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Great post.
A culture war angle you didn't touch on was admixture with white Australians.
You are either aboriginal or not, ie 1/16 counts the same as 100%.
Nature or nurture, whites outperform aboriginals, thus the indigenous medical school scholarship students all look like this:
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/styles/half_width/public/thumbnails/image/7I8A1087_1.JPG?itok=5ntaThSA
I would be willing to bet most pure blooded Aboriginals are most concerned about better food, health and shelter while the 1/16th seem to be fighting hardest to get the government to hand out cushy white collar jobs - this looks to be what the voice is to me.
It is totally unacceptable in polite company to point out how white some of these activist / scholarship recipients / welcome to country paid performers etc look
Yeah, there's a huge divide between the mostly-genetically-white urban Indigenous and the mostly-genetically-Indigenous Indigenous who live in remote Australia like the Top End. But this divide is rarely acknowledged in practice by either government or civil society, with much of the policies making no real distinction between the two (occasionally you'll see some gesture towards 'remote Indigenous'). Political and social spoils will mostly go towards the urban Indigenous as @Forgotpassword says.
It's actually infuriating because no one wants address the elephant in the room - the main reason that Indigenous life outcomes are so poor is because a significant portion of Indigenous live in remote, 'economically impoverished' communities in the middle of absolutely nowhere that no amount of 'Closing the Gap' initiatives will compensate for. You can't legislate or pay away remoteness, you can't build a major metropolitan centre in the middle of the Australian desert. Anyone who lived in such remote conditions would have their outcomes harmed. And that's not getting into the 'traditional practices' that some groups engage in which might make them incompatible with Western notions of prosperity (i.e. stabbing someone in the thigh with a spear as punishment).
There was also another Indigenous related controversy recently, because an alcohol ban for many Indigenous communities in NT (which was originally implemented with support from Indigenous communities mind you) expired early this year, which was connected to an immediate increase in crime afterwards. After some time by the current Federal Labor government dragging their feet, they eventually agreed to support a more permanent ban on alcohol in the Territory legislature. It's amazing how quickly people will come to support traditional 'law-and-order' approaches to Indigenous issues when push comes to shove.
I don't think spearing a convicted rapist and murderer after a 26 year prison sentence will substantially decrease prosperity.
My point was more than you might need more modern concepts of justice for prosperity. In other words, as community who still thinks spearing people is a good form of punishment probably isn't receptive to modern ideas and forms of governance
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Yeah. The Voice seems very unlikely to do anything productive for full-blooded indigenous in remote areas due to their plight being a gigantic stack of interwoven issues, but will do wonders for a bunch of 1/16th-types who naturally gravitate towards Left wing politics anyway.
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