Race baiters don't deserve the high ground on Indigenous policy

If we are honest, the shouting down of any idea that presents even a modest challenge to the status quo is depriving Indigenous people the benefit of an honest debate about how their disadvantage might best be ameliorated.

This raises a puzzling question: what motivates those who time and again have expressed their concern for the Aboriginal community in the most in the most emphatic terms imaginable, yet so fiercely resist ideas that sit outside the existing paradigm of chronically underachieving policies? The most obvious explanation is the long shadow cast by past atrocities committed against aboriginals has fostered an innate wariness of any 'tough love' measure designed to push aboriginals towards greater self-reliance. Perhaps it is this instinct that has so often seen those who question the wisdom of policies which view state dependency as a cure rather than a temporary treatment accused of being mean-minded or lacking in sympathy.

Again, this would less perturbing if allowing indigenous policy to be dictated by lingering guilt for the wrongs of past generations had yielded anything better than an uninterrupted string of abject failures.

On the more extreme ends, it is doubtful whether deep down race-baiters actually accept that measuring indigenous progress according to the usual indicators of living a healthy and successful life - things like educational achievement and workforce participation - is even the right thing to do. For these people (often Greens parliamentarians or academics who find themselves sitting on the far left fringe of the progressive peanut gallery), the original sin of British settlement means it will always be wrong to hold any expectation of Aborigines participating in mainstream life in modern Australia.

Sadly, the costs of sticking to policies stifled by shibboleths of cultural Marxism and political correctness is borne solely by the Aborigines who continue to live lives marred by despair and despondency.