Second wave of "stolen generations" in WA (?)

This complaint is thoroughly racist.  Aboriginal advocates are complaining that black kids should not be raised by white foster parents, even though the white carers would be much safer for the child.  Why the emphasis on race?  I would have thought that a kind heart would be the chief qualification in a carer.

And the white woman below claims to be an Aborigine, Why bother?  Why is her race so important that she had to make an absurd claim to support it? Calling white black is something that was once taken as a paradigm of craziness but in Australia it actually happens

And because the rate of child removal from Aborigines is high that is presented as unreasonable.  Why is it not seen as white social workers doing a good job?  To the city ignoramuses who think that Aborigines are just like us only browner, the high rate of child protections must seem unreasonable.  But Aborigines are NOT just like us only browner.  Anybody who has seen Aborigines in action knows how hard Aboriginal males are on women and children -- particularly when they are drunk, which they often are.

The high rate of imprisonment of Aborigines and the high rate at which their children are taken away is just what one would expect of ANYONE who behaves as Aborigines do.  Their race should not be a consideration.


In Ann Oakley’s family, child removal runs four generations deep. Like her mother and grandmother, Oakley, 52, was taken away as a small child and placed in state care.



So when Oakley says an epidemic of Aboriginal child removal still occurs in Western Australia, she speaks from experience. Although she raised her own four children, the fourth “removed” generation is that of her extended family; 11 were removed by the state from their parents. Two of them now live with her, Aaron, under ten, and teenage Nathan, but she has fostered more than 40 other mainly Aboriginal children.

Oakley never met her mother again, and only connected with brothers and sisters when she went in search of them. “I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere, I turned to drink and I habitually ended up in jail for short stints.”

“There were 10,000 Aboriginal children across Australia who lost their identities when they were removed,” she says of an earlier era of formal child removals. “A lot of people my age have not reconnected with family, they’ve suicided or died because of alcohol or drug-related illnesses. They’ve lived what I’ve lived through and not survived.”

Oakley did survive and is now a childcare advocate. She founded Kinship Connections in 2013 to trace family members for Aboriginal children in care to help them be placed close to family and kin. Ironically, she set it up with the compensation payout she received from the WA government for being an abused member of the Stolen Generations.

Western Australia already has the nation’s highest rate of Aboriginal children in care, but Oakley believes a deepening crisis looms. She is not alone. In September, Child Protection Minister Andrea Mitchell admitted it was “a pressing issue” that more than half of all 4660 children held in state care — or 52 per cent — are Aboriginal. The national rate is 35 per cent.

The WA figure is shocking and experts predict it is likely to rise. This week the Department for Child Protection and Family Support will announce the statewide rollout of new intensive family support teams “to divert vulnerable families away from the child protection system and prevent their children entering state care”.

But the WA authority is also planning to enforce permanent placement of children, meaning more children are likely to be removed from their Aboriginal parents for their entire childhoods. The policy will permit a child to be transferred permanently out of their parents’ hands if their birth parents cannot demonstrate within two years — less if the child is under two — that they are fit to raise their child.

“Every effort is made to return children home to their parents, but when this is not possible it is proposed that an application to the court for a more permanent order will need to be made within two years of a child entering care,” says DCP director-general Emma White.

“Local and international research shows that children have better life outcomes if a permanent decision is made about their future in less than two years of entering care.”

But Oakley and a dozen Aboriginal leaders working in welfare believe Western Australia is entering a new era of Stolen Generation children, several decades after that painful policy ended. They formed the WA Aboriginal Child Protection Council to register their alarm that — even inadvertently — “we’re going back to the old assimilation policy but just with different names”.

Evidence that a high proportion of Aboriginal children are taken from birth parents is not hard to find. Across Western Australia, 63.8 per cent of all newborn babies removed last year were Aboriginal. Often the mother was herself removed as a child or already has a child in departmental care. Under Section 33 of the Community and Children’s Services Act, such pregnant women are “red-flagged” as vulnerable to having their unborn child removed.

Indigenous human rights lawyer Hannah McGlade says a number of children from her own extended family are in care at any given time, often placed with non-Aboriginal carers.

“It’s a sick cycle,” says McGlade, who herself spent time in a children’s home and now acts as a respite carer for two children in order to keep them in contact with family.

“We’re like an island away from the rest of Australia.”

Aboriginal child protection worker Donna Kickett has never forgotten the sight that confronted her on her first day of work in 2004 when she was sent to King Edward Memorial Hospital to remove a newborn Aboriginal baby.

“I walked in and the mother was handcuffed to the bed. I asked, ‘What has she done?’ I discovered later that this was this woman’s 10th child and they had all been removed because of the woman’s drug issues.”

Six years later, Kickett met the oldest of the woman’s 10 children with his aunt. “The aunt said something that made me realise she thought the boy had only four siblings. I had to tell her there were nine.” She suspects the boy was never put in touch with his other brothers and sisters.

“This is the lost generation,” says Kickett, who now runs a mentoring program for Aboriginal teenagers. “How come we don’t do what’s happening in Victoria, where every Aboriginal child in care is being transferred to an Aboriginal-controlled organisation?”

Oakley, Kickett and McGlade have, like DCP, acted on a belief that no child should remain in an unsafe setting. But they point to the section of the Aboriginal Child Placement principle that says a child should be placed where possible with an Aboriginal family.

Yet only one Aboriginal-controlled agency exists in Western Australia among 29 external contracting agencies that DCP funds to place children — with mainly white carers.

The women note that DCP has 19 senior Aboriginal staff across the state but only three are involved in a child removal caseload in which 53 per cent are Aboriginal children. Even the review panel to decide on any dispute over a child’s removal has no Aboriginal people on it.

“In the last 18 months, I have found myself advocating for mothers and grandmothers whose children have been taken into care,” says Kickett. “It’s been hugely difficult trying to advocate for these families.

“And no legal service will support these families because they say they don’t have the resources to fight the system.”

Kickett is WA chair of the national child welfare lobby group Family Matters, which last month took their case to Canberra “to eliminate the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care by 2040, or within a generation”.

McGlade points to Victoria where an Aboriginal Children’s Commissioner has been appointed. “We have the highest level of removal in Australia but the lowest level of consultation with Aboriginal people.”

Oakley has taken matters into her own hands. Having become an alcoholic at 15 because she felt so alone, she has gone on to help several of foster kids to find and reconnect them with their relatives.

While she endorses DCP’s aim to place children permanently in “safe” homes, she says insufficient account is taken of the long-term trauma for children cut off from kin and the obstacles faced by mothers who’ve lost children. Through Kinship Connections, she traces a wide network of Aboriginal family members with the ability to care for a child, often when Child Protection has insisted none exists.

In a pilot program, Oakley asked the department to refer cases to her. She got only nine referrals during the year, but traced 151 lost family members for eight out of the nine children.

The department ended up placing only one child with their identified relative.

“I sit on foster panels and many of the carers getting approved now are looking for permanent placement,” says Oakley. “I worry that they might not be thinking of reunification for those children — they may never go home.”

Kickett says she was asked recently to help a grandmother who wanted to get custody of her three-year-old grandson after he had been placed in eight different homes in his short life.

DCP staff are told to draw up a “genogram” to identify a child in care’s kinship circle, but Kickett says they’re often limited and don’t involve extensive consultation with family. “But who knows better who is family than the family?”

Mike Clare, former head of Social Work at the University of Western Australia, who sits on the Kinship Connections board, says the trend is concerning. “The model of family placement that Ann is trying to develop is unique and it has huge potential,” he says.

“It comes from an American model of employing detectives to try to find adoption placements for Afro-American kids with disconnected members of their families.

“These family members were unlikely to be known to the child so the scope for weekend placement through to permanent placement with family members is extraordinary.

“There’s potential for shared family care, rather than living with a stranger in what is an additional out-of-home care option.”

Oakley says she witnesses the damage of child separation, past and present, almost every day.

Recently, like a mirror on her own past, she helped a teenage girl who was fostered out and was now suicidal and desperate to find her own “mob”.

“We found her father, aunties and uncles,” Oakley says. “It turned out her dad had grown up on a mission and he’d never seen his own mum and dad

SOURCE






The classroom is for teaching, not indoctrination

One would have expected the article below to come from a conservative but it is from Karen Brooks, an active Lefty. Is the Trump effect making the Left more cautious?

From today “Teachers for Refugees”, a movement organised by Melbournian Lucy Honan, plan to wear T-shirts to work inscribed with slogans such as “Close the Camps, Bring Them Here” in certain Victorian schools.

They also intend to hold informal discussions with their students about Australia’s shabby treatment of refugees.

While there’s no doubt many Australians who support these sentiments, school is not the place for teachers to propagate personal political opinions.

Queensland teachers have been cautioned not to follow suit and all teachers have been told wearing a piece of politicised clothing could be in breach of their code of conduct.

Honan says those involved are committed to raising awareness of the conditions in offshore detention centres and aligning themselves with refugees, and has accused those admonishing teachers of “bullying”.

I’m disappointed the word “bullying” is being deployed to staunch criticism of what is, frankly, an act that defies both common sense and completely undermines the role and credibility of teachers — who already cop so much (unfair) flack.

The classroom is for teaching, not indoctrination. Even if it’s simply in the form of a slogan on cloth. Words, as we know, are powerful and influential. When it comes to young minds, so is the person in the T-shirt.

Let me make something very clear. Like many Australians, I’m completely sympathetic to the teachers’ views. I abhor our treatment of refugees and my heart aches for children in detention centres.

As any regular reader of this column knows, I’m passionately committed to a range of politically fraught issues. But do I want teachers wearing catchphrases addressing these issues to school? Absolutely not.

Just as I wouldn’t want them wearing shirts shouting: “Stop the boats” or, as Channel 10’s The Project suggested, “Kids deserve a mum and dad”, or anti-abortion mantras.

And herein lies part of the problem. If teachers wanting to instigate change and raise awareness about the atrocious plight of refugees start bringing their opinions so overtly into the classroom, where does it end?

What if the political views of the parents, kids, let alone other colleagues, don’t align with theirs? Will a student speak up? An anxious parent?

Appearing on The Project, Honan argued, “It’s definitely a teacher’s job to stand up to the abuse that’s happening in offshore detention; we’re mandatory reporters...”

No, you’re not. You must report suspected abuse of kids in your direct care but expressing your politics in such an overt way by wearing your heart on your sleeve isn’t “reporting”. It’s emphasising a specific political position. Which is your prerogative — in your private life.

It’s also fine for teachers to share their views with students — of course they should — but in context with others’ and invite students to offer theirs. The classroom isn’t a politically neutral space. The government intervenes in curriculum — what can and cannot be taught; it doles out funding, among other measures. Most subjects have political currency — some more than others, and teachers would be doing students a huge disservice if they didn’t encourage the sharing of distinctive facts and alternate viewpoints in order to help shape opinions.

However, there are so many ways of imparting knowledge, teaching respect for diversity (cultural, religious, racial, ecological, economic, sexual), reasoning how compassion and tolerance are worthy emotions and tools for change, and about consequences for inaction, fascism, wilful ignorance etc.

Teaching great literature, world history, geography, global politics, about war and its aftermath, genocide, science, deforestation, industrialisation and encouraging students to critically think, weigh the pros and cons of a debate and offer a range of perspectives on issues, allows them to form their own conclusions.

These teachers claim they’re professional when approaching the politically sensitive topic of asylum seekers and refugees, offering a range of sources. But, when they wear one standpoint over their hearts, then they privilege this above any others and undermine the appearance of heterogeneity.

We want our kids to make up their own minds (and they do) by being informed, stimulated, and challenged, not by having their often-beloved teachers “recruit” them to political causes.

School is about broadening young minds, not turning them into mini-activists. (Though, if that’s the outcome of a whole education, then so be it.)

With Australian students’ recent drop in global education rankings, this teacher-led crusade, as well-intentioned as it is, could not have come at a worse time.

These privately held, fervent political views reflect a personal humanitarianism to which many of us subscribe. But these should not be used by teachers exploiting their trusted position to promote political crusading or to use our kids as fodder in an ongoing ideological warfare.

This merely provides those who look to denigrate and blame teachers for every social ill with solid ammunition

SOURCE





West proves not all cultures are equal

A defence of Western exceptionalism from Jennifer Oriel

Long after the West has defeated Islamic State, the jihadist threat will remain.

For the past 40 years, Western immigration policy has been based on multicultural ideology.

Its consequence is clear: Islamism has become a Western condition. Successive governments have diluted Western values to the point where they are no longer taught in schools. The result is a population unschooled in the ­genius of our civilisation whose youth cannot understand why it is worth defending.

Multicultural ideology must give way to a renaissance of Western civilisation in which Australian exceptionalism is celebrated and Islamism is sent packing.

Multiculturalism is not merely the acceptance of diverse cultures, or open society. It is the a priori belief that cultural diversity has a net positive effect on the West, coupled with a double standard that excuses lslamic and communist states from embracing it.

Thus, Western nations must open their borders while Islamic and communist states remain closed. The West must accept the myth that all cultures are equal while Islamic and communist states celebrate their unique contribution to world history. Under multicultural ideology, the greatest civilisation of the world, Western civilisation, is held in contempt while theocratic throwbacks and communist barbarism are extolled.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al- Hussein, regularly frames the West as xenophobic and racist. In a recent speech, he decried xenophobia and religious hatred. But he did not address the Chinese government’s persecution of Christians, or the governing Islamist regime in Gaza, Hamas, for hatred of Jews. Rather, he took aim at the West, saying: “My recent missions to Western Europe and North America have included discussions of increasingly worrying levels of incitement to racial or religious hatred and violence, whether against migrants or racial and religious groups. Discrimination, and the potential for mob violence, is being stoked by political leaders for their personal benefit.”

Western governments should explain why they continue to send taxpayers’ money to the UN when it has become an organisation expressly devoted to defending the interests of Islamist and communist regimes against the free world.

The growing hatred of Western culture goes unremarked by politicians whose populism is firmly rooted in political correctness. No major political party has calculated the cost of multicultural ideology to Western society. Instead, they extol it as a net benefit without tendering empirical evidence. When politicians claim truth without substantive supporting evidence, ideology is at play. It may be that multiculturalism is a net benefit to the West. If so, why has the evidence been withheld? Without it, minor parties can contend that multiculturalism is a net negative for the West and appear credible.

In the absence of empirical proof that multicultural ideology is beneficial, politicians such as Pauline Hanson, Donald Trump, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen seek to curb Muslim immigration and deport those who disrespect Western values. Hanson plans to push for a burka ban in the new year. The policy has international precedent as Dutch politicians voted recently to ban the burka in some public places. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also has proposed a burka ban, but it is reasonable to question her motives ahead of the 2017 election. In a state election held in September, Merkel’s party polled below nationalist and anti-Islam party Alternative for Germany. She has driven porous border policy and repeatedly castigated European heads of state who defend their sovereign borders, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Her call for a burka ban is thus viewed by some as blatant political opportunism.

Malcolm Turnbull addressed the issue indirectly by citing poor border controls in Europe as the cause of the problem. However, as with so many issues concerning political Islam in Australia, the question of a burka ban is indivisible from the defence of Western values.

One such value is the universal application of law that requires the equal treatment of all citizens. If Australians are expected to not wear a balaclava in banks, courts or Parliament House, why are some citizens permitted to cover their faces in a burka or niqab? Double standards and preferential treatment of state-anointed minorities is fuelling widespread, and rational, resentment in the West.

Consider retelling the events of the past week to an Anzac just returned from war. We would tell him that a Muslim married to a terrorist recruiter refused to stand in court because she wanted to be judged by Allah. Muslims in Sydney and Melbourne were charged with preparing a terrorist act against Australians. In France, several people were arrested for plotting jihadist attacks. News broke that 1750 foot soldiers of a genocidal Islamic army had entered Europe without resistance from Western armies. As in Australia, many jihadists entered as refugees and lived on taxpayer-funded welfare under a program called multiculturalism.

In the same week, a German politician called Angela Merkel, who ushered Islamists into the West by enforcing open borders, was lauded by a respected magazine called The Economist as “the last leader of stature to defend the West’s values”. Yet men from Islamic countries who allegedly entered Germany under Merkel’s open-border policy were arrested for sexual assault, including the rape and murder of a teenage girl. Asylum-seekers and refugees had assaulted women and children across Europe. Less than a year before, on New Year’s Eve, Merkel’s asylum-seekers had attacked women and girls en masse.

We would tell the Anzac that Britain attempted to acknowledge the negative impact of its undiscriminating approach to immigration. A review recommended a core school curriculum to promote “British laws, history and values” and a proposal that immigrants sign an oath of allegiance to British values. But secularism, private property and Christianity were absent from the principle list and as such, it wasn’t very British at all.

There were few Anzacs left to see what the West has become. I suppose that’s a kind of mercy. We have dishonoured the millions of soldiers who laid down their lives in the 20th century fighting for our freedom and the future of Western civilisation. We should hang our heads in shame for letting the Anzac legacy come to this. We are the descendants of the world’s most enlightened civilisation. It is our turn to fight for its future.

SOURCE





If group differences are superficial, they will fade away

I appear to be part of that coven of demons known as the Alt-Right.  The Alt-Right are those men of Stygian evil who mention the word "race". Just mentioning that word brings accusations that you just need a small moustache to become a new Hitler.

Such accusations are just a method used by the Left in an attempt to shut up conservatives but, empty-headed though the accusations are, many conservatives are cowed by them.  Only we "Alt" folk brave the storm of abuse and continue to talk about one of the most interesting of human differences.

But "Alt" is a broad church and what the various people say about race when they decide to do so is not any one single thing.  There always have been many and various views about what significance race has and that continues.

My view is that racial differences do exist and that they can make a difference. How anyone can behold the black/white situation in the USA today and think otherwise rather stuns me.  People obviously have strong abilities at ignoring reality.

But something I believe does get me into dangerous territory.  It is perhaps an optimistic belief but it is undoubtedly "incorrect".  I believe that racial antagonisms will fade away when there is no strong basis for them.

An immediate example of that is the Chinese presence in Australia.  For the first two thirds of the 20th century the Australian government had what was known as the "White Australia policy". It was a policy forged around conflicts between British and Chinese men on the Australian goldfields of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The aim was to expel "Chinamen" from Australia and keep them out thereafter.

One way or another, however, a Chinese presence not only continued in Australia but grew slightly.  And once goldfield rivalries were out of the way, Australians found that the Chinese were no trouble at all.  They were peaceful hard-working family people who were rather good at business -- particularly restaurants.  Even in the 1890s Quong Tart's grand tea rooms in Sydney were much celebrated and in fact became a social centre. Quong Tart had however taken the precaution of becoming an Anglican.  Religion has always been a rather flexible matter among the Chinese.

So in 1966 a conservative government led by Harold Holt abolished the "White Australia policy".  And shortly thereafter there came to Australia a flood of refugees from the Vietnam war, most of whom were Han Chinese racially.  And migration from other parts of the Chinese diaspora also got underway.  So Australia now is about 5% Chinese ethnically.  You see Chinese wherever you go in Australia's big cities and even to a degree in the country towns.  I grew up in a small Australian town where the local department store was "See Poys" -- owned and run by polite Chinese.

So there have been race wars or even race riots against Australia's new Chinese population?  Not at all.  Chinese schoolkids might be called names by other kids in their schools but there is no adult equivalent.  Australians of Chinese ancestry do tend to be found in occupations that require brains but they go about their lives as peacefully as any other Australian.  There is no discrimination.   A few imbeciles may at times say abusive things but that is the limit of it.  The life of Chinese Australians is as peaceful as anywhere in the world, including China.

So the Chinese are genetically and obviously different from Caucasians but the differences are not anything that disturbs social peace.  They have very low rates of criminality and very low rates of dependency on the welfare system.  And if they show any indication of religiosity, it is generally as converts to one of the more fundamentalist Christian denominations. Chinese religious flexibility is about as far away from Jihad as can possibly be imagined.  They are our allies in the battle against spiritual darkness.

And they do their best generally to adapt to the host culture.  If it were not for their eyes, Australian-born Chinese would be indistinguishable from other Australians.  So we see a huge genetic difference between Chinese and others but that difference does not have anything negative associated with it so no racial antagonisms arise.

Mind you, one has to distinguish between attitudes and behavior -- a difference first highlighted in the 1930's by LaPiere in the USA.  He found that people who had anti-Asian attitudes did not behave towards Asians in an adverse way.  And I have certainly heard on a couple of occasions Anglo-Australians say critical things about the Chinese.  But again they did not discriminate against the Chinese in their behaviour

I have for instance on a couple of occasions known Anglo-Australians to make derisive remarks about "Slopes" (East Asians) who were in fact happily married to Filipinas.  It is reminiscent of Wilhelm Marr, the man who invented the term "Antisemitism" (He thought it was a good thing).  He married three times and on all three occasions he married ethnically Jewish ladies.  Psychologists generally think that it is behaviour that is important and I do too.

And there is one bit of behaviour in Australia that demonstrates vividly how well Asians and Caucasians get along. It comes from the fact that Asian ladies hate being so small amid a population of largish Caucasians.  So they are determined that their sons will be tall.  But the only way to achieve that is to get a tall partner. But nearly all the tall men around are Caucasians.  No problem!  The Asian ladies set theirs caps at tall Caucasian men and get them.  They know how to charm.

It is quite common to see in the big cities tall Caucasian men walking around with a little Asian lady on their arms.  The only time you see an Asian lady with an Asian man is where it is a TALL Asian man.  So both the Asian lady and the Caucasian man  demonstrate clearly that they are not racist in any behavioural sense.  They accept one another without regard to racial differences.  It may be worth noting that in the traditional Bogardus scale of social distance, marriage is the closest distance. So Australia is remarkably non-racist where East Asians are concerned.

A similar phenomenon has been noted in American Ivy League universities. The big sporting guys very often have an Asian girlfriend, which is frustrating to the Caucasian women.  When they go for some big guy they often find that an Asian lady has beaten them to it.  So among themselves they refer to their female Asian fellow-students as "The Yellow Peril".

I now want to go on to another big group difference that was initially quite fierce in its antagonisms but which faded away when the difference turned out to be attractive rather than negative!  Strange but true.  And that difference lives on in me personally -- as it does for most Australians who trace all or most of their ancestry to the British Isles.  I refer to the Irish/English difference, which was and still is also a religious difference:  The Protestant/Catholic difference.  And those were once very important differences indeed.  Large numbers of both English and Irish migrated to Australia over the years and they brought all,their old prejudices with them.  So that surely was a good support for racial separatism.

And I do myself remember the tail-end of that separatism.  When I was young, I remember learning that in Brisbane, Protestants patronized a Department store by the name of "McWhirters"  and Catholics patronized antoher depatment store just down the road in Brunswick St. known as "T.C. Beirnes". And if a Protestant wandered into "T.C. Beirnes" it gave you a funny feeling.  You thought that a nun might suddenly leap out and grab you.  The two stores were as near to identical as could be, of course.

So how come I and a majority of Australians who are ethnically like me have both English and Irish ancestry?  There are few "old" Australians who cannot cheerfully nominate both their English and Irish ancestors.

What happened?  How did this dreadful miscegenation occur? How did our ancestors manage to get into bed together despite their profound racial and religious differences?  The answer is that the differences were not in fact profound.  But for horny young people they were sufficiently great to be interesting.  Young Protestants and Catholics could not keep their hands off one another despite the stern disapproval of both their families.

And I am old enough to remember how it was. We young Protestants felt that Catholic girls were more exciting because they thought sex was a sin.  Protestant teaching was of course also against pre-marital sex but the Protestant churches had a much weaker grip on their people than the Catholic church did. So because there were no real differences between the two groups, the religious difference was a spice, not a barrier, to adventurous young people. Young people like breaching barriers and much barrier breaching did go on. Most of my ilk are the product of it.

So the Protestant/Catholic difference has faded away in Australia.  Australians mostly don't even know one-another's religion -- Muslims excepted, of course.

The important part of the story is of course that the Protestant/Catholic difference was superficial. The two groups spoke the same language, looked the same and both grew up hearing only slightly  different versions of the story of Christ. 

Both Great Britain and Ireland started out with a Celtic population that was later subjected to large invasions of Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians and Normans.  And all four groups differed in little more than culture to start with anyway. So the differences between Britain and Ireland are to this day almost wholly cultural rather than racial.

It's not always so, but in the  British case the language differences appear to be a pretty good index of racial differences.  The language of almost all of both islands is English, with the language of the Celts relegated to Western fringes -- places like Connacht and Donegal in Ireland and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.  In fact the only substantial Gaelic-speaking population remaining in the British Isles is North Wales, which is an appendage of England.

So there were no significant inborn differences between the English and Irish populations of Australia -- which made the cultural differences vulnerable to challenge and change.

So thus endeth my sermon:  Group or racial antagonisms and separatisms do not persist where the differences are superficial.  The corollary of that is that group or racial antagonisms and separatisms only persist when there are major and important differences between the two groups.  Such antagonisms and separatisms are not silly, ignorant or evil but have real and important foundations -- JR

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here