Edward Heathcoat Amory writes on which politicians are really to blame for the present plight of the first Australians
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NATIONS hate having to confront their ugly underbelly. So all those Englishmen who shrank from the sight of our football supporters laying waste to Marseilles will sympathise with Australia. The success of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in the Queensland state elections has forced the Aussies to ask themselves whether they are a racist people. (1)
Mrs Hanson is opposed to further Asian immigration, and wants to reverse legislation giving Aborigines special rights. She has been disowned by the ruling Liberal party, but not, apparently, by the voters in her home state. Politicians in Canberra have two explanations for this, depending on their political tack. Right-wingers will tell you that she is not a racist, and that her supporters are making a misguided economic protest. Left-wingers will claim that she is a racist, but represents a small minority of uneducated and ill-informed rural rednecks. Both are wrong.(2)
This former fish-and-chip shop owner's message is indeed racist,(3) but it cannot be dismissed as a protest from the political fringe. Outside the metropolitan centres that cling to the seaboard of the world's largest island, a spreading virus of race hatred threatens to engulf Australia. This moral and cultural catastrophe is the direct result of the failure of the policies that have guided the country for a generation. (4)
Labour politicians were determined to weaken their connections with the old Empire, and forge new links with the rising East, which meant encouraging Asian immigration. This same group wanted to make amends for the past treatment of the original inhabitants. They had a point. Some early settlers in Queensland hunted the natives like animals, and the 'Abos' were treated worse than cattle until well after the second world war. Many half- caste children were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to orphanages. But the compensation -- massive positive discrimination and an unprecedented wave of subsidy -- has proved far more damaging than the original discrimination.(5)
Over the last two years, I have visited Australia four times -- my wife is writing a book on an Antipodean ancestor -- and driven from coast to coast, across country, through the hot, red centre. Once outside the urban areas, the consequences of goverument do-gooding are easy to see. You can tell when the red dust track that you are following is approaching an Aboriginal encampment, because a thick carpet of empty beer cans disfigures both verges. Cars are regularly abandoned in the middle of the road by their drunken drivers, simply because they have run out of petrol. We came across an Aboriginal family whose car was stuck in a sand dune. They were waiting under a gum tree for someone else to sort out the problem. They continued to sit there, drinking our water, while we attempted, for over an hour, to pull their car out. They watched while we became covered in sweat and oil, and when their car was finally free they went on their way without a word of thanks. (6)
These original Australians are no longer, if indeed they ever were, naive primitives struggling to come to terms with modern civilisation, handicapped by colonial oppression yet possessed of a special affinity with the land. That is a polite, politically correct myth. Most of central Australia's Aboriginal communities are in a cycle of apparently unstoppable decline.
The government hands them cash, cars clothing, and land confiscated from white farmers. They are not obliged to work, so they do not. Instead, the money is spent on lottery cards and alcohol. Education and health standards have plummeted, and mortality rates risen. They speak significantly less English than 30 years ago. Tuberculosis is now once again endemic in the Northern Territory. In the town of Finke, run by Aborigines, white workers are imported to run the petrol pump. Their black employers treat them with contempt. The parasitic white advisers whose policies have created this human disaster can suggest nothing except more handouts, and so the downward spiral continues.
This idiotic experiment now threatens to destroy not only the Aborigines but the white communities that live alongside them in the vast rural heart of the continent. Scratch the surface of a rural Australian today, and you will find race hatred against the Aborigines. Apparently mild and middle-class people will suddenly come out with astonishing racist remarks. (7)
Life in the outback is very hard. Summer temperatures in the fifties Celsius are common, and seven-year droughts unsurprising. Pick up a spanner in the sun, and you will burn your hand. The men and women who manage to scratch a living in this environment are now obliged to watch as their taxes go to pay for floodlit basket-ball courts for their idle, dissipated, Aboriginal neighbours.
At the same time, many farms have been confiscated from white families who have owned them for a century or more, and handed over to Aboriginal groups who have managed to demonstrate any link, however tenuous, with the land. One farmer explained to me over the inevitable can of cold Fosters on his porch, 'I used to let them roam over my land, but now I don't dare. They might claim to find a so-called sacred site, and then my family would be thrown off.'(8)
Left-wing politicians deny all this, but when I asked Don Dunstan, the former Labour prime minister of South Australia, to suggest an Aboriginal community somewhere on the continent that would prove me wrong, he was unable to think of a single suggestion. (9)
This sorry situation explains one half of Mrs Hanson's appeal. Economic insecurity amongst the unskilled, white working class accounts for the rest. As in every advanced Western country, this group, particularly the men, are increasingly redundant in the labour market. Jobs are going to more highly trained immigrants from other Asian countries.(10) This is, however, the less worrying half of the Hanson ticket. Although it is possible to find very good Asian cooking in Sydney restaurants, Australia is still a European country.
Some large cities, like Adelaide, have no significant Asian population at all. Only Darwin, on the north coast and nearer Indonesia than Sydney, is a true racial entrepot.
Mrs Hanson's anti-immigration rhetoric works because of the deeper racial prejudice against Aborigines.(11)
All is not lost. So far, Mrs Hanson's electoral appeal is concentrated in her famously redncck home state of Queensland. In central Australia, a more typical reaction came from a senior administrator in the legendary flying doctor service, who told me, 'I agree with some of what she says, but I can't stand the woman herself.' Then there is the hope that John Howard's lacklustre government will take notice of this vote and accelerate its so far ineffectual attempts to stop featherbedding the Aborigines.
It wouldn't be difficult. They could start by insisting that, instead of money for nothing, they would be paid only when they worked. Their first community project could be picking up all the beer cans that now desecrate the landscape they are supposed to hold so sacred.
Edward Heathcoat Amory writes on which politicians are really to blame for the present plight of the first Australians The following are my comments on the above article;- David Hughes-Jones.
The REAL REASON politicians of both LEFT & RIGHT in Australia are really frightened is that for the first time since 1948 the Voters in this country ( the previously Silent Majority) are making their voices heard and having an opportunity to kick out of office all the time-servers in Parliament & the Senate and replace them with people who will sort out rubbish which Australia has been lumbered with these past 50 years. Neither the Members on the Left or Right despite all their rhetoric and crocodile tears for the welfare of aborigines honestly give a damm - their main interest is hanging on to their Seats & Perks such as Superannuation etc. (U.K.,U.S.A. & New Zealand all have similar problems for much the same reasons)
(3) Why is it that just about every journalist remarks on Pauline Hansons business occupation - "former fish & chip shop proprietor"?. This is just intellectual & social snobbery. Having an Arts Degree does not automaticaly mean that the posessor has a particularly high intelligence or even much common sense - it means that he or she has gone through the education"mill" and had a good memory.Neither does the Degree confer any higher status automaticaly in the social stakes although most recipients evidently believe it does!
This is curious because they evidently have forgotten that most of them obtained their "free" University Arts degrees and Journalistic Diplomas as a consequence of the taxation of ordinary "ill-educated, working class" people.
Without that assistance most of them would also have found themselves with the rest of the working people in "ordinary" occupations - even become "fish & chip shop owners" or further down the occupational scale. They should be gratefull rather than sneer at others lacking formal "higher" education.
(4) Mr Heathcote-Amory is I believe a former Conservative M.P. and would be horrified to be regarded as "Working Class". He evidently cannot help himself in trying to make political capital by "rubbishing" any Labor policies.( British or Australian). It should be said that most of the crappy legislation and stupid policies the past 30 years in Australia immitate the legislative & political lunacies developed in Britain and the U.S.A. during that period by people like him!. Australian Politicians are not noted for original political thinking and so often copy other nations ideas with unfortunate results.This displays a lack of confidence and stupifying idiocy.
(5) Half-caste children and all-white children were and still are made Wards of the State if the conditions under which they were living was judged as being prejudicial to their welfare. This is so in Britain,the U.S.A., as well as Australia.
Most of the half-caste aboriginal children went to good foster homes,learned to speak and write English, received nourishment mentaly as well as gastronomicaly and were given the same chances in education as "white" children. Many of these "stolen children" are among the biggest whingers and moaners,despite now receiving fat salaries running Government Funded Aboriginal Activist Organisations or Aboriginal Legal Aid firms or in academic positions at various Universities.
(6) Aborigines have been taught that they are "victims" and seldom show much appreciation for any assistance received.They "deserve" it is the attitude.This coupled with the general reluctance to do anything for themselves - rather rely entirely others, including the "feeds" from the State - really is so Un-Australian and a good part of the reason hard working Australians are so fed up at continualy derided for being "racist by the chardonay socialist do gooders and idiot church leaders.
Is it any wonder most Australians rejected and disassociated themselves with the so-called "SORRY DAY"!!
(7) It's not HATRED directed towards aborigines that Australians feel,its DISGUST and a feeling of ANGER directed at bloody politicians allowing matters to reach the present situation. The One Nation Party is not full of red-necked simpletons but full of ordinary citizens who are just sick of the present mess and injustices and want someone to stop the decline and rejuvenate the country with some basic common good sense!.
(8) This is true - and many Pastoralists think and act the same and for the same reasons.
(9) Don Dunstan would not be an orphan. He knows personaly of the debacle of Wardang Island.He and his Labour Government gave Wardang IslaND ( off the West Coast of York Peninsular) to the Aborigines complete with 35 foot Diesel Launch, Diesel Power Generators, Refrigeration Plant, and all the accoutrements of a fully developed Tourist/Holiday Operation.
This was to be an opportunity for aborigines to show that they were willing & capable of running their own business successfuly. Within a short time, the launch was at the bottom of the sea and all the other equipment was wrecked by lack of maintenance. To my knowledge the launch has never been recovered and the equipment is a total write-off.
Evidently despite the enormous goodwill shown by the State Government and the taxed citizens of South Australia ( who I might add were not asked if they approved of the expenditure) -the aborigines just were not interested in working or looking after the equipment given them.There are many other instances of similar situations ending in the same disasterous failure.
(10)What a lot of rubbish!.The vast majority of Asians are running restaurants, sweat-shops making garments etc or living off drug dealing and crime.A High percentage are on unemployment "Welfare" The fact that Asians have the highest unemployment rate in the country (Other than Aborigines) suggests that the unskilled Caucasian Australian working class are competing very well indeed. As for "Well educated Asians" these would either own businesses or be in professional positions; where do they present any "threat to working class unskilled" Australians!
(11) Most Australians have little contact with Aboriginals or for that matter Asians - they are all too busy with their own lives. The so-called prejudice against aboriginals derives not from "racist" attitudes but from a dislike of anti-social behaviour and attitudes COUPLED with the intense anger that one section of the citizenry is being advantaged unfairly. It is an ABORIGINAL problem - NOT a White Caucasian problem
This is a CULTURE problem pure and simple.If Asians or any Caucasian assimilates and become good citizens they are welcomed.Those who behave badly and do not should be told to leave. Why should Australia put up with them?. Instead, they are currently given tax payer funded Legal assistance to defeat our own Laws.!