It’s now the second half of 2009, so it’s a convenient time to remember that, early last year, Keith Windschuttle published a piece in the Oz, touted as an extract from his “forthcoming, later this year” Volume 2 of The Fabrication of Australian History . This Volume 2, devoted to the Stolen Generations, and attacking historians such as Peter Read is different1 from the Volume 2 announced back in 2002 and promised for 2003, in which Windschuttle was supposed to make good his claims that Henry Reynolds had fabricated the history of frontier conflict in Queensland.
Neither promised Volume 2 has appeared, and there is no sign that either of them ever will. And there was even supposed to be a Volume 3 at one time, IIRC.
1 I’ll leave to the philosophers the question of whether two non-existent books can be said to be different or (as I suspect on reflection) all non-existent books are the same.
John Quiggin 
Seriously Prof….this is hilarious…You cant be serious. Those books are never going to show up! I always suspected Windschuttle IS the vaporware..he must have been on a hefty grant from Howard for the first book. This time no-one is paying…. Keith is probably busying revising Keynesianism and political correctness. He is a bit rusty.
I read Peter Read’s ‘Belonging’ a few years ago and found it immediately compelling, not least because it traced contemporary Aboriginal presence within a continuum of occupation in the environs of Sydney. Kate Grenville has gone the fictional route with ‘The Secret River’ based on the Hawkesbury at settlement, but her research into that same continuum of occupation owes a lot to Read in my view. What Windschuttle would have done is beyond me.
“… whether two non-existent books can be said to be different or (as I suspect on reflection) all non-existent books are the same.”
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This could be fun.
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Philosopher A: Perhaps the question is whether non-existent objects can be said to properties at all.
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Philosopher B: Ah … non-existent objects as opposed to non-actual objects?
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Philosopher A: Yes. Taking — for the sake of argument — a possibilist position, we might rephrase Professor Quiggin’s question as one about non-actual rather than non-existent books.
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Philosopher B: That seems reasonable.
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Philosopher A: So we are saying that there is a possible world in which Keith Windschuttle has written a Volume 2 that attacks Peter Read, and a different possible world in which he writes a Volume to that attacks Henry Reynolds.
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Philosopher B: But are these possible worlds real?
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Philosopher A: Maybe you’re asking whether we should treat possible worlds as analogous to fictional worlds?
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Philosopher B: Let’s say that I am.
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Philosopher A: In which case we are dealing with modal fictionalism.
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[and so on]
Trees are too precious to print a Volume II of anything that Keith Windschuttle writes. In fact his writing seems to have more in common with Ern Malley or Helen Demedenko than histoy.
I do not think that David Irving type projects should be discussed unless there is some pressing, unavoidable reason.
Why give them oxygen?
A rather cheap shot and not really worthy of you JQ. KW is not the only writer to be very slow at delivering his books. He has written enough for you to take apart without complaining about what he hasn’t written.
Ken, I’d say that after seven years a book, like a missing person can be presumed dead. If Windschuttle isn’t going to deliver he should retract the claims he made when he promised these books.
Ken
But the same applies to David Irving, who then earns money through book sales conveniently increased by this supposed “taking apart” commentary.
Remember too, it takes a page of quality scholarship to refute a sentence of denialist/Hansonite provocation.
I take offence at the suggestion that my world-changing, best-selling, never-have-to-work-again Great Australian Novel is the same as one of Windschuttle’s Fabrications in Australian History.
Well, there you go, James, as we haven’t been able to read your book we can imagine whatever we like about it. Or we can attack you for taking so long to finish it and demand that you admit that you will never publish it.
Or we can spend our time discussing and criticizing books that have actually been written and published.
In fairness, he might be very busy editing Quadrant, reading ABC board papers, and so on.
No, Uncle, this is not the place to be fair to Windschuttle.
Happily, the hypothesis of vaporware can be easily tested, in this case. Assuming the book is being progressed but not yet ready for publication, KW can always publish summaries of what he’s done so far in Quadrant.
Keith Windschuttle produced Volume 1, which is a most commendable effort and gives an idea of the effort involved in producing a volume based on research.
I hope you have read it John, although I gather most critics have not.
Volume 2 will be well worth the wait, for those who have read Volume 1.
Yes I recall too years ago that Vol 2 was to be on QLD ‘fabrications’ and Vol 3 on WA/NT though none have appeared. Perhaps he was terrified of what he saw when he actually did some primary research in the relevant archives rather than his hatchet jobs on secondary sources such as Reynolds and Ryan?
Jock, oh please. See previous sentence.
He barely laid a glove on Reynolds in any case. He found one case where Reynolds had misinterpreted a statement (IIRC, the statement expressed concern about the likely destruction of the Aboriginal population by the colonists, and Reynolds read it the other way around), but that was about it. His claim to demolish Reynolds depended heavily on the suggestion that he had much more to come in the later volumes.
Really, the whole thing is like a historical version of Utegate, with Windschuttle as GG and the political right as Steve Lewis/Malcolm Turnbull.
Hey, doncha know, they WON the history wars! My former PM tole me so.
By the way, does Windy have a gig these days, beyond the taxpayer supported and desperately irrelevant Quadrant?
Yes Jock. Pleeeeese. I agree totally Charlie…. knew he was a goner and ran, leaving a vapor trail behind him.
We will never see Vol 2 or 3 is my bet. $50 down now. Windschuttle had his five minutes of notoriety. His benefactor is retired and he is too well recognised as faulty (skewed) for media interest. Its over. He wont write another book…. at least not for the right! Childrens book maybe.
wilful – I don’t know what KW does these days other than Quadrant. According to RJ Stove, who applied for the job at one stage, it is unpaid. I once looked up the taxpayer support for Q and it’s $30,000 from the Literature Board for the Australian fiction and poetry content. Not much really, although it is surprising that Paddy took the money when he was editor.
Q is about as relevant as The Monthly – they seem to me to be the two bookends of Australian political discussion and therefore both quite valuable.
I’ve always thought the history wars were a fairly empty argument. I’m much more interested in reading about what we can do to correct the harm we have done to indigenous Australians over the past 20 or 30 years. That’s a matter to be really ashamed about.
Just for the record, I’ve never written, or even promised, a book in my life, fabricated or otherwise.
I agree with Charlie that the prospect of a convincing Vol 2 on Qld fabrications is very low. Never mind Reynolds. Where do people think places like “Murdering Creek” or Massacre Hill get their names? They weren’t cricket venues.
The whole history /culture wars rely on most readers being too uninformed/lazy to look up sources on their own. That is Windshuttle’s stock in trade. It isn’t that hard with electronic archives these days. In my experience there has been some exageration on the part of some pro-aboriginal writers but, overall, the killing of abriginals by early settlers, especialy in the gold rush era and by the colonial mounted police in Qld, is one of the great untold stories in our past.
Pr Q says:
Windchuttle’s main intellectual aim was to refute the strong claim of genocide made by the “Black Armbanders”, that European political settlement of Australia was achieved by a deliberate act of genocide against Aboriginals. I dont know about QLD. But Windschuttle, so far as the rest of AUS is concerned, has refuted the genocide claim. So further volumes are more or less superfluous, at least in this theatre of the Culture War.
In a Chanel Nine debate with Reynolds, puts forward his main thesis:
The basic truth of this claim has been acknowledged by his critics, at least in the supposedly paradigm case of genocide in TAS. Henry Reynolds, the doyen of Black Armbanders, gives up alot of the ground that is routinely taught as fact in secondary and tertiary history:
My own view, FWIW, is that the Windschuttle has refuted the Black Arm-banders strong view that the colonial and federal government were bent on the genocidal destruction of the Aboriginal race. But that the Black Armbanders have, in their turn, refuted Windschuttle’s “White Blindfold” view that colonial governments and settlers were not guilty of serious incidents of massacring Aboriginals.
Windschuttle’s view depends on a narrow legalistic notion of evidence as something that must be in written form to be proen. I call this methodology “documentalism”. By this standard, as Irving argued, Hitler was not guilty of genocide because of the absence of a Fuhrer Order authorizing the extermination of the Jews.
In fact there were numerous incidents of massacre and ill-treatment of Aboriginals who were doing nothing more heinous than carrying on their traditional manner of living. (You would think that a self-styled conservatie would stick up for that.)
Also, Aboriginals are poor witnesses in this matter because their culture prohibits them from talking about the dead. So massacres and dispossession have to be largely inferred by unreliable oral testimony and population movements.
So Windschuttle should have settled for refuting the paranoid Far-Left view of AUS history. And settled for a Centrist view that the early inhabitants were treated somewhat unjustly, thereby deserving some compensation.
Good point Socrates…or Blacktown for that matter (and yes it was).
Jack
In one sense you are right but in another sense I disagree. Referring to claims of “geneocide” as being untrue in terms of the definition of that word is correct. But if we said “widespread unlawful killing”, that would be true, and that is the point. Semantics aside, the black armband view of history is correct IMO. The only trouble was that some of the historians who promoted that view chose some of their words poorly in a legal sense. That doesn’t change what happened though.
Jack
That Windschuttle continues to categorise the so-called Battle of Pinjarra (as it was referred to when I was at primary school in the 1970s) as a battle suggests to me his main intellectual aim has little to do with wanting to set the record straight and everything to do with his own petty prejudices.
Jack
My apology; I missed the third last paragraph of your post, which is similar to my view and I agree with you.
Anyone interested in how the history wars ended could look at Tony Taylor’s recent book funded by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, titled “Denial: history betrayed”. He examines the pathology of historical denial and summarises the fabrication issue.
he concludes; W************ could be just a politically motivated propagandist grabbing a convenient cause and masquerading as a historian [p200]
Taylor asks; “how, in a progressive and democratic society, did W***********’s aggressive, denialist behaviour get as far as it did? [p203]
Finally Taylor blasts W*************** out of all respect:
“Fabrication is a genuinely atrocious book … regarded as an ill-advised oddity, like … hugh trevor-Roper’s 1983 endorsement of the Hitler diaries” [208f]
So even Godwin’s law is against W***************
Jack
Its a very long call (and worthy of Windschuttle) in your last paragraph at 22 to suggest that Windschuttle’s activities amounted to any refutation of a “paranoid far left view.”
Windschuttle would have us all believe history recording at that time amounted to “a paranoid far left view”, out of as sdfc notes, his own petty bigoted extremist prejudices.
Windschuttles writings are far more easily viewed as “paranoid” (and denialist) than anything he supposedly “refuted”.
Pr Q says:
Windschuttle was justified in taking down the Black Armband view of “Stolen Generations”, although as usual he takes it too far. Once again, he relies on docurments which do not really reveal the pain and suffering caused by sundering the bond between mother and child. (You would think a conservative would understand the importance of “family values”.)
Still, it was seriously mis-leading for ideological historians to argue that the Removal policy was done to “breed out” the Aboriginal race. Off-the-cuff references to this have been blown up into some kind of Nazi plot to exterminate the Aboriginals.
The removal of mixed-race children was done as a kind of cultural triage, not out of some desire to exterminate the Aboriginal race. The critical part of the triage, removal of mixed-race children to better circumstances, was intended help, not harm.
Authorities at the time thought the Aboriginal race was self-destructing due to the its poor resistance to disease, social pathologies and the propensity of native women to mate with lower-class Europeans. The authorities were called “Protectors” for that reason, since it was assumed that Aboriginals could not possibly adapt to modern civilization without succumbing to its discontents, temptations and threats.
No doubt the deliberate policy of taking away half-caste children from their Aboriginal families was arbitrarily authoritarian and racist. But it was not genocidal. It was done as a kind of cultural triage, to protect the part-European, not persecute the part-Aboriginal, aspect of this breed. As Wikipedia records:
THere is nothing, in principle, wrong with taking children away from un-fit parents. Many removed half-caste children had good upbringings on missions. Aboriginal elders still yearn for the good old days of the Mission, when there was respect for authority and clean living. In fact the government is still doing it in even greater numbers today: its called an Intervention.
The Commonwealth should have apologized to the Aboriginal people for failure to grant them proper citizenship until 1967. This meant that they achieved emancipation at precisely the time when a toxic wave of sub-cultural perversity was sweeping accross the developed world. With tragic consequences for all concerned in AUS, and in the US too, for that matter.
“This meant that they achieved emancipation at precisely the time when a toxic wave of sub-cultural perversity was sweeping accross the developed world. With tragic consequences for all concerned in AUS, and in the US too, for that matter.” – JS.
The culture wars may be over, but that dosn’t mean that we don’t have the odd mythical-japanese-soldier-fighting-on-in-a-remote-pacific-island-because-no-one-told-him-it-was-over thing happening.
Geez Jack it is hard to know where to begin with that rhetorical flourish. Cultural Triage?
I will limit this to one point the legislation relating to Aboriginal was a State responsibility until 1972 and policies regarding removals differed markedly from state to state. You do not have to look at ‘ideological historians’ – whoever they are – to see who argued ‘that the Removal policy was done to “breed out” the Aboriginal race.’
Government Administrators in WA at least were quite open about their plans to eliminate the Aboriginal race.
In WA AO Neville was successful in persuading the Western Australian Government to include eugenic measures to ‘breed out the colour’ in The 1936 Native Administration Act.
(Read AO Neville’s .O. Neville. Australia’s Coloured Minority: It’s place in the Community. Currawong Publishing. Sydney. 1947) Neville claimed the ‘natural outcome’ was for ‘black to go white’ through progressive inter-marriage between lighter castes and eventually with whites so that after generations all distinguishing Aboriginal features would disappear. ( There is a photo of three Aboriginal women showing their colour lightening over generations) The 1936 Native Administration Act increased the government’s power to remove children and it sought to re-classify Aboriginal people. ( 1/4 caste, 18ths, Quadroon, Octoroons etc) The official institution for implementing these policies was Sister Kate’s Children’s Home. Originally known as the Quarter Caste Children’s Home for nearly white children in 1933 it reflected its eugenic function in ‘rescuing nearly white’ children and preparing them for absorption into the white community. Children who were considered too ‘dark’ to be absorbed were left at Moore River Native Settlement where they would live out their natural life.
Of course it the whole project was a disaster leaving generations of traumatized Aboriginal families the result of which you see today in dislocation and dysfunctional groups.
charlie, what a bunch of po-mo claptrap.
Everyone knows everything was just hunky-dory until a ‘toxic wave’ of long-haired LSD-taking layabouts destroyed the world as we knew it, with their equality, peace and free-love garbage (oh, and their infernal loud music).
I have only read a few of Windschuttle’s Quadrant pieces – the earlier ones, when Padded McGuinness was editor – and op eds in the Oz. Undergraduate, preaching to the converted.
Possibly the silliest thing ever written by someone purporting to be a historian is that the number of Aboriginals killed in colonial Tasmania is X [being around 120 from memory] because X was the number reported to the police! This, I understand it, is the finding of his book on Tasmania.
In other news, there are only five blogs in existence because that’s the number I know about, five people on the planet because that’s how many I can see from my window, and John Quiggin has only a head and no body because that’s what his photo shows.
If a premier or governor or protector states that the removal of half-caste children, and their placement with white families, is intended to breed the black out of them, then that is a statement of genocidal intent. If the State or Territory proceeds to implement the perceived policy of half-caste removal, then that is an act with genocidal intent.
The definition of genocide, given by the United Nations in 1948, clearly states in Article II, item (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group is genocide.
For the naturally contrarian, the argument may thus become one in which it is claimed that because the UN definition only came into being on 9th December 1948, it does not apply to historical events preceding this date. While this argument is hardly illuminating, there at least is a logical, if intellectually hollow, basis for it. However, some contrarian historians seem to go further than that and attempt to demonstrate that all (supposed) evidence of (1948 definition) genocide is actually false. If said contrarian historians managed to do this, it would constitute a refutation of genocide of the Indigeneous tribes, as defined by (the 1948 definition of) genocide – specifically Article 2, Item (e) – and thus render moot any argument about applicability of the 1948 definition to earlier times.
Now I don’t particularly know who all of these people are that are reported to have a “black armband view of history”, but presumably they exist. Based on the opinions attributed to this group, I have the view that most Australians today are well and truly in the middle of the Keith Windschuttle claims and the Black Armband group’s claims.
Finally, some another specious form of argument used by the surly contrary (cantankerous?) historian is that use of the word “genocide” to describe what happened to some Aboriginal people elevates their (unacknowledged or trivialised) pain and suffering to that of the victims of the Holocaust. This argument is particularly egregious as it implies that the word “genocide” is in some manner reserved purely for describing events that took place during the Holocaust. It also implies that the reader of such arguments cannot discriminate between two rather different historical events, that nevertheless share some similarities at a more abstract level. Lastly, it implies that the victims of any event or events, which are clearly describable by the UN definition of genocide, are somehow of lesser significance to the victims of the Holocaust.
Perhaps it is also worth remembering that Aboriginal people, prior to the large scale immigration of Europeans, had many tribes with many different languages, differences in cultural icons of significance, and indeed with geographically different “lands”. Aboriginal people have never been a single group, however similar they may have appeared to early European settlers/colonists. The point I am making here is that a battle or massacre of a few dozen or so from a tribe might potentially have been all it took to have dealt a particular tribe a mortal blow, in which case a whole language and people may have been extinguished. I don’t have the historical knowledge to claim that this has happened; however, the possibility means that each confrontation needs to be evaluated much more carefully than as a simplistic body-counting exercise.
Oh, and the bit about the Holocaust argument is in itself presumably a “Godwin” – not the Godwin of recent infamy, of course 🙂
Does Macleay Press (the firm which published Volume One of Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication, along with, of course, various other books by various other authors) even exist any more? Today I looked up its website (www.macleaypress.com) and its “New Titles” referred to publications that appeared back in January 2006. I’ve heard of commercial web pages falling behind by a month or two, but to fall behind by three and a half years …
Jack – there was no “black armband view” of history. This was a paranoid right wing delusion.
In fact the term “black armband view of history” was coined and thrashed around by the right and its usual bunch of media disinformation spreaders – the CIS, Quadrant and the IPA. It was an attack on people doing their job as historians only they attacked genuine historians with political apparatchnik writers like the recently very low profile, questionable and highly irrelevant Keith Windschuttle.
The whole campaign against historians was a farce and a national disgrace for its unethical witchhunting. I dont care what you say. I read a lot of the discourse and it was low and venomous and the Murdoch press isnt blameless either. I came to these arguments twenty years later Jack and you know something – I found it nauseating. It was even decent proper intellectual discourse. It was a rabid vicious political beat up, in which the Coalition excelled themselves in their usual style. They need to get their act together. They needed to get their act together twenty years ago.
Freaking disgrace.
Michael July 2nd, 2009 at 16:57
Michael,
I have four words for you: “Crack Wars, NYC 1993”.
I was there then. I know what my lyin’ eyes saw.
As a general rule, when one mixes multicultural diversity with sub-cultural perversity one tends to get tears before bed-time. The toxic reactions get worse the lower down the SES/IQ ladder, whether black, white or brindle. Authoritarian solutions are invariably indicated.
In the post-WWII period American blacks made a great migration from the South to urban parts of coastal cities, leading to a collapse in family structure. Just in time to enjoy the benefits of cultural liberalism, San Franciscan style.
And they paid for what they got. For the period 1965-95, according to Gene Expression, “the US had roughly 300,000 more murders between 1964 and 2002 than had been the case if the sixties ‘explosion’ had not happened”. Thats 200 extra murders pw for 30 years straight. More than half of which were black-on-black homicide in drug turf wars.
This social disaster was only brought under control after a massive ideological conflict (“Culture War”). An intellectual battle – by, mostly Jewish ex-Leftist (first gen neo-cons). A political battle – massive out-migration of urban Whites to the suburbs and South, setting in train five out of six Presidential victories for the GOP. And an authoritarian institutional solution – three strikes and your out plus end of welfare as we know it.
You would think that AUS intellectuals might have learned from the US experience. You would be mistaken in that. Our media-academia complex gleefully jumped onto the Left-liberal bandwagon.
The Sorry Day pantomime, done directly after the institutional heavy lifting of the Intervention, was yet another example of Left-liberalisms capacity for ideological self-congratulation. I guess thats one way to deal with bad faith.
I have another four words for your:
“Remote indigenous communities 1995-2005.”
I was there on a number of occasions. I know what my lyin’ eyes saw.
There are obvious parallels to Australia with with the evolution of Indigenous policies and politics. Left-liberalism, in the context of the relaxation of cultural constraints and collapse of institutional authority has been a social disaster for most full-blood Aboriginals.
Indigenous Australians have had an analogous experience to American blacks, with an in-migration to cities, collapse in family structure and a massive substance abuse infliction. Now only brought under control by an authoritarian institutional solution – the Intervention.
Windschuttle, to his credit, has rightly condemned Left-liberal exaggeration of the poor treatment meted out to Aboriginals. He was a Left-liberal himself he and doubtless has pangs of guilt about supporting these disastrous policies.
Left-liberals have managed to ease their bad conscience about the disastrous effect of their cultural policies by re-doubling their denunciations of conservative critics. Its obvious that a main part of the reason for the furious treatment meted out to Windschuttle is due to his spoiling the morality play by pointing out that the black hats were not all sitting on the heads of Dead White Males.
jack – you use too many cliches that seek tob re-ignite the culture wars but people really are over the culture and history wars. The Coalition started this by using inflammatory phraseology like “media-academia complex” or the “far left academics” which soon became under JH “all academics” and deteriorated from there (was “media-academia complex” some sort twisted of derivative of the real development of the military industrial complex?)
Its interesting isnt it? The coalition somehow manage to twist and blame an imaginary far left crowd in Australia for what they actually do themselves. If anything the media in Australia has been dominated by a “liberal narrow lens – media complex” (complex meaning hang up in this context).
No – it wouldnt do in the Coalition to give academics too much respect would it… unlike previous more dignified times in Australia’s history when people who did the work of academic research and study were worthy in most cases of respect from citizens and didnt risk running the gamut of right wing funded insult press with every honest word they wrote, from inferior second rate nitpickers like Windschuttle on the payroll of a political stink tank masquerading as a journal. The Coalition, who it appears found some threat in people researching and telling it like it really is? What did the coalition have to hide Jack? The scams they might have been involved in? the loss of potential profits for some bigwig bully donator? The denying of any responsibility for aboriginies when they might have wanted the rest of the land for mining leases? Yes we know Jack, who helps the CIS and IPA and Quandrant – the minerals industry and the conservative US funding tanks. Thats why they used attack dogs like Windschuttle on academics Jack. If you think otherwise you have been conned.
There is no black armband view or piece of work that wasnt a construct of the conservatives against an innocent. A political beat up of the worst kind, derived from a flushly funded nasty campaign to discredit academics.
No respect Jack and plots, lies and and media dirty tricks. Now the liberals have lost the respect of the Australian people.
Karma Id call it even if long overdue.
Macleay Press is KW, I think.
#37 Alice July 2nd, 2009 at 20:28
Right, it was perfectly fair and reasonable to describe the Aboriginal Protector removing half-caste children from what could best be described as shanties and placing them in missions as “genocide”. Thats exactly the kind of thing Eichmann would do in the same circumstances.
And children are being removed in great numbers under the Intervention. So thats genocide too.
So yes, calling all these things genocide is perfectly fair and reasonable. No Black Armbands to be seen here folks, just keep moving’.
#40 July 2nd, 2009 at 21:45
I know its in extremely poor taste of me to harp on such matters. But having travelled around the world for extended periods and lived/worked in hot spots in AUS for most of my adult life I cant’ help noticing some re-curring patterns.
In AUS I seek things like “white flight” and “bussing“, “native shanty towns” and “ethnic ghettos“. Then I notice the success of the Intervention (knee-jerkishly derided and now conveniently ignored by Pr Q). And I put these things together.
What I get is Culture War.
But the Left-liberal attitudes is about contemporary woes is “don’t mention the (Culture) War”, plus Black Armbands about previous woes. All viewed through politically correct spectacles.
Now we have the same sort of tensions that triggered Cronulla being played out in Harris Park with Indian students playing the role of Anglo Surfies. Shhhh…thats crazy talk.
We must not mention these things in public. It will upset the children. Instead they must be fed a steady diet of revelation, exaggeration and demonology designed to make them ashamed of their ancestors whilst we hastily push under the carpet our own nasty little messes.
Jack
If you are going to evoke references such as “crazy talk”, “exaggeration”, “demonology”, “nasty little messes”, don’t be too surprised if all this stuff is piled up on you.
People launch Culture Wars or History Wars as a last resort to avoid an inevitable defeat.
No, people participate in history and culture wars because they have too much time on their hands and because it’s easier that worrying about the here and now.
Ken
People do not launch history and culture wars because “They have too much time on their hands”.
It seems to me that Howard and Quadrant deliberately launched history war precisely as they were extremely worried about the then “here and now” as they saw it.
So I do not follow your logic which seems to be a undergraduate quip of some kind.
Jack,
Your statements about the virtues of intervention and removal don’t really match the data available.
Health surveys have consistently shown that indigenous people in remote communities are healthier than those in non-remote communities, despite the right’s assimilationist rhetoric that remote communities are a left-wing plot. The recently released Productivity Commission report on Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage showed that reported rates of indigenous child abuse and neglect are far higher in NSW and Victoria than in NT, suggesting most abuse is in urban areas, not remote. Furthermore, rates of abuse have increased in the last 2 years, ie. since the NT intervention.
More generally, the high rate of abuse now known to have occurred in institutions and towards adopted children suggests that removal was the last thing in any child’s interest, then or now.
That’s right James.
And in the NT the healhiest Aboriginal people are to be found in the remotest of communities – the much maligned out-stations.
The MJA recently published research on this,
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/190_10_180509/bur11368_fm.html
Meanwhile, there has been much empty-headed babble about “mainstreaming”, “cultural museums” and other such nonsense.
I don’t know who launched it and it really doesn’t matter now. It seems to me a matter of narrow academic interest – like who started the Peloponnesian war.
If Howard did bring it into public debate for grubby political reasons (which I am still not sure about), then more fool the left for taking the bait.
Yes I’d be interested in Jack’s evidence that the intervention has been a success, that it has caused ‘great numbers of children’ to be removed and has ‘brought under control’ … ‘in-migration to cities, collapse in family structure and a massive substance abuse infliction’. I confess that was not my impression of what has happened but I’d be genuinely interested in evidence to the contrary.