Rafe Champion has posted here Mal Brough’s recent speech at Melbourne University on the Federal interventions in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory
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Coping with "symptoms" not dealing with causes
anonymous
October 9 2007, 05:25:56 UTC
Greetings Lorenzo, a friend emailed me your blog. I have had major cause for concern over this patriarchial approach to dealing with 2 plus centuries of Social Darwinist activism against the Indigenous peoples of this land. Firstly, this approach maintains such constructs that were first developed during the 1850's as a way to systematically infantilise and demonise a (or should I say many) once proud culture with (who had definate rules sexual mores) in order to dispossess them of their land. The impact has been to erode and destroy the social norms as you say. However, I currently don't have the answer to the problem of child sexual abuse - which exists in non-Indigenous society too. I also know of white victims whose purpetrators are indeed of "noble" ilk in mainstream society sucha s politicians and indeed the odd foreign diplomat. I feel I share your disgust and Mal's notes and wonder - where too from here??? Maybe Aboriginal people, had been treated as people by our forebears in the first place..might have helped....
Re: Coping with "symptoms" not dealing with causeseruditoNovember 22 2007, 05:41:31 UTC
That one can have qualms about the details of the intervention is understandable -- I express a few here.
But your suggestion that this is "Social Darwinism" is deeply silly, since Social Darwinism would hold that you DON"T intervene, but let the disfunctional die out.
Also, there cannot have been 2 plus centuries of Social Darwinist activism since On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859 and Herbert Spencer did not publish his first meditation on it until 1864. It is also easy to exaggerate the effect of such thinking on indigenous policy in this country even after that. Sir Paul Hasluck, for example, thoroughl repudiated such ideas.
The level of child abuse and violence in many outback communities is hugely greater than in the rest of Australian society. The point is wholesale social collapse. Inherently a difficult issue to deal with.
a friend emailed me your blog. I have had major cause for concern over this patriarchial approach to dealing with 2 plus centuries of Social Darwinist activism against the Indigenous peoples of this land. Firstly, this approach maintains such constructs that were first developed during the 1850's as a way to systematically infantilise and demonise a (or should I say many) once proud culture with (who had definate rules sexual mores) in order to dispossess them of their land. The impact has been to erode and destroy the social norms as you say. However, I currently don't have the answer to the problem of child sexual abuse - which exists in non-Indigenous society too. I also know of white victims whose purpetrators are indeed of "noble" ilk in mainstream society sucha s politicians and indeed the odd foreign diplomat. I feel I share your disgust and Mal's notes and wonder - where too from here??? Maybe Aboriginal people, had been treated as people by our forebears in the first place..might have helped....
Hel hath no fury.....
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But your suggestion that this is "Social Darwinism" is deeply silly, since Social Darwinism would hold that you DON"T intervene, but let the disfunctional die out.
Also, there cannot have been 2 plus centuries of Social Darwinist activism since On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859 and Herbert Spencer did not publish his first meditation on it until 1864. It is also easy to exaggerate the effect of such thinking on indigenous policy in this country even after that. Sir Paul Hasluck, for example, thoroughl repudiated such ideas.
The level of child abuse and violence in many outback communities is hugely greater than in the rest of Australian society. The point is wholesale social collapse. Inherently a difficult issue to deal with.
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