DO-GOODER PATERNALISM DISASTROUS FOR AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

The Centre for Independent Studies has just issued a seminal paper. It's called A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities. It makes out a compelling case that the existing deal is a disaster and that the main beneficiaries of the present arrangements are a parasitic and incompetent class of whites in the so-called caring professions..... In the process, they provide the basis for a long-overdue revaluation of the policies of H.C. (Nugget) Coombs.

Coombs, a former governor of the Reserve Bank, was the principal author of a paper called A Certain Heritage, published in 1983. Hughes and Warin call it "a blueprint" for "a socialist experiment - advocating communal land ownership, supported by substantial welfare transfers". Its aim was "to create an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander hunter-gatherer utopia that would culminate in a nation independent from the rest of Australia". Put as baldly as that, the whole notion sounds ridiculous. Part of the authors' point is that it always was ridiculous. The tragedy, as they see it, is that too few of the sensible people on the Left or the sceptics on the Right have had the courage to speak freely about dreadful social policy that has had such dire consequences for an already vulnerable underclass.....

As Hughes and Warin put it: "Nowhere in the world has communal land ownership ever led to economic development. Attempting to replicate hunter-gatherer groups in fixed locations created remote, fragmented communities that cannot support jobs and incomes." As a result, education, health, life expectancy, housing and related gaps between remote community dwellers and other Australians have widened. Alcoholism, substance abuse and crime have escalated. They conclude that "any group, regardless of ethnic origin, subjected to this experiment, with all energies deflected from economic to cultural activities, would have been condemned to the same fate". .....

I asked Hughes to expand on the paradox of a man of palpably good intentions being the source of so much misery. She explains it largely in terms of the millennial fantasies about noble savages that were such a pronounced feature of the times. "Coombs's compassion is very understandable," Hughes says. "It is not, however, understandable how a professional economist could formulate a utopian dream of hunter-gatherers living in remote communities, far away from the centres to which Aboriginal people were being attracted by access to education, health and improved housing.....

More here

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ELSEWHERE

"Liberals" still love Commos: "Why has John Kerry sponsored a Senate resolution honoring a Stalinist who championed racial separatism? The Soviet Union awarded W.E.B. Du Bois the Lenin Peace Prize. Maoist China staged a national holiday in his honor in 1959. Now, for reasons unexplained, the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential nominee seeks to honor Du Bois too. Kerry's efforts to honor Du Bois have been joined by fellow Bay State Democrat Ed Markey, who, along with more than three-dozen colleagues, has advanced a similar resolution in the House of Representatives."

Childish Europeans: "One reason that Europe understands so well the braggadocio and sense of inferiority of the impotent Muslim world is that it suffers precisely from some of these same maladies in its own problematic relationship with the United States. A Muslim in Europe who puts a picture of bin Laden on his wall is the equivalent of a European chanting that Bush is Hitler"

Theodore Dalrymple on bureaucratic Britain: "I think we are less free than we used to be. The weight of the state is making itself everywhere felt. In my former professional life as a doctor, for example, I was obliged more and more to obey the dictates of ministers, rather than those of my medical beliefs. Whereas when I started out on my career all that was necessary to continue in practice was that I should be qualified and that I should refrain from behaving in an egregious or outrageous manner, by the time I retired this year I had to fulfil all sorts of requirements, all of which (in this age of evidence-based medicine) were quite without evidence of use or efficacy. But that is not the real point of such requirements: they are not there to improve the quality of medical practice; they are there to let us all know who is boss. And even if they were effective, which is intrinsically very difficult to prove, they would still represent a loss of liberty. The fact is that the requirements laid down by ministers and their bureaucrats now take up fully half the time of senior doctors, when they could be doing clinical work, and this at a time of shortage of medical manpower."

The Leftist aim is destruction: "The atheistic socialist intellectual elites have been trying to destroy Western Civilization since they fomented the Counter-Culture Revolution in the 1960's; (I know: I was part of it!). They have the same aim now, only now they're trying to use the courts to accomplish what they could not by popular revolution. The Left's basic anti-Western attitude is why they've had such a hard time joining in with Bush and attacking the neojihadists; in the neojihadists the Left saw a powerful ally in their long-standing effort to destroy America, and with America the West and Western traditions. It's also why they would rather align themselves with Third World dictators like Fidel and Chavez and Mugabe.... The Left knows that they could never get any Amercian legislature to ban religious symbols and references to the Creator from all government auspices, events, objects, etc. That's why they've taken the issue to the courts: this is the Left's last chance at inflicting their atheistic anti-traditional program on to all Americans"

More evidence that the "Hobbits" were just pygmies: "The 18,000 year old human skeleton unearthed in Indonesia last year is in the spotlight once again. In the latest report published in the online edition of Science, researcher paleoneurologist Dean Falk said the skull has advanced features more like those of modern humans. Earlier he had expected to see a chimpanzee skull".

Wal-Mart: A big business with a backbone: "Hi, my name is Andrew and I'm a Wal-Martaholic. That may sound silly, but to many of my friends, shopping at Wal-Mart is something to be ashamed of, a personal weakness like alcoholism or lecherousness. It needn't be so. Wal-Mart's only 'crime' is doing its job -- selling goods to consumers -- so well that it has come to dominate the retail market. It did that by outmaneuvering and underselling its competitors for decades, thereby earning its station as the top global retailer."

I have just put online a set of notes I prepared whilst I was teaching survey research methods at the University of New South Wales many moons ago. They form an introductory course in how to use surveys to assess people's attitudes. See here. They do form the core of a university course, however, so are not for the everyday reader. Some of the matters I cover even seem to be beyond the grasp of a lot of my academic colleagues.

My latest posting on MarxWords notes how Marx advocated bloodshed. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at the post-resurrection Jesus.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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