There’s an old saying: ‘You can’t help those who won’t help themselves.’ Somebody ought to remind Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy about that one. Like so many on the ‘indigenous’ gravy train, McCarthy is forever wringing her hands and demanding that everyone else save Aboriginal Australians from themselves.
Not that most need it, of course. The majority of Aboriginal Australians are doing pretty much as well as the rest of us (although domestic violence and child abuse rates remain stubbornly higher than all other groups, in all socioeconomic quintiles). The ‘gap’ they’re forever bleating about mostly applies to a minority of Aborigines in remote communities.
Here’s the thing, though: literally no one is stopping them from sending their kids to school. In fact, the rest of Australia bends over backwards to entice them to. Inordinate amounts of taxpayer dollars are spent building schools that almost no one bothers to attend and trying to entice teachers to endure abuse, assaults, rapes and even murder, while teaching the ones who do.
Literally no one is forcing Aboriginal parents in these communities to drink and bash each other and their kids. Just as literally no one is forcing anyone to live in squalid communities in the middle of nowhere where there are no jobs or much of anything else, either, besides sand, alcohol and drugs.
And no one, but no one is forcing Aboriginal Australians to break the law.
But apparently it’s everyone else’s fault that they keep landing up in jail.
Steep increases in the numbers of Indigenous adults jailed across the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia threaten to derail the refreshed Closing the Gap agreement signed with high hopes for a new way forward in 2020.
Do they think it’s coincidental that the increase in incarceration is correlated with a staggering increase in violent crime in these states? It’s almost like people who rob, bash, rape and murder other people end up in jail, for some reason.
Data from men’s and women’s prisons across the nation are by far the bleakest indicators published on Wednesday night.
These figures from 2024 are deeply concerning to the alliance of Indigenous organisations working with governments to meet targets because of the known knock-on effects of crime and jail on families and children.
So deeply concerned that they’re going to take their own people to task for failing to do what mostly everyone else somehow manages to?
However, the Productivity Commission blasted state governments and the NT in a report in February 2024 that claimed bureaucrats were paying lip service to this promise. The report argued things would not improve while it was “business as usual” for state and territory governments.
On Wednesday, commissioner Selwyn Button returned to the criticisms of a year ago.
“We found that governments had not taken enough meaningful action to meet their commitments under the agreement,” he said. “The continued worsening of outcomes we’ve seen in some Closing the Gap target areas shows the importance of governments taking their commitments to the national agreement seriously, and taking meaningful actions to fully implement the priority reforms.”
So, nothing about people taking personal responsibility?
It’s always everyone else’s fault, isn’t it?
It’s particularly ironic that the same people screaming to ‘burn down the colony’ are the same ones begging ‘the colony’ to save them from the consequences of their own actions.
