Our esteemed Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has once again shown his true colours…despite holding himself as a ‘champion’ of our indigenous communities, instead, he’s a fucking moron again!
Because living in a remote community, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere is a ‘lifestyle choice’ according to Tony Abbott.
Ummm…my understanding of ‘lifestyle choice’ sort of comes down to choices. So I might live in an urban area, and choose to move to a rural clime? Or vice-versa, whereby I live in a country town and pack up to move to the city.
But the folks who live in remote communities most likely have no such ‘choices’. Firstly, their connection to country binds them spiritually and psychologically to the place they live. Secondly, they just don’t have the social or economic resources to get up and move somewhere else!
Abbott has copped lots of flack today, even from those who have tacitly supported his other measures to address Aboriginal inequality. But his foot is firmly planted in his gob today…you fucked up Abbott.
When dealing with Abbott, your titles really need to be more specific. I thought this was going to be about his veiled threats to Indonesia that executing a couple of scumbag heroin smugglers would not be in Indonesia’s best interests.
Well shit…I can’t be buggered starting up a thread about EVERY damned thing Abbott does…I’d be here all fucking day!
But just for the record, I approve of his attempts to have our citizens returned ALIVE. We don’t grok the death penalty here…just doesn’t sit right with most of the populace no matter HOW heinous the crime.
I too agree with the efforts to bring them back alive - just not the way he’s essentially told them that they have no right to punish Australians scumbags “or else”…
I am still ashamed of the way my govt sent state funded terrorists to a French beach resort as a punishment -and we don’t even have the death penalty
Championing the cause of Australians facing a barbaric penalty overseas is one thing. Reminding Indonesia that we sent them aid money after their devastating tsunami is quite another kettle of fish.
Julie Bishop was hoping to arrange an exchange for the drug smugglers. I wonder if they’d consider swapping them for Abbott? Seems like that would solve all our problems in one go.
I don’t mind Abbott so much. He is to Australian politics what Cary Elwes is to movie acting. If someone asks me what is the worst acting performance I have ever seen, I can reply, “Cary Elwes - Saw,” with certainty. If someone asks me worst ever PM I now don’t have to ponder the long, ever growing list of possibilities, “Tony Abbott,” I can call out.
I joined a Facebook group called “Tony Abbott - Worst PM In Australian History” on election eve because it amused me. I didn’t realise he’d take it as a personal challenge.
Like George W Bush, Tony Abbott “mis-speaks” at times. With GWB it was entertaining. Tony Abbott…not so much. His gaffes have a mean streak in them which is not endearing or demonstrative of Prime Ministerial dignity.
On this specific matter however, there is some logic. Furthermore the action of closing the community centres is being carried out by the West Australian government, not Abbott himself.
If you and your family were living in a desert region, no jobs, no school, no hospital - you’d do the best you could to find those resources and probably move.
That is the entire human emigration story. Move to a better place. Maybe return when things are better.
I agree that Abbott’s position is logical. It’s also culturally insensitive and unkind. I was going to say it was a “tone deaf” comment but that probably depends on your taste in music. There are plenty with whom it will have hit exactly the right note.
Kam, you say they just don’t have the social or economic resources to get up and move somewhere else. They clearly don’t have the resources to live where they do either, else they wouldn’t need to be supported by the government. I’m sure the government would rather pay for them all to move to a city where they could be supported more easily and cheaply than to continue to pay for them to live somewhere remote.
The term “lifestyle choice” is all wrong because it makes indigenous decisions to continue to live on their ancestral lands sound like a lightweight first world problem which it isn’t. It’s probably more accurate to say it’s a cultural choice. I think it’s unkind to make the indigenous give up their culture through lack of support.
I assume Bengangmo is French and referring to the French Government sending Government agents to sink the Rainbow Warrior ship while it was moored in Auckland, New Zealand.
The ship was run by Greenpeace and was intending to sail to disrupt French nuclear weapons tests to be held in the Pacific Ocean. The sinking resulted in the death by drowning of a Greenpeace photographer.
The French agents were caught and the resulting scandal led to the resignation of a French Defence official.
The agents were sentenced to 10 years after a plea bargain but the French Government released them after just two years in a unilateral breach of the agreed terms.
This was back in 1985.
I only provide this information in case anyone is confused by a story about an Australian politician on an American bulletin board suddenly references the actions of the French government in New Zealand.
I am not fully up to speed on the mechanics of aboriginal affairs in Australia beyond a cursory understanding and the knowledge that, historically, they have been disgracefully ill treated.
I have to object, though, to the notion that a human being is irreversibly “bound,” spiritually or psychologically, to living in a physical location. Certainly a person may be attached to a place because they have lived there a long time, but a newly born person has no such attachment, and in any event the government of a sovereign state really has no business setting policy based on some abstract, fuzzy notion of a spiritual bond a person has to Upper Rubber Boot, Northern Territory, that they can’t make to Lower Doofusville, Queensland.
It is self-evidently the case that people of any numbers of faiths can find a home and a life in places separated from their spiritual homeland. Not all Muslims have to live in Arabia; 98% of Christians do not live in the Holy Land or Rome; most Jews don’t live in Israel, and so on. Of course those are not the same faiths or spiritualities and it is plausible that Aborigine spirituality is more inherently tied to locale. In the end, however, spirituality is a choice, not an intrinsic, unchangeable feature of a person, and a person must to some extent live with the consequences of that choice. A government cannot practically accommodate spiritual choice past some point of logistical absurdity, and remote communities in Australia’s back country might well be beyond that point. There is a reason most people do not live in deserts, tundras, and at the tops of mountains. They’re awful.
Canada has a similar situation in trying to support remote aboriginal communities based on a network of treaties, arrangements and politics so dense it takes years of story to grasp it all, and by any measurement of human development it is an absolute goddamned disaster. There is no amount of money that can be poured into a community of 1500 people in a place like Attawapiskat that will change the fact that Attawapiskat is a Godforsaken place nobody would live in it they weren’t being 50% paid and 50% forced to do so.
So what’s the solution? Beats the shit out of me, because, again, it’s a political and legal spaghetti and simply cutting people off is just not fair. But there is truth at the heart of what Tony Abbott said.
…no there is not, and it is because you are not fully up to speed on the mechanics of aboriginal affairs in Australia beyond a cursory understanding that would lead you to believe this.
