THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Indigenous voice ‘a precondition’ for Closing the Gap: Anthony Albanese

Indigenous voice ‘a precondition’ for Closing the Gap: Anthony Albanese

Wotta lotta ... It's fine talk but NOTHING will close the gap. Talk certainly won't. Many governments both State and Federal have tried everything conceivable to equalize black and white living standards but the gaps remain. A bigger police prsesence in Aboriginal communities to protect the women and children would help but that is about all

A voice to parliament is a “precondition” for making Aboriginal communities safer and closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, Anthony Albanese says.

After revealing at the weekend his plans for a simple “yes or no” referendum on constitutional enshrinement, the Prime Minister told The Australian a voice would bring an even greater focus to the issues of violence, life expectancy, education and health affecting Indigenous people.

It is the strongest argument Mr Albanese has made to date on the practical need for a voice to improve the wellbeing and safety of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, as critics of the proposal accuse it of being “symbolism.”

One of the nation’s foremost Aboriginal leaders, June Oscar, has backed the Prime Minister and sees the voice to parliament as an issue that women can champion for the sake of their children.

Speaking after the Garma Festival on Sunday, Mr Albanese said he understood concerns that practical outcomes for Aboriginal communities would come second to the voice, but said the referendum was “far from being an either-or proposition.”

“I believe that a voice to parliament and lifting up the status and respect of First Nations communities is a precondition for getting better practical outcomes and closing the gap in all areas,” Mr Albanese told The Australian on Sunday.

“I understand that people have been let down by promises, and that people want more than just symbolism for its own sake.

“There are legitimate concerns about practical reconciliation, and about the need to close the gap whether it be on life expectancy, educational outcomes, living standards, health outcomes – they all need addressing.

“But there will be a greater focus on them when there is a voice to the parliament that has to be listened to.”

A proposed model for the voice overseen by Indigenous academics Marcia Langton and Tom Calma has 24 members, 12 male and 12 female, including at least five people from remote communities.

Dr Oscar said the voice was a chance for Aboriginal women, the backbone of their communities, to “come to the fore”. She hoped non-Indigenous women would help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in the yes campaign.

Dr Oscar is a Bunuba woman who led a long battle with bureaucracy to restrict alcohol in the Fitzroy Valley in the far north of Western Australia. She and other Aboriginal women took action in response to alcohol-fuelled violence and record numbers of Aboriginal suicides.

When the last bottle shop in the valley was shut down in 2009, Dr Oscar and other Aboriginal women helped researchers uncover one of the world’s highest rates of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder – permanent brain damage – among local children.

“Everything that we have been able to achieve has been a fight,” Dr Oscar said. “We can’t and we should not have to keep fighting because the fight is exhausting, and it discourages good people from getting involved. It is a struggle to get our issues listened to and acted on – you are dealing with layers and layers of bureaucracy.

“Will the voice provide relief from the fight? If it genuinely engages Aboriginal people in the design of it, I believe it will.”

Dr Oscar said she had more views in common than differences with senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who has indicated she may campaign for a no vote in the referendum. The Coalition parliamentarian from Alice Springs has criticised the voice as symbolism and urged Labor to prioritise the reduction of family violence in Aboriginal communities.

“Our starting points might be different but we want the same things,” Dr Oscar said on Sunday.

Opposition spokesman on Indigenous affairs Julian Leeser supports an enshrined voice and believes its chances of succeeding are higher if a model is settled before a referendum. He has urged Labor to provide more detail soon.

On Sunday, Mr Albanese said he wanted the design of the voice “to be owned by the whole of parliament … There will be more detail in the discussion that will take place to pass the proposal for a referendum to take place.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/indigenous-coice-a-precondition-for-closing-the-gap-anthony-alabanese/news-story/9b76b705057de2fafd6af0dc40d7836a

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Indigenous voice ‘a precondition’ for Closing the Gap: Anthony Albanese

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