Something interesting is happening with “Indigenous” Australians. Not only is their population exploding faster than any other in Australia, but they are also apparently all moving to the cities.
According to census data, Australia’s Aboriginal population is growing at twice the rate of everyone else, soaring by 20% in just a decade. Moreover, 80% of Aborigines live in cities or non-remote regional areas. What’s going on here? Are Aboriginal people really having so many more babies, and moving en masse to the city?
It is not that indigenous Australians are abandoning small towns and their traditional lands in droves. The numbers of indigenous people in Australia’s remote and very remote places are predicted to continue to climb everywhere, except in Katherine in the Northern Territory.
But over the next 12 years that growth will be outpaced by indigenous population increases in major cities […]The growth will be fastest in the Australian Capital Territory.
Rather than natural population growth and movement, is something else going on?
It seems far more likely that formerly-white people in the cities are unearthing a great-great-grandma who was one-sixteenth Wiradjuri or Woiwurrung, and suddenly declaring themselves “indigenous”, and a “proud Gamilaroi woman”. In no time at all, they’re swanning around in a possum-skin cloak, calling themselves “Aunty” or “Uncle”, and stiffing the local council a few grand a pop for a “Welcome to Country” ceremony.
And more and more of the ever-increasing Indigenous Affairs budget is ripped away from the remote Aboriginal communities who so desperately need it.
What this means for policymakers and people who devote their careers to indigenous health is fascinating. If the overall circumstances of indigenous Australians lift as the proportion living in cities rises, researchers and program designers will need to be shrewd in identifying where the disadvantage remains and how to target it.
theaustralian.com.au/nation/indigenous-australia-moving-in
It would be too much to expect that policymakers will ditch the whole discriminatory idea that a person’s race alone should entitle them to generous government handouts. Assistance should be on the basis of need alone, not identity.
No one knows more about how genuinely needy Aboriginal people are being ripped off by pale-skinned city-dwellers than remote-area Aborigines themselves.
A so-called “Indigenous Voice to Parliament” is the latest fad of Australian “progressives”. Not all Aboriginal spokespeople are on board, and when reporters travelled to remote Aboriginal communities, many had no idea what they were talking about. When it was explained to them, they scoffed about “more talk-talk”, and how any such body would inevitably be “dominated by half-caste [sic] people. If they get any money, it will be spent in the cities”.