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Following on from the defeat of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum (seriously can we just include Torres Strait Islanders in the definition of "Aboriginal"? The whole phrase is too many words) Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the silence is now over. The leaders of the Yes campaign have published an open letter to the Parliament, and it is salty. So salty that reportedly some people refused to sign on to it - and perhaps that is why it appears without any names attached.
It opens by describing Australia's decision to vote no as "appalling and mean-spirited". It asserts that "It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around." It says that "the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act". So on and so forth.
In short, it is very much filled with the sort of resentment and hostility that turns people off, hard. Even on the normally far left /r/australia subreddit, posters are tearing strips off it.
This is of course a terrible time for the Yes campaigners to be acting in this way. With the failure of the Voice, indigenous policy is in a state of flux. The government is licking its wounds and weighing how to respond. These activists could not have made a better argument for why they should be sidelined in those deliberations.
This shows the disconnect between leftists and Aboriginal leaders and what the actual goal was. Now the mask is off and the leftists see what they really believe.
It's really that simple.
Wow, that's a remarkable quote. It's incredible that they can openly state they want nothing less than ethno-supremacy while mainstream media sources are calling so many people racist for not being one-sided enough in their favor. A banal and obvious observation I know, but you usually don't hear admission of it that plainly, and that puts into perspective how incredible it is that such a narrative is safely forwarded by people who are treated like they have a monopoly on the concept of racial justice in the mainstream discourse.
It really is incredible that this is has widespread buy-in among serious people living in the west. Apparently an explicit ethnostate is something we should be aiming for and defending. Their ultimate aim is to establish explicit rules around this:
You can read more here. Imagine if something like this actually became law in a nation purporting to be a liberal democracy.
...erm, aren't we talking about Aboriginal people?
Israel does get plenty of criticism for its approach here, obviously, and it doesn't seem relevant to Australia. I think the better comparison would be to other self-described indigenous peoples. Certainly during the Voice campaign we heard a lot of people talking about Maoris and Native Americans and Canadian First Nations.
Honestly something that struck me on doing very basic research into other countries' Indigeous persons was that the Australian Aboriginal's life expectancy gap with the median was about the same size as it is for the Maoris and First Nations people. Despite the latter two having the 'benefits' of deeper recognition in their countries.
Really? Amerinds seem a lot better off than I’d expect aborigines to be, based on how I’ve heard them described.
Well, let's take some specific metrics. Let's compare Australian Aboriginals, Maoris, American Indians, and Canadian First Nations relative to the surrounding culture, on a few different metrics.
Hypothesis: if the claim that the Voice and recognition would help to close the gap is true, the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people should be significantly worse in Australia than in the other three nations.
Life expectancy:
(sticking with pre-covid figures if possible)
Aboriginals: 71.6 years male, 75.6 years female. Compare to 81.3 years male and 85.4 years female for non-indigenous, for an average gap of around 10 years.
Maoris: 73.0 years male, 77.1 years female. Compare to 80.3 years male and 83.9 years female for non-Maori (same link), for an average gap of around 6-7 years.
American Indians: I'm having a harder time finding a clear result here. This page gives 73.1 years for Indians, versus 79.1 years overall average, though it's not by gender. However, it could be more complicated, and America is the largest and most diverse nation, so I'm more cautious here. Pages like this suggest it might be more complicated. Still, let's ballpark it around 6 years.
Canadian First Nations: 72.5 years male, 77.7 years female. Compare to 81 years male, 85 years female for non-indigenous, for an everage gap of around 8-9 years.
Conclusion: Aboriginals do have the worst figures here, so count that as circumstantial evidence in favour of treaties and recognition. That said I would like to see a lot more evidence around causation.
Income:
(I'm not going to stress about currency conversions here, or weekly versus yearly income, because what matters for us here is the indigenous:non-indigenous ratio)
Aboriginals: Average weekly household income is $1507 AUD according to the ABS (compared to anything from 1358 through 2061 in general)), but equivalised, AIHW says $830 AUD, compared to $1080 for non-indigenous. I'm just going to estimate that Aboriginals are making approximately 77% what non-Aboriginals make.
Maoris: This site tells us that in 2013 the median income for Maoris was 78.9% of the national median, which I'm happy to just accept.
American Indians: Wiki has us covered here: $56,990 USD yearly median household income for Indians in 2021, versus 76,330 for the whole population. This translates to Amerian Indians making about 75% as much as non-Indians.
Canadian First Nations: Per page 32 here, average indigenous income in Canada is around 66% that of non-indigenous people.
Conclusion: I don't see any correlation here. Aboriginals are the 2nd-best-off of these groups, and the gap between Aboriginals, Maoris, and American Indians seems well within margin of error to me. The real surprise for me here is Canada, which I didn't think was that much worse.
I was going to make a pass on education as well, but that's proving harder to find figures for.
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