Brian Ross wrote on Apr 21^st, 2023 at 12:39pm:


How can he possibly say that unless and until the full workings of this monstrosity are fully laid out - you know - after the gullible and sleeping Australian public have signed the blank cheque???

This can't seriously be a learned and studied opinion ..... I won't give it more than a passing note, same as you did, Brian.  Thank you for producing it... now we can move on with the realities.

Oxford union style debate. Hear both sides.  3 Aborigines and one Indian.




Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is a Country Liberal Senator for The Northern Territory and former Deputy-Mayor of Alice Springs.

Dr Shireen Morris is a constitutional lawyer and teaches constitutional law, constitutional reform and Indigenous constitutional recognition at Macquarie University. She is co-author of the book A Rightful Place: A Road Map to Recognition (Black Inc.).

Nyunggai Warren Mundine is director of the Indigenous Forum at CIS. He is an author of several books including Warren Mundine in Black and White: Race, Politics and Changing Australia (Pantera Press) and editor of Beyond Belief – Rethinking the Voice to Parliament (Connor Court).

Anthony McAvoy is Australia’s first Indigenous Senior Counsel and between 2011 and 2013, Tony was an Acting Part-Time Commissioner of the NSW Land and Environment Court. He was also Acting Northern Territory Treaty Commissioner from the period of Dec 2021 to June 2022.

Frank wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2023 at 1:49pm:


Shireen Morris was the most impressive speaker, Tony 2nd.....

I met Shireen 3 months ago, she is open-minded about MMT, and actually mentioned it at a Labor conference.

iirc  I told her Noel Pearson agrees with the JG concept (you can watch his interview with prof. Bill Mitchell on youtube).

Still no elucidation on how to close the gap; but Shireen made a good case that if the voice existed, the silly Labor policy to lift alcohol restrictions would not have happened. 

Grappler Truth Teller Feller wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2023 at 6:56pm:


Except for humans driven by instinctive, unconscious, self-survival mechanisms..

Rationality hardly gets a look in, which is why human behaviour in the aggregate is characterized by endless wars and entrenched poverty.

thegreatdivide wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2023 at 8:20pm:


Neither. The US is in a sorry state. I fear this is what historians say when civilisations eat themselves from the inside.

And to make things worse, the very fact of dividing the population on the basis of race in the Constitution, the nation’s foundational document, will endorse the notion that there are essential, immutable differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, with the conflicts separate representation invariably generates giving that inherently abhorrent, artificially cemented, colour line even starker salience.

It is therefore no accident that the National Aboriginal Conference degenerated into an unending confrontation with the Fraser government and then that of Bob Hawke, placing the demand for a treaty that would recognise the undivided sovereignty of an “Indigenous nation” above the practical issues that desperately needed to be addressed.

Nor is it an accident that a careful study of Sweden’s Sami parliament concludes that it has served to “intensify the Sami-state conflict”, with Sami politicians casting “government policy and thus, ultimately, the Swedish state” as their “main adversary”– and the ­deterioration in the relations between the Sami and the state has been even greater in otherwise consensual Finland.

John Howard was consequently prescient in 1989 when he warned – in comments widely derided as racist – that far from advancing reconciliation, ATSIC would prove “a monumental disservice to the Australian community” which would “strike at the heart of the unity of the Australian people”. But ATSIC – whose main novelty lay in adding cronyism and incompetence to its predecessors’ intransigence – could be abolished (with bipartisan support) because it was created by legislation; the voice, once it is entrenched in the Constitution, will be there for generations to come.

That would not be a pity; it would be a tragedy. The reality is that the vast majority of Australians share the positive vision Paul Hasluck, Robert Menzies’ long-serving minister for territories, forcefully set out in 1961. Indigenous Australians, he told the state premiers, deserve to be “members of a single Australian community enjoying the same rights, privileges and obligations as other Australians”, with any special measures being “temporary measures” that would “assist them to make the transition”.

Never was that emphasis on equal, rather than special, rights clearer than in the 1967 referendum.
...
We are once again being told that constitutionalising inequality will promote equality and that enshrining separateness will reinforce national unity.

It is surely time that illusion, which has trapped so many Indigenous communities in chronic disadvantage, endemic violence and spiralling rates of incarceration, was abandoned once and for all.
Henry Ergas

Setanta wrote on Apr 23^rd, 2023 at 4:52pm:


Admittedly Tony is into 'preserving the culture'; my interest in in closing the gap. 

But did we learn how Mundine and Price actually intend to  close the gap, other than motherhood statements like "give local communities self-determination"?

Quote:
 

Interesting how our own world view colours our perceptions; I thought she was basically agreeing that local policy determination is important, to close the gap.   




Quote:


Yes, but  Shireen drew a distinction between the SJWs and people on the ground in the communities, obviously.

And in fact, this is one reason why the former CDEP was successful in reducing crime and alcohol, because the local communuity had input into choosing the work programs for local community self improvement.

But gruesome neoliberal/neoclassical market economists /bean counters cancelled the CDEP.