deliver improved living standards and reconciliation. If we are going to move forward, we need to acknowledge how badly our country has failed in the past, and an apology is an essential element of this process.” Since this is full of Tony Blairish alarm terms like “move beyond”, I looked closer. It sounds too much like “the time has come for all good men to rise above principle”. How would it help to do this, when it would offend people too, and the “actually deliver improved living standards and reconciliation” is not established?
Nelson is Liberal leader because he was supported by the party’s Right. (Hence Brownyn Bishop – Bronwyn Bishop! – is a shadow minister.)
That support is highly conditional, because he is not One of Them. Nelson isn’t one of anybody, really. He especially isn’t Malcolm Turnbull, which is why he got the job in the first place.
Sooner or later, probably sooner, the Right will tire of him and find another puppet, or Turnbull will shift the necessary two votes and usurp him. If it’s not this issue that does Nelson in, it will be another one before long.
Nelson probably won’t fall on this occasion because the Right appears to be split on the issue.
It’s interesting that Murdoch hack Glenn Milne has quoted an email from a supposed “hardliner”, Shane Stone, saying we need to make this apology:
Well, you can take credit for it if you want, Shane, but the fact is that even trogolodytes can tell which way the wind is blowing.
It’s an interesting dynamic, this spectacle of (part of) the Right falling over themselves to say sorry.
Presumably they haven’t all just been converted by Kevin Rudd’s towering rhetoric and powers of persuasion.
It probably would have happened 10 years ago but for John Howard. He was against it, so they shut up for career advancement or other reasons or they managed to convince themselves that despite what they thought he was right and they were wrong.
Howard’s departure could signal a change of mind on all sorts of issues from those who previously lined up solidly behind him (gay marriage, climate change, euthanasia, the republic …)
Doesn’t Brendan Nelson remind you of another little snivelling runt who became leader of the Liberal Party? I don’t expect Nelson to last long in this incarnation, but I suspect that, like his predecessor, he will mark his territory and keep coming back like a bad smell.
And here’s a thought: How long will it take the Australian government (and people) we can say “SORRY” to the people of Iraq?
since neither nelson nor any lib has either goal or means to do anything, he can only be a spokesperson, not a leader. so he speaks for the various groups in turn, which seems fair.
i suspect there are a number of farmers and graziers who suspect ‘sorry’ will lead to legal tussles about lease-hold land. this would provide a material basis for the ‘idealogical’ struggle over ‘sorry’.
if rudd were genuinely concerned about aborigines, he’d turn over to them, as tribes, as much lease-hold land as possible, establishing new states with old ozzy governments. newer ozzies might complain, though.
Or alternatively, al, Rudd is genuinely concerned about aborigines, but doesn’t pretend to know the one easy solution that will solve all their problems.
Al Loomis says Nelson “can only be a spokesperson, not a leader. so he speaks for the various groups in turn”.
Um, Al? Nelson is SUPPOSED to be the leader of a political party. Leadership is SUPPOSED to be about providing enlightened counsel and direction. If he cannot provide leadership, perhaps we should just call him the Libs’ “Front Man”.
I winced when I read about Nelson wanting to review the apology. When a large portion of the debate has revolved around a single word – “sorry” – being seen to want to quibble about the wording is a bad move.
A little illustration for ya at
www.poligoths.blospot.comor i could even spell it correctly:
www.poligoths.blogspot.comAs the comments by people like Bill Heffernan, Shane Stone, Ian Tuxworth and many other ‘Right-wing’ conservatives demonstrate, opposing an apology isn’t necessarily right-wing. Most of the apologies made by the state parliaments last decade ago were under conservative governments. Opposing an apology is just miserly, history-rewriting Howardism which would be both good policy and good politics for the federal Liberals to jettison now they have the chance, removing the politics and putting the focus on the so-called ‘practical issues’ which everyone purports to be concerned about (although personally I dispute the suggestion that an apology can’t have positive practical benefits in its own right if done properly).
However, Nelson’s problem isn’t even that he’s refusing to indicate support for an apology – it’s that he’s so obviously all over the place on his justifications, thus appearing to be without any conviction at all on it. If he was genuinely averse to an apology (which I suspect he isn’t), he’d do a lot better maintaining Howard’s line (which as was pointed out above, many Australians – mistakenly in my view – support) and challenging Labor to actually demonstrate consistency themselves by supporting all the recommendations of the Bringing Them Home report, rather than just cherry-pick a single one about an apology and dismissing all the rest without consideration.
Labor is actually maintaining 90% of Howard’s position on the Stolen generations inquiry and report, with just the one modification of putting forward an apology. A lot of the symbolism here is not for the benefit of Aboriginal people – Rudd knows that words are the easy bit, which is why they continue to follow Howard in leaving the rest in the too-hard basket. Something Brendan Nelson is making it even easier for him to do.
And whilst I agree a unanimous vote is very desirable, I don’t agree that Nelson should seek to expul and withdraw endorsement of any Liberal who votes against an aoplogy. We need less instances of parliamentarians being forced to vote for things they are fundamentally opposed to, not more. Unanimity is desirable, but not at the price of forced and fake agreement – surely it devalues an apology if it is made by someone with a gun held to their head?
Well Andrew Bolt spells out the contrary view
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/forget_the_truth_and_say_sorry/
At the moment Rudd is no doubt in deep consultation with the lawyers as to the wording of his new symbolism, in order to minimise the calls for practical recompensation. No matter, their carefully constructed symbolics won’t dampen the enthusiasm for more sit down money in large chunks and it’s then that we’ll see how wise he’s been in disgracefully slurring my parent’s generation. They simply saw dirt, squalour and neglect and acted accordingly. Unfortunately some of their woolly headed, offspring experts that poured out of Whitlam’s open door universities, have now completely thrown in the towel.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,23152693-911,00.html
Well may they say sorry because nothing will save them from their total shame and moral bankruptcy now.
Bolt is indeed a prime instance of the parallel universe on this as on global warming delusionism. The longer the Liberals pay attention to people like him, the longer they will stay in the wilderness. It’s not a slur on previous generations to point out that their actions caused great suffering and contributed to the present problems we face.
For all its talk about “practical reconciliation”, the Howard government mostly let things slide, except where the political symbolism of things suited them, most notably with “sending in the armed forces”.
Having taken the necessary symbolic steps, Rudd is obligated to follow up with practical action. Obviously, we need to keep up pressure on this front.
They simply saw dirt, squalour and neglect and acted accordingly.
yeah, that explains it. Sure. And of course it was those dann university educated types that have ruined Aboriginal affairs.
Nope – the thing that ruined Aboriginal affairs was the setting up of outback Aboriginal ‘townships’ that have no reason to exist other than to house displaced indigineous Australians who don’t fit neatly into modern Western townships and who don’t want to continue living a hunter/gatherer lifestyle in a modern age. No wonder they have problems with alcohol and violence in these towns – can you imagine how mind-numbingly boring that existance must be? Parking Aboriginals away in these distant ghettos – away from middle Australia so their appalling living conditions won’t offend us is a disgrace. That’s what we should be apologising for.
Scrap these towns and settlements I say. If these’s no reason for a town to exist other than to house an Aboriginal ‘problem’ then the town shouldn’t exist. Let Aboriginals choose. They can live a traditional Aboriginal life on the land (and let’s give them some back – decent land not desert) – or they can live a modern Western style life in our modern cities or properly functioning outback towns that exist for a reason (agriculture, mining etc).
Andrew, that is very simplistic. Aboriginals who live in or near cities and country towns do no better on all the social and economic indicators than those who live in ‘townships’.
Andrew Bartlett is spot on:
Nelson’s problem isn’t even that he’s refusing to indicate support for an apology – it’s that he’s so obviously all over the place on his justifications, thus appearing to be without any conviction at all on it.
Nelson has found himself in charge of the Lolly Shop but he has no time to figure out how to run the place, because all the other kids are madly trying to bash the door down. If only they realised that all the lollies have gone now!
And Rudd is playing it safe, for the time being at least, to the shame of all the anti-Howard activists who helped bring him to power. Of course, we expected no more. For the time being at least.
We have taken one small step forward by getting rid of Howard, but we remain subjected to the US military-industrial complex’s preferred two-party system of pro-US, pro-war, pro-Corporatist Democracy. With luck, we just might have destroyed the coalition parties (and the Greens might emerge as a genuine alternative to the “centrists” in Rudd’s Labor party), but much will depend on how the Liberals manage themselves over the next few years. I hope Rudd will heed the warning of Tony Blair’s demise: the Tories were decimated until Blair signed up to Bush’s ill-advised adventure in Iraq. Let’s not give the Liberals the same opportunity for re-growth, eh Kev?
And let’s fund a proper apology by slashing the budgets of Defence, ASIO and the ADF, for starters.
“For all its talk about “practical reconciliationâ€?, the Howard government mostly let things slide, except where the political symbolism of things suited them, most notably with “sending in the armed forcesâ€?.”
The Howard govt was always hamstrung and straightjacketed by the raucous cacophany of Dreamtimers. It’s political hands were tied by a producer group that defied any reasonable criticism or long overdue attempts at reform. That only changed fractionally when Labor finally bit the bullet and ditched ATSIC, long after the writing was on the wall.
“It’s not a slur on previous generations to point out that their actions caused great suffering and contributed to the present problems we face.”
It’s a slur to pretend that neglected and abused children can have their cake and eat it- i.e. be removed from intolerable situations for a better upbringing and start in life, as well as play happy families with those from whom they needed to be quarantined in the first place.
Spiros,
By definition, any solution that is outlined in 2 paragraphs in a blog like this is going to be simplistic. This is a problem that has vexed far more intelligent people than me over decades. There is no magic wand. I do know, however, that if you put a bunch of people together in one spot, give them nothing to do but access to alcohol – trouble results. It’s not an Aboriginal issue – it’s a problem that crosses all boundaries. There was a very good lab experiment on Channel Ten that proved the point – called Big Brother.
“the thing that ruined Aboriginal affairs was the setting up of outback Aboriginal ‘townships’ that have no reason to exist other than to house displaced indigineous Australians who don’t fit neatly into modern Western townships and who don’t want to continue living a hunter/gatherer lifestyle in a modern age.”
Andrew’s half right here but the alternatives are bleak unless we can offer a drastically revised constitutional marketplace that demands the skills they do have, which was always the underlying attraction of well meaning Dreamtimers in the first place. I’ve outlined that constitutional marketplace reform before.
Andrew is right. Obviously every community is different, but social and economic isolation is fundamentally destructive. You could take 100 nice little white middle-class families and put them in the outback for a few generations with broadly similar, or worse, results.
BBB
Spot on Andrew : There is no magic wand.
And saying sorry isn’t it.
wiz, there is no magic bullet for the aboriginal question, but maintaining them in a state of dependency can’t be right. a fair few native americans fought in ww2, and some of them took advantage of the “g. i. bill” (education grant.) to turn themselves into lawyers.
the result has been independence on their own land for many tribes , in some cases tribal wealth, and in the case of the navaho, on whose land i lived for three years, a very evident pride and self-confidence. the contrast with the reality and attitudes evident here are marked.
Nelson should keep quiet on the matter, we’ve had the election, no need to run over it again.
Essentially Rudd is continuing Lib policy and the conditional nature of this “sorry” will upset plenty of other Aboriginals.
BBB, most whites would not live in the outback, there’s no reason for them to do so.
Nelson is in an interesting personal situation with this. His backers are anti-sorry, he’s adopted a ‘maybe-not’ approach and offered the prospect of conscience vote for the dinosaurs. Yet my reading of him personally is that he would support an apology. Will he support it, and irk his backers, or will he join them?
He’s managed to make this maximally complicated for himself.
Reading over the comments there is some real confusion over the history and development of the ‘town camps’. I think similiar confusion exists over the reason for this apology. Opponents should have a look at the comments of ex-NT CM Ian Tuxworth (a good ol’ Territoian red neck) for a dose of reality,
“You cannot compare it with today but I think what you can say from hindsight is that there were parts of it we got badly wrong and we did a lot of damage to lives and families.
It is time for us to be generous and just have some dignity about it – not to say we will agree if you change that word or this word.
We have about 300,000 Aboriginal people in the community and we actually need everyone of them to be a contributor to the country, the economy, to sport or whatever it is.
Some people have been beaten down so badly that they will find it hard to ever get up and if things like this make it easier we ought to do it.”
Actually I have a magic bullet suggestion for remote communities. Broadband internet access. The idea would be to seduce the kids to another world.
The announcement by the Rudd government that they would oppose compensation for the stolen generation seems very similar to the politics of the Howard government. For better or for worse, colonisation of Australia brought with it a system of laws including “common law”. Common law includes the notion of a “tort” – if I do something wrong to someone, they are eligible to compensation from me. The governments refusal to compensate the stolen generation is a denial of their common law rights and is therefore extremely disrespectful.
The governments argument that money should instead be spent on health and education is a furphy because they are not mutually exclusive and the government should be properly funding health and education for Aboriginal people anyway, which it is not.
Pepper,
Most already have it. A bit slow and sometimes unreliable, but it’s there.
“They simply saw dirt, squalour and neglect and acted accordingly.”
Said action being to remove all so-called mixed-race children from their parents regardless of their living conditions while leaving so-called full-blooded Aboriginal children in the aforesaid “dirt, squalor and neglect”.
Or maybe Observa has another explanation as to why some children were removed from their families while their half-brothers and half-sisters were left with them.
But, the children who were taken were much better off – its not like Australian orphanages and foster homes at the time were hotbeds of sexual and physical abuse.
Oh wait, I’m sure that that abuse didn’t really exist until those damn trouble-making academics got involved.
“Nope – the thing that ruined Aboriginal affairs was the setting up of outback Aboriginal ‘townships’ that have no reason to exist other than to house displaced indigineous Australians who don’t fit neatly into modern Western townships and who don’t want to continue living a hunter/gatherer lifestyle in a modern age.”
Who exactly do you think set up those townships?
“Weipa began as a Presbyterian Aboriginal mission outpost in 1898.”
“In 1914 the original Government Aboriginal settlement was established on the Hull River near Mission Beach on the Australian mainland but, on 10 March 1918, the structures were destroyed by a cyclone and never rebuilt. Subsequently, the settlement relocated to Palm Island with the new population referred to as the Bwgcolman people. In the first two decades of its establishment 1,630 Indigenous people from at least 57 different language speaking places throughout Queensland were relocated to Palm.”
“The town has a sad history, which has been drscribed in at least two books, Dumping Ground by Thom Blake and Is That You Ruthie? by Ruth Hegarty. Starting in 1904, indigenous people who became known as the Stolen Generation, were forcibly removed from their homes and “settled” at Cherbourg. Sometimes they were sent there as punishment for refusing to work on white owned farms.”
References from the relevant wikipedia articles
The townships weren’t invented by the Whitlam government as some people apparently want to believe.
Aboriginal people were dispossess from their land often by force. They were forced – at the threat of imprisonment or worse – to remain on the reserves.
People don’t stay in those communities because of “sit-down money” or land rights or any of the other bogus rationalisations put about.
They stay in them because, in general, living standards for people who move away from them to town camps or even to large cities are even worse.
Even if people from the communities could find work in say Alice Springs (doubtful given their poor educational backgrounds and let’s be honest out-and-out racism), they’d immediately be descended up on by alcoholic indigent members of their extended families or clans demanding (quite often with accompanying threats of violence) food, alcohol and a place to stay.
Clean up the town camps, improve education in the communities, create more work opportunities for indigenous people and see whether they choose to stay on the communities or not.
Oh and if anyone’s doubtful about that racism comment: I once spoke to a store owner from western Queensland who complained about how the local town was dying and he was unable to find a junior to work in his store. I asked if he’d considered trying the latest Aboriginal community a few kilometres down the road. His response was that if he did the kid would inevitably steal, would have dozens of his drunken relatives hanging around stealing and assaulting customers and that even if this didn’t happen half his white customers would refuse to shop with him any more.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/IndigLRes/stolen/stolen21.html#Heading9
“Many children experienced brutality and abuse in children’s homes and foster placements. In the WA Aboriginal Legal Service sample of 483 people who had been forcibly removed, almost two-thirds (62.1%) reported having been physically abused (submission 127 page 50). Children were more likely to have been physically abused on missions (62.8% of those placed on missions) than in foster care (33.8%) or government institutions (30.7%) (submission 127 page 53).
Witnesses to the Inquiry were not specifically asked whether they had experienced physical abuse. Nevertheless, 28% reported that they had suffered physical brutality much more severe, in the Inquiry’s estimation, than the typically severe punishments of the day.
Stories of sexual exploitation and abuse were common in evidence to the Inquiry. Nationally at least one in every six (17.5%) witnesses to the Inquiry reported such victimisation. A similar proportion (13.3%) reported sexual abuse to the WA Aboriginal Legal Service: 14.5% of those fostered and 10.9% of those placed on missions (submission 127 pages 51-53).”
“Dr Jane McKendrick and her colleagues in Victoria in the mid-1980s surveyed an Aboriginal general medical practice population by interviewing participants twice over a three-year period. One-third of the participants had been separated from their Aboriginal families and communities during childhood. Most of the separations had occurred before the child had reached 10 years of age and lasted until adulthood. Most of the separations were believed by the children to have been on `welfare’ grounds (and not because parents were deceased or had voluntarily relinquished them).
These separated people were twice as likely to suffer psychological distress in adulthood than the remainder of the participants: 90% of participants who had been separated were psychologically distressed for most of the three years of the study, compared with 45% of the participants who had been brought up within their Aboriginal families. Depression accounted for nearly 90% of diagnoses. Factors offering protection against the development of depression and other distress included a strong Aboriginal identity, frequent contact with ones Aboriginal extended family and knowledge of Aboriginal culture.
Overall, two-thirds of the Aboriginal participants were found to be significantly psychologically distressed throughout the three years of the study. The contrast with non-Indigenous general practice populations is telling. `The rates of psychological distress in non Aboriginal general practice samples vary from 15 to 30 per cent.”
Of course, the fact that for two or three generations a large proportion of the entire Aboriginal population were physically and sexually abused while in foster care and suffered mental illness as adults had absolutely no influence on their own child-raising abilities.
The election was tighter than most people think it was.
The number of people who support an apology is significantly less than the number who voted labor at the federal election.
Rudd is able to join the dots between those two facts.
Happily Rudd doesn’t need to worry about polls on this issue, satp. He’s in government now – and will act properly without regard for the numbers. Which are unknown anyway.
The Liberals are not doing this to themselves. The government is employing similar tactics to the Howard government’s playing of the Beazley opposition over border protection and terrorism: ensuring that the opposition comes along but gets no credit for doing so and winds up divided in the process.
Tough gig, opposition.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2154114.htm
“The Central Land Council says better policing and education on Aboriginal Land would be more helpful than removing permits.
Council director David Ross has rejected claims by the likes of former Labor Party president Warren Mundine that opening up communities to outsiders would help protect children and stimulate economic development.
Mr Ross says Aborginal people want the system to stay and economic and crime issues can be tackled through other means.
“People are getting their knickers in a knot about permits when they shouldn’t be.
“They should be getting their knickers in a knot about having more police in communities because that’s what people have been asking for for the last 20 years or more. Rather than saying take away our permits, (we’ve) been saying give us police, have police stationed here (and) give us better education systems.” ”
As I said, what Aborigines in remote communities want and need is better policing and better education – a fewer stunts like the “intervention” by John Howard’s government which delivered fewer than one additional police officer per community.
Ian, good points.
There is similiar amnesia on the formation of the much malinged ‘town-camps’. In Alice they began to appear in the early 1900s. People were being pushed from traditional lands -‘land rights’ were not even on the horizon – and were not welcome in town itself, but were tolerated on the fringes. Now, many people prefer to stay in the town-camps as opposed to the demands of public housing tenancy in town. And as the recent events have shown, ‘normalisation’ of the town-camps isn’t a high priortiy for the residents, given that they have largely avoided the ‘normalised’ option that already exists. It’s not that town-camp residents don’t want improved facilities and amenities, but they want it done in the way they find appropriate and under their control, which is hardly surprising given their past experiences.
observa (#19) said “No matter, their carefully constructed symbolics won’t dampen the enthusiasm for more sit down money in large chunks and it’s then that we’ll see how wise he’s been in disgracefully slurring my parent’s generation. They simply saw dirt, squalour and neglect and acted accordingly.”
If it was as simple as seeing dirt, squalour, etc, then why did the removals concentrate upon saving the half-castes, quadroons and octoroons, but not the full-bloods? The answer is spread across the readings and enactments throughout the 20th century.
As for “disgracefully slurring” your parents’ generation: societal attitudes change over time, and in any case, individual attitudes within a society cover a wide spectrum. What previous generations thought of the practices under the Native Welfare Act 1963 (for one example) needs to be understood in the context of the time. I don’t see why saying sorry now to those affected individuals is in any way a slur upon my parents or your parents’ generation.
Put another way, has any government apologised to the people affected by the Maralinga atomic bomb tests (including the service men and women, as well as aborigines)? Observa, would you take it as a slur on your parents’ generation if the government did apologise?
Pepper said:
“Broadband internet access. The idea would be to seduce the kids to another world.”
I think Aboriginal communities already have enough porn!
Or are you thinking they will all log on to Prof Q’s blog for some intellectual wanking? LOL.
“The number of people who support an apology is significantly less than the number who voted labor at the federal election”
Really? Wilson Tuckey supports it, Shane Stone supports it, even Tony Abbott supports it (sort of). If everybody to the left of Tuckey supports it, that’s nine tenths of the population.
Ian – what is the nature of the policing problem in Remote Communities? Is a doubling of police numbers required for example? And what is the enhanced police presence designed to achieve? Which laws need to be better enforced? Or enforced at all?
To #47 gandhi
No. I expect they would play computer games like other children.
I don’t think what they do is critical. The point is to perceive the wider world, find it attractive, think it possibly attainable, and perhaps acquire some skills useful in dealing with it.