A long overdue statement from Marcia Langton about the sabotage of Aboriginal advancement by trendies, lefties and Greens on the back of four decades of disastrous post-Whitlam policies.
Strong local leaders have worked hard to bring economic development to indigenous communities where welfare has turned residents into perpetual mendicants reliant on the state. Time and again, native title groups have spent years getting an agreement with a resource company over the line, negotiating income streams that might shift indigenous people from the margins to the centre of regional economic development in return for land access, only for a ragtag team of ‘wilderness’ campaigners to turn up with an entourage of disaffected Aboriginal protesters to stop development at the eleventh hour.
While the federal Labor government likes to feign shock at the more flaky antics of its coalition partner, Aboriginal people have known for years that the Greens are no good in bed. Their notions of economic development in remote Australia, which chiefly involve employing Aboriginal people as wilderness caretakers, are inspired by children’s books and anarchist tracts. As I’ve been saying for 20 years, this concept of wilderness is nothing but a new incarnation of terra nullius. With luck, the NT election represents a tipping point. The time of dismissing Aboriginal aspirations for economic development is over.
h/t Tim Blair
Long overdue is an understatement. It is a total disgrace, a shameful omission and further proof, if it were needed, that the left chatterati and the msm have conspired to lie about what is in the interests of aboriginal people. It is hard love they require, and nothing less will work.
The apology I am waiting for is the one to all those whose names have been besmirched in bulk by the demonisation of former generations, those who saved many aboriginals rather than stole them.
Blogstrop
8 Oct 12 at 7:01 am
Rafe-I have been researching the Bioregionalism agenda that is UN driven and commenced fairly shortly after the Stockholm Human Environment Conference in 1972. Part of its template beyond the ecology where humans are just another species and should no longer have Axemaker Minds capable of dominating nature is the notorious Agenda 21. The documents are quite specific in their reverence for returning to aboriginal or Native American or Miconesian cultures, for example.
It’s a ludicrous vision but very real and very active in the Left’s continued pursuit of Transformation and political and economic and individual control.
Robin
8 Oct 12 at 7:13 am
I hope they find an at-least half decent Aboriginal candidate who would be a credit to the Parliament and run him or her against the current minister for Aboriginal Affairs. The resulting annihilation would be, as Paul Keating once said, “The sweetest victory of all.”
perturbed
8 Oct 12 at 7:20 am
Yes its a tried tactic by the greens to abuse any legitimate concerns by indigenous groups for development. Jabiluka is the most obvious case, but the tactic has been tried many times – Olympic Dam and now James Price.
That the greens have no qualms about using some of the legitimate concerns that indigenous groups have to try and disrupt any particular development, irrespective of the real desires of indigenous australians, (which may include development under the right conditions) just shows the true nature of the greens – unprincipled extremist zealots.
Pete
8 Oct 12 at 7:51 am
Long overdue indeed.
WELL WHAT IF YOU TOLD US THAT YEARS AGO?
HOW COME YOU ONLY SPOKE UP AFTER OTHER PEOPLE MADE THE HARD YARDS?
Poor Old Rafe
8 Oct 12 at 7:52 am
It’s all about spotting the change in the social mood and getting on the new bandwagon, Rafe,
Gab
8 Oct 12 at 8:03 am
The communists were onto Aboriginal issues before WW2, it might have looked like a principled concern because it was not a bandwagon then but you know what happens when the communists got involved in things.
Poor Old Rafe
8 Oct 12 at 8:10 am
A little slow in coming.Marcia and others did not protest when “Green” politics took over swathes of land designated Aboriginal Land under the NT Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976.
Nor did they resist the interference of so called
“Environmental” groups such as ACF,FOE,WWF who were misdirecting development policy on Aboriginal Land.
Just hope Langton and her allies are not too late and receive full backing from the Federal Government in their move to develope major resource projects to the benefit of ALL Australians.
gabrianga
8 Oct 12 at 8:25 am
Greens – no good in bed and no good out of it either.
A new concept of Terra Nullius – that one is being finesssed in Tasmania right now, where there are effectively no traditional aboriginal people left to complain (there are some few people who identify as aboriginal, but that is not the issue).
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
8 Oct 12 at 8:31 am
Inside of the Greens ecological social Darwinism; Aboriginal people, as all people, have the equivalent value of a microscopic marine organism or virus because nature if more important than people.
Lysander Spooner
8 Oct 12 at 9:52 am
Hey Robin
To your knowledge, does the primitivist zeal of the UN-NGO-Luvvie Agenda 21 types extend to living off-the-grid in wattle and daub huts themselves ?
Or is that just a ‘feature’ planned for the rest of us, while they busily circle the globe attending conferences at five star resorts planning the retreat of industrial civilisation ?
Myrrdin Seren
8 Oct 12 at 10:27 am
A nice discussion of green voting demographics is at http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2012/09/the-greens-versus-labor-geographic-and-educational-dimensions.html
• Clearly demonstrated is the big difference between the three safe Labor Melbourne electorates with huge Green votes, Melbourne, Batman and Wills, and the three equally safe Labor seats with low Green support, Lalor, Gorton and Scullin.
• The three outer suburban seats are low in University educated residents and low in Green support, while the inner-city electorates lie in the opposite corner, high in both Green support and proportion university educated residents.
Goes on to discuss “Society and Electoral Behaviour in Australia”, published in 1978 but largely written before the 1977 election by future Liberal cabinet minister Dr David Kemp
Kemp predicted that the new class of university educated electors were less attracted to the parties of the established order, the Liberal and National Parties. Kemp speculated on how the knowledge elite could be attracted to new third parties that in future could change politics by gaining the balance of power in the Senate.
Green goes on to note that the problem for the Labor Party is that in trying to hold on to its inner city seats, it can often alienate its outer suburban base. The number of seats the Greens have any realistic chance of winning has always been small. The number of outer suburban seats that Labor could lose to the Coalition is much greater.
Jim Rose
8 Oct 12 at 4:39 pm