Speech on Indigenous Interventions

Oct 07, 2007 06:29

Rafe Champion has posted here Mal Brough’s recent speech at Melbourne University on the Federal interventions in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory ( Read more... )

politics, indigenous, status2, policy

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Comments 27

tcpip October 7 2007, 00:09:13 UTC
The good intentions which are a monopoly of the “progressive”.

Bullshit.

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Re: Ad hominen tcpip November 22 2007, 05:33:37 UTC

Often "conservatives" do have malignant and selfish reasons. Ayn Rand even made it a virtue! But to suggest that only progressives have a monopoly on good intentions is just bullshit.

Edmund Burke had good intentions. Milton Friedman had good intentions. Heck, even Ronald Reagan had good intentions I suppose.

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Re: Ad hominen erudito November 22 2007, 05:44:42 UTC
Well yes, it is. But lots of "progressives" talk and write as if only folk who think like them care.

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quatrefoil October 7 2007, 11:41:41 UTC
What does this tell me?

It tells me that you are perilously close to disregarding the principle of innocent until proven guilty. The fact that these men have been charged with such a heinous crime does not mean that they have committed it. They have the right, like all other Australians, to be tried by a jury of thier peers. And I'd argue that for justice to be done that jury must include people who understand their customs and speak their language.

If and when that jury finds them guilty, the above conclusions may well be justified - until that point, they border on slander.

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catsidhe October 8 2007, 02:51:07 UTC
Worse than that, even. The reaction to Kalumburu (which, by the way, is so isolated it advertises for adventure tourists, and it wasn't actually a reaction to Kalumburu at all, even with a history of problems there, largely ignored) was to make the claim that this community is corrupt and entrenched with EEVIIL, therefore all communities must be similarly EEVIIL, and summarily removing all rights and power from them all.

Hey, we found a nest of paedophiles in Fitzroy which includes the local mayor, therefore we must sack all councils in Victoria, and institute martial law. Think of the children!!!

And, wait, Kalumburu is in WA, not the NT. So, isn't this latest vignette of despair being used a little disingenuously? After all, they haven't invaded WA, so this must have been the result of normal police investigations. And the reason Brough is “discuss[ing] how the Kalumburu community can pull itself out of its crisis of violence, drug addiction and child abuse” rather than just doing it to for them, is because he doesn't actually ( ... )

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Sigh erudito November 22 2007, 05:52:11 UTC
If one cannot even discuss the level of socio-cultural collapse in indigenous communities, because, hey, white communities are not perfect, then we really are abandoning indigenous Australia to disaster.

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Sigh back. catsidhe November 22 2007, 06:33:57 UTC
What a breathtaking misrepresentation of what I'm talking about.

There was no ‘discussion’ of the state of socio-cultural collapse before the army was sent in.

Oh, wait, that's not quite right. There was an entire commission set up to investigate it. And what has the Intervention done about the very concrete recommendations made by that commission? Damn near to nothing is what ( ... )

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Coping with "symptoms" not dealing with causes anonymous October 9 2007, 05:25:56 UTC
Greetings Lorenzo ( ... )

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Re: Coping with "symptoms" not dealing with causes erudito November 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.

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