CHRISTIANITY IS THE WORST FAITH, EXCEPT FOR ALL THE OTHERS

Time to say sorry to all Aborigines (The Australian, May 20th, 2006)

It is time to say sorry to indigenous Australians. Time to say sorry for the way black women and children are abused in remote settlements. Time to apologise for governments just spending money over a generation instead of seeking solutions to practical problems. Time to regret the social engineering ideologues who have played politics with people's lives. On ABC TV's Lateline program last Monday night, Alice Springs Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers showed us why in a graphic interview that made it impossible for people who prefer to downplay the real oppression of Aborigines to ignore what is happening any longer. Dr Rogers reported cases where women were sexually assaulted, where infants - infants - were raped. Equally awful, she described how lawyers representing Aboriginal men from remote communities who committed such crimes played the race card, claiming their clients acted in the context of customary law. But the cause of the appalling circumstances Dr Rogers described run much deeper than courtroom stunts. In large part, they are the outcome of a generation of social engineering that experimented with indigenous lives. They are also a result of the rhetoric of political opportunists who have used Aboriginal disadvantage as a stick to beat settler society. It started in the 1960s when the push for equal pay for Aboriginal stockmen in remote Australia cost too many of them their jobs – and pushed their families on to welfare. There was no case then, just as there is none now, for race-based discrimination in what different people are paid for equally productive work. But the fact remains that while equal pay was a just reform, it helped start the spiral into welfare dependency in the bush. Three decades later the Mabo decision, which cemented the ideal of indigenous land held in common, was equally well meaning, and just as damaging. By making it impossible for Aborigines in remote communities to own their own homes, it ensured public housing and community resources would always be run down, because no individual will take responsibility for what everybody owns. Universal welfare has done as much damage. Allowing Aborigines to rot in remote settlements where there is no work and no prospects for young people is a recipe for social disaster. People turn to drink and substance abuse to numb the misery, parents lose interest in disciplining their children and all sense of family structure ends.

But rather than accept that these strategies have never worked, over the years opinion leaders in indigenous affairs have cast ever wider for somebody, anybody, to blame. Indigenous deaths in custody were described as affronts to all Aborigines, rather than the result of crime and misery that trapped too many black men. We were told the stolen generation had scarred all Aborigines, as if this alone accounted for everything from diabetes to domestic violence in plague proportions. But such arguments ignore the evidence that many members of the stolen generation, especially those who were sent away to school, rather than universal servitude as is so often suggested, provided the last voices of mature moral authority many indigenous communities heard. And in the ultimate absurdity, we are still told self-determination is the only solution to indigenous disadvantage, despite the fact that ATSIC's discredited leaders – mainly men – largely ignored the interests of women and children in remote Australia. Even this week, advocates of the failed status quo in indigenous affairs were at it again in response to Dr Rogers's revelations. Her statement was such shocking stuff that at first it seemed Australia would be shamed into acting. The next day, the federal Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, spoke out, saying the misery must end. He sounded like he meant it. And it seemed as if a paradigm shift had occurred, that instead of academic debates about abstract indigenous rights, people in power would finally act to protect women and children. But not for long. Northern Territory Chief Minister Clare Martin said her Government was trying hard and that she would not attend the summit Mr Brough proposed, because indigenous violence was already on the agenda of the Council of Australian Governments. And then she came up with an inane excuse for inaction by calling on Canberra to provide more money for housing in remote areas. This sounded familiar to anybody interested in the well-being of indigenous Australians because for a generation we have heard how more money is the answer. But it's not. Whatever Ms Martin thinks, sexual assaults in remote settlements will not be stopped by bigger public service budgets.

A widespread plague of social pathology and gruesome sexual abuse among aboriginals is gripping the Australian consciousness this month, which you can read about through the links to the right of this editorial. The liberal inspired battles against old-fashioned prejudice that began in the 60's were hijacked by the postmodern left and became grounded in the celebration of pre-settlement paganism, the quest to revive an ethereal “traditional knowledge” that bore an uncanny resemblance to the cant of modern environmentalism, a native self-government magically innoculated against corruption and oodles and oodles of cash mau-maued out of naive but well-meaning Westerners. An adjunct to this was a full-frontal assault on Christianity and the churches that had run missions and residential schools, which descended into high-profile lawsuits that actually bankrupted some dioceses in Canada. Almost no one challenged this gross distortion of the historical record and the Churches were gripped by an orgy of self-flagellation that saw parish after parish work long hours to master the art of fine-tuning public apologies to combine maximum mea culpas for cultural genocide with minimum exposure to class action tort lawyers.

Sadly, faced with these horrors, too many will draw racist rather than moral and cultural conclusions. Even worse, hardly anyone will hear the beat of warning drums and reflect on the connections between our own modern plagues of STD’s, sexual abuse, teenage female mental disorders, the exploding sex trade, vulnerable children, etc. and the destruction of the boring and demanding moral plinth of Judeo-Christianity in favour of the seductive lure of amoral paganisms, new and old.