It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.
Australians have made a lot of mistakes, we have treated Aboriginal people very badly, and we have our share of racists and bigots.
Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.
Yet and still, Peter Norman took into account that the aboriginals were suffering just as much in Australia as Blacks in the United States were suffering.
There may not be a great job for [Aboriginal people] but whatever there is, they just have to do it, and if it’s picking up rubbish around the community, it just has to be done.
What we do to our native Australians, our own indigenous people, is nothing short of horrific.
Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.
The majority of Aboriginals do not want handouts because they realise that welfare is killing them.
