Skinny latté ideology

So instead of being proactive in the task at hand many, sadly, are simply going through the process of ensuring their adherence to their duty statement is not brought into question while accumulating their superannuation entitlement through the passage of time. Many simply wait their turn for a comfortable middle management job to present itself without a worry about the plight of the most marginalised group in society.

A bit like drinking a skinny latte or skinny flat white coffee thinking you're addressing a weight issue - the more you drink it the more you believe it. Hence the skinny latte ideology title - the more you believe you're doing a good job of alleviating Indigenous disadvantage, when you're not - the more you believe you are.

Those who fall into this category know who they are - because they must number in the tens of thousands - as the problems at the grass roots level continue to escalate unabated.

Perhaps one of the answers to solving problems of child abuse and domestic violence in our rural and remote communities is to shut them down?

Most Australians would support the view adopted by Senator Chris Evans when he emphatically ruled out such a heavy fisted approach in an address he gave to the Canberra South Branch meeting of the ALP in June 2006:

The fact is that shutting down remote Indigenous communities will not solve the problems of violence and abuse, it will simply re-locate them. The problems in places like Wadeye and some of the Alice Springs town camps demonstrate this. Indigenous communities in urban and regional Australia also face high levels of violence and abuse, because these are problems of entrenched social disadvantage and dysfunction-not problems of geography.

Senator Evan goes a step further and suggests that Indigenous people may actually be better off in remote communities:

Professor Fiona Stanley's Telethon Institute has done research in WA which shows that young people in remote Indigenous communities are less likely to experience mental health problems than their urban and regional counterparts. Employment and education outcomes are not necessarily better for Indigenous people who move from remote communities to larger towns and centres. So let's be clear about this: shutting down small remote communities is not the answer.

Could it possibly be that Indigenous Australians are a product of their inability to adapt, restructure and re-educate?

To answer these questions we must revisit our past in order to explain the present.

Prominent Indigenous academic, Professor John Maynard, uses the sobering words of JD Woods in his book Fight for Liberty and Freedom to express the dire predicament of Indigenous Australians at the hands of marauding invaders in 1879:

Without a history, they have no past; without a religion they have no hope; without the habits of forethoughts and providence, they can have no future. Their doom is sealed, and all that the civilised man can do ... is to take care that the closing hour shall not be hurried on by want, caused by culpable neglect on his part.