I see you’re having a bit of trouble with impulse control today….I doubt that when the constitution was framed, the Founding F-wits were looking ahead to a day when a governemnt would decide that a big, paternalistic military occupation would be needed for Aboriginal welfare in the Northern Territory.

“Founding F-wits” is rich. I can see that I am not the only one “having trouble with impulse control today”. Your condescending epithet shows the typical progressive conceit of hindsight. Let Barton, Parkes and Deakin be as racist as you like. The “Founding F-wits” only founded the most successful of the 20thC’s new nations. Whereas Left-liberals achieved miserable failure in their own pet project.

Although you have made a true, if unintentionally ironic, point about the their lack of foresight. It would have stretched the powers of the bleakist and most absurdist late 19thC satirist, never mind the framers of the Constitution, to foretell the farce of ATSIC never mind the horrors of NT remote indigenous communities.

Left-liberals spent all those years denouncing the awfulness of the Australian federation establishment treatment of Aboriginals. But when the nice post-sixties generation took the reigns in the seventies they managed to pull of an almost impossible feat, to actually make out-back Aboriginal social pathologies even worse. Who is the “F-wit” now?

Gummo Trotsky said:

Section 127 of the Constitution – which was removed by the 1967 referendum – gives a very clear indication of where Aboriginal people fitted into the Federation:

I would be the first to acknowledge that the foundational error of our federalists was the failure to grant full civil rights to Aboriginals. It flows from my modernist, rather than post-modernist, construction of rights. As I pointed out on this blog a couple of years back:

Ive never denied that Aboriginals had plenty of legitimate grievances right up till and well past the 1967 emancipation.

My own view, FWIW, is that the FF’s should have granted native Australians full citizenship rights from the moment of Federation. This was more or less the view of the more enlightened US Founding Fathers (eg Washington) in regard to native Americans.

My view flows from the common sense functional school of cultural conservatives, such as Burke, de Toqueville, Weber Durkheim etc. It would have been much better to have eased into native Australians into modernity in the more sensible early years of the 20thC, under Queen Victoria, rather than getting thrown into post-modernity during the later years of the 20thC (when Left-liberals were more likely to honour Queen Pricilla). Their belated emancipation amplified culture shock with predictable results for social pathology.

Gummo Trotsky said:

You’ve hardly made a cogent case for the inclusion of a race power in the Constitution…Section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution could be struck out without in any way diminishing the power of the Commonwealth.

I’ll grant you that making “a cogent case for the race power” is a tricky for me, given my modernist construction of universal civil rights. But the High Court has managed to pull off the trick (Justice Murphy and Kirby, no less) so I perhaps I can do it. They found that the “race power” is an institutional ratchet, which cannot reduce the civil status of a given race within the Commonwealths jurisdiction but can and should only be used to improve its conditions .

It should not allow the Commonwealth to take away fundamental civil rights to vote, associate, express opinons and generally participate as full citizens in Australian society. The founders wronged the Aboriginals in this respect, which oversight has been corrected by the 1967 referendum.

But it should give the Commonwealth the power to make special administrative arrangements for the several races entitlements. So long as these are done for the benefit of the specified race.

My reading of the legal basis of the Intervention is that it satisfies the High Courts construction of the race power. Certainly no one has managed to mount a plausible challenge to it through a superior legal venue.

Nor is it true that the race power “could be struck out without in any way diminishing the power of the Commonwealth”. The Equal Opportunity Act is a federal act which would have ham-strung the Commonwealth’s power to Intervene even though it has jurisdiction in the NT. You can bet that the  myriad of political interest groups threatened by the Intervention would have mounted a High Court action, certainly to restore the pernicious permit system if they thought it would get through. But S 51 (xxvi) barred the way. Tough luck for child molesters and wife bashers, but there you go.

Gummo Trotsky said:

The race power in the Constitution is a nasty relic of a nasty era….The reason there’s a specific race power in the Constitution is that the Founding F-wits believed, like you, that race is real and politically significant. They were only half right – race is politically significant – but only because people continue to believe in it and make it a political issue. When you stop believing in it, it goes away – its place is taken by genetic and cultural variation.

Now we are going from ideology to anthropology where the ground under your feet is even shakier. Although characteristically you do not seem to realise it.

I see no reason for those in the post-modern era to pat themselves on the back for allegedly transcending the “nasty relic of nasty era”. The price of such race blindness in the case of Native Australians was letting child abusers go on a rampage for decades on the grounds that it would be politically incorrect and culturally insensitive to intervene. Until Howard – “nasty relic of a nasty era”! – decided to impose adult supervision.

Race is real because it can be predicted by biological science using DNA. The notion that “race goes away when people stop believing in it” deserves to go down in the annals of post-modern fairy tales. You have no business castigating ecological denialism in life science when you indulge in biological denialism in human science.

Race unrealism was comprehensively refuted by the HGP which classifies human species under a five races that would have been immediately recognized by the FF’s. Not to mention the countless forensic DNA analyses done over the past generation which somehow manage to determine racial and sexual identity.

And because race is biologically real it is sociologically relevant, as anyone with ‘lyin eyes to see can say.  That makes it politically significant, for better and for worse. Whats more as nations globalise with other nations and diversify their own nations the odds are that race is going to become more, not less, politically significant. Note the current political trend in the EU.

The trouble with Left-liberals is that they do not recognise their true political saviours. Howard chased One Nation of the political stage with sound policy and savvy politics. Do you think that parotting “dog whistle” and chanting “race is not real” will make the National Front and Tea Parties go away?

I would have thought simple justice required an acknowledgement to the descendants of the dispossessed that our lifestyles depend on the fact that our ancestors acquired our land unfairly. This single fact totally destroys despisis’s contention that Aborigines are just another ethnic group. It also justifies and IMHO compels continuing programs to reverse the harm that this unfair confiscation of land has done to Aborigines, even at considerable cost and inconvenience to non-indigenous Australians.

The root cause of attitudes like those expressed by desipis and others seems to me to be an inability (or a refusal) to grasp the enormity of the crime committed against indigenous people, of which they are amongst the beneficiaries. The “We’re all Australians now so let’s just move forward together” crap is nauseating and reflects a grotesque absence of moral values. Pretty much sums up most of the Howard bunch, I guess, who clearly continue to dominate conservative politics.

Grow up you peevish little bugger.

Obviously we’ll have to agree to disagree,

Probably for the best, as our disagreements seem to be ideological and are unlikely to be resolved through rational arguments. You can continue to view historical context as a justification for racist polices, and I will continue to believe reconciliation involves us all moving forward as genuine equals with mutual respect.

What is lacking here is any real appreciation of the distinctiveness of Aboriginal relationship to country. They sing country, dance country, paint it and own it in ways that non-indigenous Australians don’t and never can.

Exactly, that’s what I was trying to get at at #254, and I suggested (knowing it seemed unlikely ever to happen) that Desipis do the reading of what Aboriginal people have said about it because the only other thing I could think of was to draw an analogy with various white experiences of attachment to land(scape) (including my own) that are about identity and feeling, and have nothing to do with property-holding. But that’s absolutely not on either — there is no equivalence.

The real problem here is not so much the lack of understanding of what the issues are, more the absence of desire to acquire any. I dunno why we’re all knocking ourselves out trying to explain it.

Thanks to all on this thread for a civil and constructive discussion and an absence of hysterical denunciation. I think that the anti-ceremony contributors have thrown everything they have against the wall, and nothing has stuck. Obviously we’ll have to agree to disagree, since the anti-ceremony crowd hold as dogma that Welcome ceremonies and acknowledgement of country are ‘special treatment’. All the propositions they have advanced in support of that view have been roundly debunked, but hey, it’s dogma, so it won’t be shifted.

Fortunately, that crowd have lost hold of the political and instrumental means to impose their dogma on Aboriginal people. We must guard against a resurgence of course, and enacting and participating in Welcome and acknowledgment ceremonies as a cultural practice on a continual basis is perhaps the most appropriate and historically just means of doing so.