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Is there a special unit, somewhere, dedicated to constantly churning out new and ever-more fanciful narratives for the Aboriginal Industry? Because someone has to be coming up with the bullshit that somehow becomes common currency for the media-political chattering classes.
Whether it’s the repeatedly debunked ‘Aborigines were classed as ‘flora and fauna’ myth or the ‘Stolen Generations’ myth, these idees fixes grip the tiny minds of the chatterers in serial fashion. ‘Welcome to Country’, ‘First Nations’, Dark Emu – no bullshit is too obvious that they won’t parrot it with idiotic solemnity.
Then there’s the ‘World’s Oldest Living Culture’.
Not only is this claim demonstrably false, insomuch as it even means anything, it also begs the question: what’s to celebrate about a literal Stone Age culture?
Certainly not the endemic violence.
As the Northern Territory welcomes in a new government that has promised to get tough on crime, the focus is on urban Aboriginal youths – the gangs of crims breaking through shop windows, stealing cars and threatening with weapons.
The Country Liberals promise to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10 to make kids answer for the over-size damage they cause, to reintroduce spithoods and to reinstate truancy officers to make sure Aboriginal kids attend school.
It raises questions about a more problematic cohort: Aboriginal men aged in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who were kids not so long ago, now being told by judges they are beyond repair as worthwhile members of society.
The inner-urban chatterers, with their well-thumbed copies of Dark Emu and memorised ‘traditional acknowledgement’ speech for every occasion, can deny all they want that there’s a violence problem in Aboriginal culture, but the grim statistics don’t lie.
These men bash and maim repeatedly. They have long records. Spells in prison are not correcting them. They have kids and those kids are charting the same course.
For all their witterings about ‘femicide’ and ‘gender-based violence’, the left plainly couldn’t give a shit about the appalling violence inflicted on Aboriginal women and children. When a group of NT Aboriginal women travelled to Canberra some years ago, in a desperate plea to be heard, not one Labor or Greens politician bothered to even show up.
When the Howard government responded to the ‘Little Children are Sacred’ report with a suite of practical measures to reduce alcohol abuse in Aboriginal communities, the left screamed ‘racism’. The Albanese government made removing the measures their first priority.
Indeed, it almost begins to look as if there’s a protection racket running for violent Aboriginal men.
In the Territory courts, where there is a swinging door of repeat offenders, there is a sense that help cannot come soon enough but, even if it did, it would make no difference anyway. Chief Justice Grant said he needed to apply a value of deterrence when sentencing dog sadist Adam Britton to 10 years and five months in prison, with a non-parole period of six years. But it’s not as if the public needs to be reminded not to rape and kill dogs. As for telling Aboriginal men not to harm women and children, judges have been yelling into that void for decades.
Then there’s the High Court’s 2013 ‘Bugmy principles’, which hold that if evidence of a severely deprived childhood can be established with repeat adult offenders, it must be given weight in sentencing. The practical result of which seems to be that Aboriginal men convicted of the most horrific violence against Aboriginal women are repeatedly given lenient sentences, after which they go right on with the bash.
Each man has the same story – differing only in the nature of the assaults.
Dead or dead drunk father, dead or drunk or disconnected mother, barely educated, wandering childhoods, substance abusers since teenagers, disregard for bail, disregard for jail, capable of committing extreme violence on women and each becoming fathers themselves during short-lived times of freedom.
The well-off city-based apparatchiks of the Aboriginal Industry can blame ‘the legacy of colonialism’ all they like, but anyone familiar with the historical and archaeological literature should be well aware that Aboriginal violence is nothing new. Nor can it be blamed entirely on poverty: abuse is disproportionately high at all economic quintiles of Aboriginal Australia.
Nothing’s worked so far, so now what?
Jon Tippett KC, the Northern Territory’s leading criminal barrister, says […] it is time for brave people to try new things and to be stern. And to be prepared to fail, and to then try other things.
“It’s going to be a tough one,” he says. “Where there’s lack of parental control or parental interest, young people may have to be in prison. Ten-year-old kids may have to be put in an environment where they’re fed and schooled.
“It’s all very well for parents in Palmerston or out in communities to scream about their kids being taken away. But you, parents, are not sending them to school. You are not feeding them. You are not bathing them or clothing them. They have scabies. You are not engaging in their health care. They are below weight and their cognitive abilities have suffered because you are not looking after them.
“It’s a choice. Either you look after them, or somebody else will. We may do that reluctantly. But these children are entitled to an upbringing in a first-world country that gives them a crack at life. If you’re not going to do it, mum and dad, then we are.”
We tried that – and all we got in return was a hairshirt because of the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’, who might better be characterised as the ‘Rescued Generations’.
Nothing will change until ‘the world’s oldest culture’ pulls up its socks and joins the modern world.
