Showing posts with label communities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communities. Show all posts

Closing Aboriginal Cmmunities in WA is Immoral

You cannot change culture by legislation. The Western Australian government is closing remote Aboriginal communities citing poor health, suicide and not much work. Aboriginal children are brought up in "strong" communities where they learn local languages and rituals passed down for generations. Closing communities will result in total loss of language and culture.

How can Aboriginals buy housing in cities? They have no tradition of hereditary wealth or access to education to better one's life. White governments are absolutely responsible for the situation of modern day Aboriginals. White people forcibly took this country from them and forced them into the margins of society where they have remained for centuries.

What remote Aboriginals need is more money from government. They have a right to live on their ancestral lands. They were born there. The WA government will be closing rural towns next. Where does this end? If Aboriginals decide to move back to closed remote communities they are entitled to welfare payment due to lack of work. After all, they are Australian citizens. Governments sometimes fails to accept this.
Culture by Ty Buchanan
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Recognition of Aboriginals in the Constitution a Waste of Time

Tony Abbott is planning to include Aboriginals in the Constitution as the original "owners" of the land of Australia. This is like like Kevin Rudd's speech apologizing for the lost generation of Aboriginals forcibly taken from their parents and put into institutions or brought up by White people. Talk is cheap.

What Australia needs is a planned development program to make life better for Aboriginals. The right for men to receive unemployment payments was taken away by a still paternal federal government in the Northern Territory. It was taken on the premise of bad treatment of Aboriginal children. This was a blatant lie. No Aboriginal has ever been charged for ill treatment of children.

Money is needed to spend on Aboriginal communities. Tony Abbott has no money to spare, particularly with his right-wing policy of reducing taxes for wealth whites. How is Australia going to decrease the deficit with such a policy? The only thing that government can do is reduce spending. This will hit the economy and bring hard times upon us.

How can a prime minister be known for development, as Tony Abbott announced, if he has no money to spend, unless he has a magic wand up his shirt. The private sector will not voluntarily help Aboriginal communities. There is no profit in it and business has only one motivator - make more money. Telling industry to employ more Aboriginals will change nothing: they have never been taught the needed skills.
Politics by Ty Buchanan
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No-Car Future Is the Only Sustainable Option

The National Sustainability Council presented its long awaited report called the Sustainable Australia 2013: Conversations with the Future. This is the first of a series of biennial papers to advise the government about the state of the economy vis-a-vis the environment.

Full of optimism, the newly founded council said the future looked bright if we changed to building sustainable communities. However, the type of community needed is far more radical than envisaged by the council. Despite Australia having many of the most livable cities in the world we need to start planning immediately for the kind of balanced society of the future.

Oil will not be around forever and coal is too polluting to be used at such high rates. This means individuals driving around in five seater cars will not be possible. Electricity use is skyrocketing with Internet cloud servers and hungry mobiles gobbling up tonnes of coal and oil in power stations. Future cities will have to be designed with houses laid out in a manner that allows public transport to easily be used to get to work. Little is said about this now, but it will be in the future.

Somehow workers will have to be able to get from side roads to main roads where buses or vehicles on rails can travel. This will involve many more stops than at present and it will take longer to get to places of employment. We could see the return of bicycles or low-powered slow speed electric vehicles.

A place without car ownership will be an odd place to people of the current era. Nonetheless, it will have to happen eventually. Modern cities are car dependent. If an economic crisis stops the flow of oil these cities will die.
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