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If you're happy paying them to exist and letting your two kids figure out how to support their three then have fun with that, but that's all you've been doing and all you'll be doing, and I don't consider the whole farce deserving of the respect you apparently feel it's entitled to.
This is a response to both you and @Southkraut below:
Well, a permanent class of parasites is what we have now. Part of the goal of Closing the Gap is to get Aboriginal people into the kind of economic system that would allow them to be like any other demographic in Australia.
I fully agree that it is a failure if all we do is bring Aboriginals up to the same standard of living as other Australians by throwing money into a sucking pit. The goal of all Closing the Gap schemes has to be getting the Aboriginal population to a point where they are sustainable participants in the Australian economy and even the Australian community.
The metrics by which the Gap is measured include educational and employment outcomes. The thing we are trying to do is get Aboriginal people to have jobs. I oppose just throwing charity or welfare at people forever. But if we can get most Aboriginal people to have tolerably decent jobs that are bringing them 60k AUD a year or whatever (which is well below average but enough to live on), then that is a good thing.
It seems to me that there are basically three paths before us.
Path one: Do absolutely nothing. Don't care, just let Aboriginal people starve or turn to crime or otherwise form a permanent underclass.
Path two: Provide enough welfare or charity to avoid one. Create a permanent welfare class.
Path three: Use a combination of welfare, education, and targeted social interventions to try to shift this group into sustainable participation in the Australian economy.
In the post you responded to I rejected path one. You now accuse me of path two. I agree that path two is bad. I therefore favour path three.
I can't think of any other path, save perhaps a 'path zero' which would be to just kill them all, or deport them all, or otherwise make Aboriginal people not exist in Australia any more. That's obviously not an acceptable path either. So what else is there?
What's your favoured path? What do you think should be done?
Option #3 is just option #2 with extra steps. You can't educate your way out of a serious IQ deficit, we've been watching the western world fail at exactly that for generations now. Targeted social intervention? Man the notion that as a group they're even capable of successfully navigating advanced civilization is, as far as I can tell, an unevidenced religious belief.
I don't have a different option for you. I'm just reminding you that all you really have are option #1, option #2, and a bunch of silly cope. Your society will maintain them at some level it's comfortable with, and where exactly on the dial between luxury welfare and Victorian poverty the needle lands isn't something I necessarily have a strong opinion on. At least not when it comes to other countries.
But if this is a place for serious discussion then I'm not taking this "closing the gaps" talk seriously. Be aware of what you're buying and don't delude yourself that the cost will ever go down. There is no real solution, this is just a permanent anchor around the neck.
I suppose I think the issue you're dodging, then, is that something must be done. Both option one and option two lead to undesirable outcomes - you only have to glance at Alice Springs to see that.
I don't think Aboriginals must be brought to some level of luxury, but even supposing for the sake of argument that Aboriginal people all have a median IQ of 80 or so, I think getting them into the same rough position of IQ 80 non-Aboriginal people would be a step up, both of them and for the rest of Australia. I won't dispute that the last fifty years of Aboriginal policy have failed, but I don't accept that "just live with a horrible problem forever" is a better approach.
Must it? What happens if it isn't? You don't seem to have a solution other than the usual "something something education" rigamarole, I don't have one for you, nobody else seems to have thought of a decent one over the years either, why are you so sure one exists?
That's too bad, because it's what you're going to get. If current levels of welfare and cultural asskissing aren't enough to get them to stop huffing gasoline and throwing spears at each other, I can't even imagine what it would take to get them where you'd like them to be.
I agree that doing what we've done for the last few decades is not adequate. It will not work, and the Voice was just a pitiful attempt at doubling down on that.
From my perspective, both the Voice and what you're saying are counsels of despair. You and Megan Davis are both saying the same thing, which is essentially, "Nothing will ever change, welfare forever."
I do not accept that this is good enough. This is not acceptable. Maybe you think Aboriginals are all dumb, fine, whatever. But Aboriginals are not as badly off as the dumb members of other racial groups. I would at least aim for that level!
Yes.
Well, too bad.
There are genetic influences on behavior beyond simple IQ. You're talking about a population that has never experienced any of the selection effects associated with agriculture or civilization. You keep on hoping that fact somehow doesn't matter and we'll see if the next fifty years play out any better than the last fifty.
All right, but what you said was:
As far as I can tell, you are the one who's happy just paying a population to survive on endless welfare, while I'm the one insisting that this status quo is not acceptable.
You yourself said that you don't have a different option. You're fine with this, then, are you?
I am not fine with this, and I do not think that Aboriginal people are so congenitally incompetent that they cannot find some role, even a very humble role, in a modern economy.
I wouldn't say I'm happy about it, but you'll never post your way to another option existing.
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Could you sketch out what a plan for an improved state of affairs looks like, then?
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Since you tagged me - I don't really presume to favor one path over another. My personal preferences will hardly be those shared by a decisive plurality of Australians, and I'm very decidedly not even in Australia. About as far away as can be, really. I just hope whatever Australia does works out for the better, and whether or not that the results aren't ignored and that people world over can learn from it.
I'm just armchairing it, and I see the incentives for a growing class of parasites being established (if they haven't been before). Hence my question about Aboriginal birth rates.
The Aboriginal population is growing on paper, but I'm not sure about overall birthrate figures - the increase in people identifying as Aboriginal is partly driven by changing patterns of identification (and the increasing number of mostly-white people claiming indigenous identity) as well as increasing life expectancies. So even if the birthrate stayed completely flat I would expect the number of Aboriginal people on the census to increase.
As far as I can tell the Aboriginal birth rate is pretty flat overall, though higher than that of non-indigenous people. It is not so high that I expect an exploding Aboriginal population in the short to medium term, especiall since, though their birth rate is higher than non-indigenous people, large-scale migration means that the non-indigenous population is still growing much more quickly than the Aboriginal population. This paper is older but takes a longer look and seems to indicate that Aboriginal TFR has been falling, along with everybody else's.
If you would like policy to try to increase the non-indigenous birthrate in Australia, and to encourage family formation and children among Australians in general (perhaps specifically white Australians?), then I have no hesitation in supporting that. I think fertility decline is a serious problem across the entire Western world and I expect it to become one of the foremost global crises over the 21st century. So I am wholly behind pro-natalist policy.
I think my position overall, then, is that there is no particular threat of a rapidly expanding Aboriginal population making demands on the Australian welfare system that bankrupts us, but that I support pro-natalist policy regardless, for other reasons.
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