Wednesday, November 17, 2010

I heartily endorse this tweet

RobertCandelori I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land: King George III & his heirs up to and including Queen Elizabeth II
I know, it's politically incorrect and if I thought about it too much I would appreciate the problems with it (I suppose), but really, I'm just over all this bullshit acknowledging of traditional owners.

It's a completely meaningless term and is actually contradictory. Either you are the traditional owner of land or you are not. Other than for unimproved Crown land, aboriginal people are not the owners of land and there is nothing to be gained by this well-intentioned sop that effectively seeks to delegitimise our presence in this country.

Now, you may pine for a time before British Australia and wish that the British had never come here and established the modern nation state called Australia.

But we aren't going away. Non-aboriginal Australians aren't going to pack up and move back to where ever they or their families came from.

And yet we tolerate this idea that implicitly says that our presence here is illegitimate, that there are people with a claim to this country that is real, whereas ours is not.

We put up with that ersatz "traditional" welcome to country ceremony that didn't exist until 40 years ago when Ernie Dingo and another fellow made it up.

Do we Australians really need to be welcomed to what is our own country?

Our sensibilities should be troubled by the dispossession of the aboriginal people and the disastrous effects it had on them, but it happened. It can't be undone and it wont be undone.

So we are all here together and surely the last thing people rotting in the remote communities, or the deracinated urban aborigine passing generational failure and disadvantage to yet another generation, is to be encouraged to nurse grievances about the wrongs of the past and wallow in an impotent victimhood?

Because, gee, hasn't that been working a treat for the last thirty or forty years?

The greatest tragedy of the 2007 federal election was the fact that at just the moment we had a government that had found the courage to 'name' the failed policies of the past for what they were, and to declare that we had to do things differently, we changed the government and we have gradually seen since the old alliance of the white urban Left and those aborigines who profited from the disadvantage of the rest of their people reassert the disastrous policies of the rights agenda, separatism and victimhood.

I'm sick of symbolic gestures that are more about white people feeling good about themselves, (and superior to the less 'enlightened'), than about making sure this current generation of aboriginal kids isn't destroyed like the ones before it.

And let's be honest about this shall we? Even here in Perth's suburbs I can see exactly that happening. Kids tagging along with their parents (who have never worked a day in their lives) as they wait before half past eight in the morning with social security money for the bottle shop to open, and a day's drinking to begin.

Kids whose formative years is a never ending succession of violence, foul language and the most appalling anti-social behavior. Kids who are doomed to fail at school before they even get there.

But what makes our inner-city hipsters angry? Apologies and preambles to the friggen constitution.

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