White do-gooder sees pervasive racism towards Aborigines

I don't know why I occasionally put up rejoinders to Leftist screeches.  I guess I feel that a full picture of the matters concerned has to be available.  And Leftist writing usually leaves out such an enormous amount of the full story that I really feel annoyed at such deception.

The woman writing below, Caitlin Prince, apparently works in some sort of welfare role among Aborigines and appears to do so largely as a result of her political convictions.  And a big part of those convictions is that Australians generally are racist.  But what evidence does she muster for that conviction?  Just three anecdotes.  But you can prove anything by anecdotes.  I could report far more anecdotes that prove Australians generally to be racially tolerant.  So she falls at the first hurdle in her rant.

So her claim that "defensive anger" is the common response to  accounts of the deplorable situation of Aborigines is also just another anecdote.  That she is a racist is however clear. She criticizes "white men of Anglo-Celtic or European background."  Why does she have to bring their race into it?  Why can she not outline the words and deeds of particular people in her criticisms?  Instead she resorts to lazy generalizations with no detectible substance in them.

Another of her broad brush strokes is to say that "mostly racism is unconscious  and internalised".  How does she know?  Does she have a mind-reading machine?  She does not. Instead she relies on her deductions about the motives behind various words and deeds that she has observed. There is a very long history in psychology of failed attempts to read minds but she is not humbled by that.  She knows better.

One of her observations, however, is probably right.  She says that the poor state of Aborigines evokes feelings of powerlessness in whites.  She does not however confront a major reason why.  Successive Australian governments, State and Federal, Left and Right have all set in train big efforts to improve the situation of Aborigines -- but nothing works. If anything, the situation of Aborigines has gone downhill since the era of the missionaries.  People of all sorts have racked their brains to come up with solutions but none have succeeded.  People feel powerless in the face of Aboriginal degradation because they really ARE powerless.

She says that the problem for Aborigines is "the thick walls of indifference, denial, and defensive anger that characterises so much of our country’s response to our First Nations".  If that were so, how come that so many government programs have over a long period been tried in an attempt to help Aborigines?

So the sad state of Aborigines is NOT the result of racism.  It is something in Aboriginals themselves.  And that something is not too mysterious.  They have over many thousands of years adapted brilliantly to a hunter-gatherer life -- but that life is no more.

So what is her solution to the undoubted problems of Aborigines?  It is pathetic.  It is a "national conversation".  She is completely oblivious of all the conversations that have gone before.  She lives only in the present, as Leftists usually do.

As it happens, the lady in my life spent many years among Aborigines providing them with real professional services -- medical services  -- paid for by one of those "racist" Australian governments. She tells me something that the angry sourpuss below gives no hint of.  She tells me that she LIKES Aborigines.  And having seen much of what has been done to and for Aborigines by well-intentioned governments, she is firm in her view that no outside help will do much for Aborigines.  She believes that any solution for their plight must arise from among Aborigines themselves.  I think she is right.


Last week, a nine-year-old refused to stand for the national anthem to protest its lack of recognition of First Nations, and the country erupted in anger. High profile, fully grown adults publicly called her a brat and threatened to “kick her up the backside”.

In the same week, Mark Knight’s cartoon of Serena Williams was criticised internationally as racist, and Australian media doubled down to defend it. “Welcome to PC world” the Herald Sun published on its front page, while Knight accused the world of “going crazy” and suspended his Twitter account.

Meanwhile, two Aboriginal teenagers died in Perth running away from police, and communities pushed again for government action on the high rates of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Yeah — how dare people suggest Australia is racist!

I can’t imagine how it felt to be Aboriginal during this (not atypical) week. Although I don’t have to imagine — Celeste Liddle (@Utopiana), the Aboriginal writer and activist, tweeted:

"We’re constantly stuck trying to remind white people of the humanity of Aboriginal people – particularly Aboriginal women and children. It’s tiring, devastating and as we continually end up back in the same place, clearly not working. Sort your shit out, Australia"

— Celeste Liddle (@Utopiana) September 17, 2018

Emotions run high when it comes to the topic of racism and First Nations people. The fact that a nine-year-old can elicit such a venomous rebuke from senators and media personalities is testament to that. In my experience though, it isn’t only alt-right conservatives who have strong emotions about this topic. In the past eight years that I’ve worked in remote Aboriginal communities, every non-Aboriginal person I’ve worked with has experienced a strong reaction to the interface of Australia’s race relations.

Defensive anger is a common reaction to having your worldview challenged. Researcher Megan Boler believes it’s an attempt to protect not only one’s beliefs but one’s “precarious sense of identity”; a defence of one’s investment in the values of the dominant culture.

The problem with growing up within the dominant culture is that it’s easy to be oblivious to anything outside of it. As Tim Soutphommasane, the outgoing Race Discrimination Commissioner, recently pointed out in The Griffith Review, Australia’s media and political structures are still dominated by white men of Anglo-Celtic or European background. While in reality, Australia is far more culturally diverse, the positions that shape both the nation’s policies and stories we tell about it, are still dominated by Anglo-Australians.

When voices from outside the dominant culture do reach us, their perspectives are unexpected, drawn from life experience beyond our shared frames of reference. Their criticism can feel like it’s come out of the blue.

Knight said his cartoon wasn’t about race. Perhaps he was naive to the history of caricature that represented black people as infantile sambos. His intention may not have been racist. As white people, we often mistakenly believe that racism requires a conscious belief that black people are less human than us, but mostly racism is unconscious  and internalised.

It’s all the more bewildering to be accused of racism when it isn’t your intention, such as a health professional who wants to help, discovering they’ve unknowingly offended their Aboriginal client; or a well-intentioned teacher, who had no idea teaching only in English to a community with a different first language, might cause harm. Or perhaps a cartoonist, who prided himself on insightful social commentary, but had his blind spots pointed out.

Frequently, we react defensively and insist our actions aren’t racist when we’d be better served by realising we didn’t know it was racist  and listening to people of colour to understand why, without minimising or denying their concerns.

Anger is not the only emotional response I see in non-Aboriginal people when confronted with our country’s racism. Some people respond with grief and sadness, others with guilt and shame. Nearly always, there are feelings of helplessness that easily flick over into dissociation, numbness and denial. Megan Boler writes that denial “feeds on our lack of awareness of how powerlessness functions, effects, feeds on, and drains our sense of agency and power as active creators of self and world-representations. By powerlessness I mean a state that is usually silent and mutates into guilt and denial that gnaws at us….”

Our country struggles with meaningful recognition of our First Nations, in part due to these feelings of powerlessness and being overwhelmed. We are divided, black from white, by the privilege of being able to drift off into denial. Aboriginal people remain pressed up against the painful consequences of racism with the daily deaths, incarceration, and illness of their family members. Non-Aboriginal Australians on the other hand, bump along, failing to grapple with the overwhelming task of reckoning with our genocidal history and its ongoing legacy.

People of colour refer to “white fragility”, and while I think the term is fair (if the suffering could be weighed, there would be no competition), unless we respond wisely to emotions triggered by discussions of racism, we’re not going to progress the national conversation. Emerging from denial is like thawing from ice; it comes with the pins and needles of moving out of a long-held, contracted position. It’s painful, and people react emotionally.

I’ve worked for eight years now in remote health. I often feel paralysed, at a loss as to how to break through the thick walls of indifference, denial, and defensive anger that characterises so much of our country’s response to our First Nations.

How can I, as one voice, possibly affect it? I want to run away, to not face it. And right there, in the choice to not confront racism, is white privilege.

The moment I choose to do nothing, the moment I stop wrestling with my emotions and slip instead into denial and avoidance, I act out the privilege that has and continues to cause so much harm to our First Nations.

To do nothing is to be complicit.

What a painful thing to have to face.

SOURCE 









What Shakespeare and the Greats can teach a self-centred world

Professor Panayiotis Kanelos, President of St. John’s College Annapolis, will address the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation on the value of a liberal education in the contemporary world.

“Many people think Shakespeare and the great writers, artists, composers and thinkers of Western civilisation are no longer relevant in the modern world.  They are wrong,” says Professor Kanelos.

“Modernity encourages us to fashion ourselves and a liberal education – understanding the great works of Western civilisation - helps us to understand what sort of selves we ought to fashion.  Shakespeare, for example, still has so much to teach us,” Professor Kanelos said.

“The “liberal” arts have always had at their centre the cultivation of freedom.  Yet as conceptions of freedom have shifted over time, so too has the shape of liberal education,” Professor Kanelos said.  

“In our hyper-individualized world, the role of liberal education has shifted from liberating human beings to teaching us how to cultivate our liberty responsibly,” Professor Kanelos continued.  “So, a liberal education helps students build lives of meaning and purpose and helps society by helping individuals find common ground,” Professor Kanelos said. 

Chief Executive of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Professor Simon Haines said, “Professor Kanelos has a rich understanding of the value of a liberal arts education and St John’s College, Annapolis, is one the leading liberal arts colleges in the world.” 

Professor Kanelos has a distinguished background as an educator and is also an ardent Shakespeare scholar, who has authored and edited numerous books, articles and essays on Shakespeare.  He has a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at University of Chicago, an M.A. in Political Philosophy and Literature from the University Professors Program at Boston University, and a B.A. in English from Northwestern University.

St. John’s College, Annapolis, is one of the oldest colleges in the United States, tracing its origins to King William’s School, a preparatory school founded in 1696, and receiving a collegiate charter from the state of Maryland in 1784.  It has run a Great Books curriculum, based on the Western canon, since 1937.

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation was created with an endowment from the late Paul Ramsay AO, founder of Ramsay Health Care, to promote a deeper appreciation of Western civilisation through the creation of university degrees, Ramsay Scholarships, summer schools and public lectures.

Media release via email


   




‘Inviting a crash’: PM issues ominous warning as he defends government’s housing policies

PRIME Minister Scott Morrison has warned a popular idea to help Australians buy their own homes could actually “invite a housing market crash”.

A vow to limit negative gearing to newly built homes is the centrepiece of Labor’s housing proposals. It also wants to halve the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount.

Bill Shorten claims the current government’s policies give investors an unfair advantage over first home buyers, and overwhelmingly benefit people with high incomes.

But in an exclusive interview with news.com.au, Mr Morrison issued an ominous warning about the Opposition’s alternatives.

“The risk is this,” the Prime Minister said. “If you now take the sledgehammer of negative gearing and capital gains tax changes — if you abolish negative gearing as we know it — then you’re inviting a housing market crash. And that’s good for nobody.”

Mr Morrison defended the government’s policies, saying they had helped property prices fall in a controlled way. “We’ve seen house prices come back to a soft landing, and that’s not me saying that, that’s ratings agencies, it’s the Reserve Bank,” he said.

“Everyone has recognised that one of the biggest economic risks that the country faced was a housing market crash. That’s what the ratings agencies were concerned about, that’s what the banks were concerned about, that’s what economists all around the country were concerned about. That’s what, as treasurer, I was very concerned about. So we needed to bring the housing market into a soft landing.”

House prices in Australia’s five capital cities have fallen an average of 3.5 per cent in the past 12 months, with the sharpest drops in Sydney and Melbourne.

That’s a welcome trajectory for many Australians who felt they were being priced out of the market after almost a decade of consistent and demoralising rises.

Mr Morrison pointed to data showing first home buyers were finally enjoying something of a resurgence. Midway through this year, they accounted for 18 per cent of new loans.

“We’ve got first home buyers now back up as a percentage of new loans to its best level in about five, six years. And a number of things have contributed to that,” he argued.

“One of the things I did as treasurer was to introduce the First Home Super Savers scheme, which we need to continue to let people know about.

“I think it’s a pretty simple and constructive scheme which means that people can save for their deposit faster, simply by making the same sacrifice they’re already doing today.”

The scheme lets Australians save for a home deposit using their superannuation account, which means they pay less tax.

“You can save, with exactly the same salary sacrifice, 30 per cent faster than you could before,” the Prime Minister said.

Mr Morrison also highlighted the government’s work with the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) to crack down on interest-only mortgages, which made up about 40 per cent of all new home loans at their peak last year.

“When you get people who can just keep borrowing more and more and more and do it on an interest-only basis, they can bid up the price, and that was fuelling the exacerbation of the problem,” he said.

But despite those improvements, buying a house in one of Australia’s biggest cities is still a daunting prospect.  RateCity.com.au recently released data on the average annual income needed to buy a house or unit in each city without mortgage stress — a term for when 30 per cent or more of your pre-tax income goes towards loan repayments. The required income was $162,000 in Sydney and $132,000 in Melbourne. Those figures are well above the average Australian’s salary.

“That’s an extremely big amount of money. And in Sydney, a 20 per cent deposit plus stamp duty is a whopping $240,000. It’s impossible to collect in a short space of time,” research director Sally Tindall told news.com.au.

There is also the added pressure of interest rates. In the past few weeks Westpac, the Commonwealth Bank and ANZ all pushed up their variable rates, though NAB decided not to join them.

“Look, you don’t want to see that occur. That’s the banks that decide to do that, but the NAB decided not to, so good for NAB. Go and change your loan to NAB, that would be my view,” Mr Morrison said.

“It’s for the RBA to decide what’s happening with the cash rates, but you know, their forward prognosis has been very stable now for some period of time. So I think there will be a lot of pressure on the banks not to move their rates.”

The Prime Minister said his government supported allowing new banks into the market to challenge the Big Four. “More products. Increasing pressure. Make the market work, make sure people get the best deal,” he said.

Mr Morrison said he sympathised with the plight of first home buyers struggling to get into the market.

“I remember the first place I bought with (wife) Jenny, it was 53 square metres, it was not very big. It was very, very small. But that was what we could afford, and that’s how we made our start. And it’s always a big challenge for anyone to buy their first home,” he said.

Should Australians consider following that example, and lowering their own expectations for a first home? Mr Morrison told us he didn’t want to “lecture” anyone.

“I’m for Australians setting their own expectations. I’m all for aspiration. I’m all for them having a big view of their future, and for us to be able to help them try to achieve that wherever they can,” he said. “I’m not one who likes to lecture people about what their aspirations should be. I’m all for an aspirational Australia.”

SOURCE 

   




Wage growth is FASTER than cost of living – despite the price of electricity skyrocketing and fuel prices hitting a four-year high

Australian wages are growing at a faster pace than costs of living despite double-digit increases in electricity and petrol prices, an economics professor says.

Pay rises failed to outpace inflation in the year to June, with both measures increasing by 2.1 per cent.

Electricity bills rose by an annual 10.4 per cent and petrol prices jumped by 16.3 per cent, recently hitting a four-year high, the Australian Bureau of Statistics's consumer price index showed.

But Melbourne Institute Professor Mark Wooden said that since 2001, overall wage growth had outstripped increased living costs.

Not all popular items went up in price, with vegetables 8.7 per cent cheaper over the year as clothing costs fell 3 per cent.

While wages have been flat, it has also occurred against a backdrop of weak inflation, which is on the low side of the Reserve Bank of Australia's two to three per cent target band.

Prof Wooden pointed out that with almost a quarter of award-wage earners receiving a 3.5 per cent pay increase from the Fair Work Commission, well in excess of inflation, many workers were better off.

This followed a 3.3 per cent minimum wage increase in July 2017.

'The lowest paid workers should be doing better,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'The people at the bottom, the bottom 10 per cent, they are relatively no worse off to the people in the middle.

'The last three or four years, there has been no increase in wage inequality.'

The academic fellow with the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research calculated that during the past decade, which has included the mining boom and the global financial crisis, wages have risen by 31 per cent, compared with 22 per cent for inflation.

The gap between the two was used to argue that real wage increases, adjusted for inflation, had delivered increases in living standards.

SOURCE 

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