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Notes -
I'm talking about national identity, not racism. I grant that these are related issues, but there is a distinction. There is no question that Aborigines are Australian - even the people that hate Aborigines would agree with that.
I don't pretend that there is no racism in Australia - I do maintain there is not very much, but counterexamples can always be found.
Having said that... Aborigines are something of a special case. The uncomfortable truth is that the guy who called them a bunch of petrol sniffers may have been coarse, but he wasn't wrong. Aborigines have shockingly high levels of every bad socioeconomic measure you care to name. Drug abuse, child abuse, unemployment, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, etc, etc. It's bad among the city-dwelling mixed race Aborigines and it's extremely bad in the remote outback communities where they are actually black. Aborigines are 3% of the population and 28% of the prison population. No one wants this to be true, but it is, and everyone knows it.
Petrol sniffing specifically is a big enough problem that we passed a law banning normal petrol in Aboriginal communities. They have to use "low aromatic fuel" which is less potent and abusable as a drug.
There is a huge amount of desire to see all of these metrics improve and massive amounts of money have been thrown at solving the problem, but nothing has worked. So the guy who made that comment may or may not have been racist... but either way, he was telling it like it is.
I see what you mean about national identity and the national consciousness of it - that can be a different thing from racism for sure. I'm encouraged by your comments as the line I get from media in my country is about things like the popularity of the One Nation party and suggestions that Australia had quite an underbelly of racism.
Not that my concern is that people can't be racist per se - people can have their own views, it just seems like a poor marker for liberal democracy if there is a lot of racial tension. It sounds like this isn't particularly the case in Australia.
I was aware of the dysfunction in Aboriginal communities - I think the racist element that can arise is if that's overgeneralised suggesting an inherent genetic lack and the counter examples are never mentioned. I know there are systemic and difficult to resolve issues though as with other indigenous peoples under colonisation.
The popularity of One Nation may have been overstated to you. They got 4% of the vote at the last election. And even among that 4%, I highly suspect that a fair number of voters cast their votes despite the party's reputation for racism rather than because of it.
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