A visual breakdown of question time
Indigenous people are underrepresented in the House of Representatives -- could this be why just three out of every 1000 questions in question time related to indigenous issues? Bond University journalism student Tan Li Jun Sheena has created this infographic.
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The reason that this is the case is because nobody really has any idea anymore as to what might work to raise indigenous people into a normal relationship with a modern multi-cultural society.
The ‘Bringing them Home’ inquiry and report discredited colonial paternalism and assimilationism. ‘The Little Children Are Sacred’ report discredited liberal progressivism, by showing a picture of the kind of social disarray that can happen when one applies a libertarian rights culture and it comes up as life-without-boundaries or accountability.
There are no winners when it comes to indigenous affairs. And the politics of race make it it almost impossible to have an intelligent or honest discussion, free of ideological cant and hypocrisy.
Nothing is going to change until significant sections of indigenous society decide that things are going to change and move to a new normal where there is a resolute and disciplined commitment to become part of the multi-cultural mix in a modern economy.
And we will know this happened when indigenous parents start to take the same attitude to the education of their children as their Chinese and Indian counterparts.
As surely as night follows day, 40 years later a whole generation of indigenous success stories will making their way into our press, literature and parliaments. Politicians will court indigenous Australians because they have some clout and because some of them will have serious money to donate to political parties.
And inevitably, there will be questions about them in parliament, because there will be something in it for the questioner and questioned alike.