Tony Abbott is correct that the findings of the seventh Closing the Gap report are profoundly disappointing.
“Despite the concerted efforts of successive governments since the first report, we are not on track to achieve most of the targets,” the PM told Parliament this morning.
Abbott acknowledged that indigenous Australians face “entrenched and multigenerational disadvantage”, but also said they were sold short by the “tyranny of low expectations”.
The same thing could be said of successive governments on the issue of indigenous disadvantage.
Life for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians is “harder and shorter”, as Bill Shorten told Parliament this morning:
“Poverty and disadvantage are rife. Illiteracy, depression, addiction and suicide are common. Home ownership is a distant dream. Jobs are twice as hard to find. A young person leaving school is more likely to go to jail than university. A woman is 30 times more likely to know the pain and fear of family violence — and 15 times more likely to be driven from her home as a result.”
These and other facts should outrage Australian voters every day — not just in the second week of February each year.
The “gap” that we all focus on for one day in the political year is one measured in lives, in health, in misery, in a lack of economic opportunity and a poverty of economic outcomes. Non-Aboriginal Australians simply wouldn’t tolerate policies that resulted in one of their own communities suffering such consistently poor outcomes.
While it is more profitable to exploit Aborigines than to work with them to improve their quality of life, nothing will change.
Tax payers’ contribution goes to the pockets of Coles, Woolworths, alcohol sellers, drug dealers, rip off merchants and all the other leeches living off Aboriginal disadvantage.
Aboriginal wealth, gained through the ALP, citizen action and Native Title claims, goes to benefit transnational mining companies.
Everybody, including some senior Aboriginal elders, have been pimping Aboriginal people for 200 years, to almost anyone who wants a piece of the action. Almost every dollar going to Aboriginal people ends up in European and Asian pockets shockingly quickly, by the shortest route possible.
Aboriginal women are left to clean up the mess, with a few medical and education people to give them a hand.
There must be a better way, but getting rid of the pimps and leeches would be a good start.
Mairi, having observed how well-intentioned do-gooder theories have frequently had the opposite effects from what was dreamt, more of these simplistic ‘solutions’ are unlikely to help ANY group which is the recipient of this sort of cargo cult ‘thinking’.