I was impressed with Rudd's speech and felt so elated that finally a polititcian had done something straight away the he promised to do in the election. After having Howard for 11 years who promises were mighty empty its refreshing to see Rudd actually following through with it!
I now feel that this will help indigenous australians settle a little more, to feel like their suffering and abuse that a lot received has been publicly acknowledged and apologised for.
I know think its time to really start working for the betterment of the indigenous population, though I don't believe offering personal compensation is going to deal with the issues involved. Having grown up in the Northern Territory and lived there most of my life, I have been surrounded by probably the worst stereotypes of indigenous people you could imagine.
I believe that due to earlier governments policies of basically throwing money after a problem and never trying to fix it, indigenous people have grown up with no respect for money, distrust for authorities (and for good reason) and WORST of all no respect for themselves and their culture.
This is also what happened in low economic 'non indigenous' families as well.
What we need to focus on is rebuilding that respect for ones culture. Saying 'here is 100,000 sorry for your suffering' is not going to do it. We need to use money to fund work programs, to stop the 'money for nothing' welfare system that was made to keep indigenous people down with no hopes. Why look for a job when you know you're getting $500 a fortnight for nothing? Why push yourself when all around you your family and friends have no drive or ambition. Indigenous people are a closeknit family units. They don't like to be alone, they don't like to be a leader, its a big thing for someone to stand up and walk away from all that is familiar to them.
While I disagreed with some of the intervention tactics, being a school teacher I saw some benifits. For the first time students who were never at school started turning up. They started learning, getting involed, finding things to do they liked, instead of staying home and having no parental figure pushing them to school.
What has happened is a generation that is repeating the same mistakes over and over at a much faster rate (the average age for a first time mother is 17) and learning the same mistrust of authority, hatred and boredom for education (not because they are stupid, but because they don't attend enough school to learn anything of much use!) and no drive for anything more than what they see.
Indigenous people have a beautiful wonderful culture and are the most kind and caring people. They have just lost a lot of it due to being given money but never told how to use it, turning to alcohol and petrol sniffing to get through the dasys and breeding the same loss of hope and pride through their society.
I hope this is the start of rebuilding what they lost. And compensation is not the way to do it. In fact its probably going to be hard for a lot of indigenous people to contend with, but i feel its the best way, to get the best out of a population that has lost its spirit.
but I still feel he has something that Howard crucially lacked. Empathy, I don't know, but definitely he has it.
We can only hope.
I hope so too!
Please Mr Liberal Party please replace them with compassionate, humane peeps so we can continue this catch-up fix-up. Thank you.
