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Canberra plans to ban alcohol and pornography on Aboriginal land to curb a "national emergency" in child abuse, Prime Minister John Howard has said. Any thoughts?
It;s pretty bad in australia, there's a huge divide between the Aborigines and white aussies. There was one case of an Aboriginal politician who had a seizure, and was left lying at a bus stop for hours as everybody thought she was "just another" drunk and passed out Aboriginal.
I think alcohol is one of thier main problems, simply because their culture isn't used to it.
NZ things are a lot better as the maoris are intrgrated a lot better into society, probably in part thanks to getting their permission to use the land when we went over, rather than just taking it.
The Aboriginals that live in the outback have a lot of autonomy, basically they have tribal law. The perception seems to be that some of the tribal Aborigines have sort of pushed the boundaries of this - so you have some Aborigines who are good mates with the tribal elders who go relatively unpunished (there was a case recently where a 50 year old guy raped his 12 year old niece and was pretty much let off under the tribal law).
Alcohol isn't part of traditional tribal culture, so it probably doesn't help things. For historical reasons Aborigines see it as part of being granted freedom/citizenship to be allowed to drink (when they were considered Australian fauna they weren't allowed to drink alcohol, as soon as they were made Australian citizens they were allowed to drink). So they drink heavily and get blind drunk and probably don't have a lot of social controls or boundaries on that.
I'd say that a few have done these bad things and got away with it, so the behaviours have become sort of normalised...
In the very sgort term (i.e. most politicians political careers) these options are easier & cheaper than tackling the root cause.
the root of the problem is huge though. White people invading the country and making it their own, and a huge desolate difficult to police country. I don't pretend to understand all the problems, but at least they aren't ignoring it.
It's a temporary ban while they check out the issues. A lot of Aboriginal communities with tribal law are "dry" communities anyway, they've banned it themselves, with varying degrees of success.
