One never hears stories of Germans in the 1930s clamouring to get their yellow stars. Because who would actually want to be oppressed? Yet, for all that we’re told how systemically oppressed Aboriginal Australians and Maori are, there’s a notable rush to “identify” as “indigenous”.
Suddenly, everybody wants to be oppressed — or is there another, less noble motive?
Serious concerns have been raised about “black cladding”, but many Aboriginal people and community-controlled organisations continue to see people suddenly identifying as Aboriginal to access these benefits.
What benefits are these? The tens of billions of dollars worth of benefits that are only available to people of one race in Australia. The motive is well-meaning enough — helping people from a group who are, by and large, worse off than other Australians.
But Aboriginal Australians are not homogeneous. Some of them, especially in remote communities, are in shocking need. Yet, they’re seeing little benefit from lavish government funding. Other people, though, are doing very well out of it all, indeed.
The Indigenous Procurement Policy is an example. The IPP is embedded in the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, which dictate the procurement policies of all federal government agencies.
The IPP ensures Indigenous suppliers are given a market advantage over non-Indigenous suppliers.
The idea that one race should be prioritised above all is the hallmark of an ethnostate.
The federal government promotes the fact that the IPP has increased funding to Indigenous businesses by more than $5.3bn since its launch. But where has the money gone?
A review of the Closing the Gap report in 2020 shows that despite this multi-billion-dollar investment, the employment rate for Indigenous Australians increased only slightly (by 0.9 percentage points). This is supported by other government reports that show this money does not appear to have trickled down to the people who need it most and who were the intended beneficiaries.
Who could have foreseen that? Throwing billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money around only ends up lining the pockets of an unscrupulous, powerful few? Well, I never.
Too often people claim a long-lost Aboriginal ancestor, then claim to be Aboriginal without meeting these requirements. Can people who find out they have English lineage through ancestors arriving on the First Fleet immediately claim English citizenship or expertise in English lore and culture? No.
The damage inflicted by people identifying as Aboriginal to obtain financial and other benefits without meeting the legal definition is real.
The Australian
Perhaps the whole problem is that we have an officially sanctioned race who are having billions of dollars handed out to whoever’s quick enough and unscrupulous enough to grab it. “Free” government money attracts grifters like flies to honey.
Instead of wasting time trying to tell the flies from the honeybees, perhaps the solution is to take away the whole, race-based honey pot. Hand out funding on demonstrated need, the same as for everyone else, and not on the basis of claiming to be a member of an officially-promoted race.
