Here we go: counting hasn’t even finished in the election and the humbugging from the usual roster of troughers in the Aboriginal Industry has begun in earnest.
‘Humbugging’ is a practice in Aboriginal culture, where others demand money from the people who’ve earned it. It has its origins in traditional resource sharing, which made sense in a nomadic culture living off the land. In a modern setting, though, it boils down to little more than aggressive begging. The sort of ‘crabs-in-a-bucket’ mentality that serves only to drag down those trying to honestly better themselves.
At a larger scale, the same mindset rules among far too many Aboriginal activists. Rather than asking what they can do for themselves, it’s all about what everyone else must do for them.
Anthony Albanese must use his once-in-a-generation election win to be courageous in indigenous policy and go beyond “warm acknowledgments of traditional owners” to address extreme disadvantage, voice architect Marcia Langton says.
In other words, the Voice is back. Here we go again.
Should we be surprised? These snout-in-the-trough activists never really accepted the referendum result anyway. All they’ve done for the past 18 months is stamp their feet, throw tantrums and call everyone else ‘racist’. The usual guff from the left, in other words.
Professor Langton, who co-chaired the design of a legislated voice for the Morrison government and later joined other indigenous leaders in Mr Albanese’s voice advisory group, said: “I want to see great courage from our prime minister and his cabinet to stare down those who think it is OK to allow the horrific disadvantages faced by far too many indigenous Australians.”
This is the overwhelming arrogance of the likes of Langton. Rather than admit they were just wrong, they smear everyone who disagrees with ludicrous, false, accusations. Where is her evidence that the vast majority of Australians who voted ‘No’ think Aboriginal disadvantage is “OK”?
In fact, the evidence points all the other way. “The majority of Australians recognise that indigenous people continue to experience injustice and high levels of disadvantage,” as an Australian National University poll found. The Guardian found, in the wake of the failed referendum, that “63 per cent of respondents want Labor to recalibrate and address indigenous disadvantage”.
So, Australians want their Aboriginal brothers and sisters to be doing as well as any other Australians. Where they disagree is how. They certainly reject the preferred agenda of elites like Langton. Less than a third favour doing more of what’s been failing for decades: the discredited ‘reconciliation’ agenda. Australians are sick of being guilt tripped: the vast majority reject a ‘truth-telling commission’ that they know will just be used to peddle the ‘poor bugger me’ bullshit that’s all we’ve heard.
They certainly don’t want to hear bleating about ‘Trump-style culture wars’ from the likes of Langton. What they’d like, as the widespread cheering to Langton’s vow never to deliver another Welcome to Country if the referendum failed, is for the perpetual-chip-on-the-shoulder elites to shut the hell up – and for Aboriginal Australians in remote communities to start helping themselves.
Professor Langton’s call comes as another of the country’s most experienced Aboriginal leaders, Tom Calma, said the nation’s senior indigenous figures must meet the government soon to discuss the way forward.
“The senior indigenous leadership needs to sit down and have a good talk to the government and see how we can develop a mechanism so that they can be informed about policy development that is outside of bureaucracy,” Professor Calma said.
Well, here’s a couple of suggestions you can have for free:
- Send your kids to damn school and start acting like parents.
- Stop breaking the law.
Australians are sick of the sight of gangs of Aboriginal kids running rampant every night in the streets of cities like Darwin and Townsville, while their parents are doing nothing but drinking and fighting. You can’t blame it on ‘media misrepresentation’. If anything, the opposite is true: media go out of their way to hide the identity of young Aboriginal offenders. The numbers don’t lie: we’re all too well aware of the grotesquely over-representation of Aboriginal Australians in domestic violence and child abuse statistics.
Too much of it comes down to the much-vaunted ‘culture’. What might have been appropriate to a Stone-Age nomadic culture is horrifically out of place in a modern society. Promise Brides, humbugging, payback: leave it all behind. Anglo-Australians, after all, don’t paint themselves blue, decorate their houses with the heads of their vanquished enemies, or measure their status by how many livestock they can steal, any more.
Labor’s indigenous policies since the defeat of the voice referendum have centred on housing, jobs and economic empowerment.
It committed $4bn to address chronic overcrowding in NT communities and is partway through an overhaul of the work-for-the-dole style program that once employed more than 30,000 Aboriginal people but broke down in 2020. Labor has also pledged to help Indigenous communities become part-owners and developers of projects on their traditional lands.
And there’s the problem: handouts aren’t going to fix a culture that’s broken and anachronistic or bring economic development to places where there’s nothing that’s not paid for by the taxpayer. Paying people to be living museum pieces in the middle of nowhere is a recipe for ongoing Aboriginal misery.
