Clarification/Follow-up by MarySusan on 08/29/06 10:20 pm:
Isn't Australia's government controlled by Corporations?

I would find it hard to believe.

Do you have any info on this?

Regards,

Clarification/Follow-up by paraclete on 08/30/06 3:10 am:
Doesn't appear to be although the recent industrial reforms appear to be a kow-towwing to the americans and the FTA. We have a large number of corporations in which the governments (Federal and State hold interests)(Transport, Telecommunications, Ports, Energy) so this also short circuits the need for lobbists. We destroyed a great deal of our industry by embracing free trade and lowering tarrifs without everyoneelse following suit. Our manufacturing industries migrated to Asia a little earlier than yours. We also don't have the sophisticated political lobbists in abundance as you do as well as a very different structure in the workings of our parliament. The Government doesn't have great difficulty getting it's leglislative program across unless it has a hostile Senate and so there is no need for pork barrelling amendments to leglislation which block the process in your congress. In fact to move such an amendment would be a breach of process. Basically, if it isn't in the budget it doesn't get done. Much of the work of parliament is done by regulation which streamlines the process.

Clarification/Follow-up by Dark_Crow on 08/30/06 3:36 pm:
ET:
I think we are pushing the idea; however, it is difficult for them to hear above the noise produced by the Communist, Socialist and some Liberals who produce misleading propaganda like the article here by Reuters.

Clarification/Follow-up by Itsdb on 08/31/06 11:52 am:
>>Yes you can export our form if you like, of course you would have to abandon your all powerfull presidency.<<

For a guy who sure spends a lot of time criticizing us this shows how little you really know about the U.S. Either that or you're just gullible enough to believe what the moonbats have been saying. Maybe both?

>>With our form you get educated, fed, housed and even paid to find work all while connected to the net<<

And we don't? Just because Australia has no official measurement of poverty doesnt' mean you don't have a problem. In a column from August 2005 Andrew McCallum of ACOSS estimated "around two million people are living in poverty in Australia." If you have a population of 20 million that's around 10 percent that live in poverty according to your standards.

He points out some other interesting statistics:

* The number of people unemployed for five years or more has actually risen by 40,000 over the past five years. (Unemployed 5 years or more?)

* The number of long-term unemployed - those who have been on payments for a year or more - has remained fairly stagnant during that time.

* 800,000 children are growing up in jobless families.

Literacy among outback Aborigines a shock
August 30, 2006 12:00am

MANY Aboriginal people in remote areas will enter adult life with the reading skills of a 10-year-old, having failed to achieve national literacy standards in primary school.
The finding comes from the author of a paper, published yesterday by the Centre for Independent Studies, which reveals Aboriginal children from remote communities have literacy rates far lower than those living in urban centres.

While 93 per cent of all Australian students and 83 per cent of Aboriginal students achieved year 3 reading benchmarks, only 20 per cent of indigenous students in remote NT schools met the standard.

By year 5, 89 per cent of all students and 70 per cent of Aboriginal students nationally achieved the reading benchmark, compared with only 21 per cent of Aboriginal students in remote NT areas.

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Wadeye: a case study of the Australian government’s Aboriginal agenda
By Erika Zimmer
24 August 2006

Under the guise of concern for Aboriginal women and children, the Howard government has seized upon revelations of sexual abuse in indigenous communities, initially broadcast in an Australian Broadcasting Corporation “Lateline” program in May, to push through its right-wing agenda of “ending welfare dependence”...

Lacking an economic base and crippled by chronic government underfunding, the region’s conditions are comparable to some of the worst in the Third World. For example, the median life expectancy is 46 years, with death most commonly due to heart disease, kidney problems or diabetes. Twenty percent of the children are stunted, 21 percent are underweight and 10 percent wasted.

While approximately 800 children of school age live at Wadeye, no high school exists. The sole Catholic primary school is able to accommodate only 300 children. At the same time, a shortage of housing means that up to 20 people live in each house.

Unemployment stands at 84 percent while the average personal income for Aborigines is estimated variously at between $4,000 and $8,000 a year, less than 20 percent of the national average. It is little wonder that Wadeye has the highest per capita juvenile offending rate in the NT.

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Diabetes affects more Aborigines
August 30, 2006

ABORIGINAL Australians are becoming sick from diabetes at a substantially higher rate than other Australians, a new report shows.

The study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) looked at trends in diabetes-related hospitalisations using hospital statistics from 1996 to 2004.

It found the rate of hospitalisation was seven times higher for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians than other Australians.

And overall, hospitalisation rates rose with increasing socio-economic disadvantage and increasing remoteness, the report found.

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From the University of Western Australia’s Crime Research Centre's Crime and Justice Statistics for Western Australia: 2004

Compared to 2003, the total number of arrests increased by 12.6 percent and the total number of distinct persons arrested increased by 9.5 percent. Indigenous people were arrested at 8.6 times the rate of non-Indigenous people.

Commenting on increases in the prison population, Mr Morgan said: "Compared with 2003 figures, prison receptions in 2004 increased by 11 percent, while the prison census population increased by 14 percent. Based on average daily prisoner population, WA continues to rank second in the country (behind the Northern Territory) in rates of adult imprisonment."

Imprisonment has increasingly involved Indigenous offenders, particularly Indigenous women.

“Almost two-thirds of all prison receptions for motor vehicle or driving-related offences were of Indigenous offenders, and almost half of all female Indigenous prisoners were imprisoned for fine-default. Indigenous people accounted for 40 percent of prisoners on census night,” Mr Morgan said.

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UN condemns Aborigines' housing

Australia's Aborigines live in some of the worst housing in the world, a UN housing expert has said.


UN special rapporteur Miloon Kothari was speaking after a two-week tour at the invitation of the government.

He said changes to laws on land rights were unwise and new housing designs were being imposed on the community.

A government minister, Rod Kemp, said in response to Mr Kothari's comments: "The mere fact you have the UN [make] some comment doesn't make it right."

Aborigines make up about 470,000 of Australia's 20m population.

Leases

Mr Kothari was speaking at a news conference after he concluded his tour.

He said: "I think that some of the conditions that I've seen are amongst the worst in the world both in terms of overcrowding, severe overcrowding, and in terms of lack of access to civic services."

Mr Kothari said he had seen up to 30 people living in a two-bedroom house.

"We visited one community in the Alice Springs camps where people were living in tin shacks for the last 30 years and with no rights to their land and, of course, no services," he said.

The special rapporteur will deliver his formal report to the UN early next year.

Mr Kothari was highly critical of plans in Northern Territory to scrap a 30-year-old scheme of communal land ownership.

"I'm quite sure that it's not going to work... and we are hoping that it will be reconsidered," he said.

New federal laws aim to give Aborigines low-interest loans and 99-year leases on their land.

Mr Kothari said the Northern Territory changes had been "pushed through too hurriedly".

He said Australia had a "serious hidden national housing crisis" and needed to appoint a federal housing minister to tackle it.

However, Mr Kemp said the UN was not the "font of all wisdom".

"Sometimes the UN gets it right and sometimes it gets it wrong," he said.

"We just don't dip our lid to anybody, you see. We're an independent country and an independent government."

Clarification/Follow-up by paraclete on 09/01/06 3:53 am:
Steve

Those outside of Australia spend a great deal of time critising the "treatment" of a small group of the population who are disadvantaged by distance, in the same way as perhaps some of your indigenous tribes might be. These are not an urban population as the impression is created but people who choose to live in remote communitites and retain much of their tribal life style, They are essentially a hunter /gatherer community relying on welfare for the cash to interface with the rest of the nation. They have special problems and the answer isn't to throw money at them, because urban style housing and amenities mean little to them, their needs are on a different scale. Here we might be speaking of 1% or less of the population not the massive numbers of disadvantaged found in the USA. Some of these people have only emerged from the stone age in the last generation and frankly they might be better off had we left them alone. Now along side all of this are other "indigenous groups" most of whom are not anything like full blood aboriginal and who are marginalised because of wrong choices and lack of skill and opportunity. These are people who have moved into urban populations because of well meaning government housing plans. They are out of their "country" and disconnected from their cultural, family and tribal base. They tend to congregate in specific areas developing ghettos with attendent social problems

Names like Dubbo, Redfern and Moree would be familiar to anyone who looked in depth at recent reporting. As a result of their activities suburbs have been depopulated andd bulldozed because they are unlivable and the people move on to terrorise another community. We don't need the UN telling us these people are disadvantaged. We know but getting them to take responsibility for their own development is the hard part, when they do there is ample funding for them to do so.

Clarification/Follow-up by Itsdb on 09/01/06 12:15 pm:
Clete, that might explain the aboriginal part of my followup but it doesn't explain the first part. Point being that every nation, no matter how wealthy, has a problem with poverty.

Mr. McCallum whom I quoted earlier, also makes this point:

While it is obvious poverty at home in Australia is not of the same scale or severity as the developing world, ACOSS believes poverty still exists according to contemporary definitions of what poverty is. One widely accepted definition describes poverty as “an enforced lack of socially perceived necessities”. This means poverty is a relative term defined by a society to describe the people who cannot participate in the activities that most people take for granted.

Clarification/Follow-up by paraclete on 09/01/06 10:12 pm:
Steve

I disagree that poverty is relative. I'm not talking about people who are down to their last Mercedes-Benz, that's not poverty.

Poverty in this nation, just as it is in any other, is not being able to put food on the table, not being able to pay the rent, or not being able to seek adequate medical help.

Your indigenous people do well from gambling but it wasn't always so, ours can do well from land rights and mining royalties but it is only a few. There are no such benefits for the urban poor, the long term welfare dependent, the economically displaced because of globalisation, these are the people without employment and yes they exist in every nation and they are in poverty. What I dislike is any wealthly nation failing to deal with this problem when they have the means to do it. Why would I critise america because it puts it's resources into Iraq, a nation which allowed to get on with life could look after itsself before american intervention, yet its own people in certain parts are seriously underprivilged. Your laisse faire economy creates poverty, but you choose not to see it because it allows the rich to take more than their fair share at the expense of the poor. Wealth is not a virtue, poverty is not a blessing, 15% is too high a number. Your minimum wage for example is something like $5 hour, that is rediculous in a nation as wealthy as yours, even ours at $13 is far too low for someone caught at that level to do more than subsist and live in poverty

Clarification/Follow-up by Itsdb on 09/02/06 1:42 pm:
>>What I dislike is any wealthly nation failing to deal with this problem when they have the means to do it.<<

This is where you get under my skin, you seem to think we do nothing about it and that's a flat-out lie. You can even find clues as to much of the cause of 'poverty' in the article you posted if you'd look.

"Among African Americans the problem correlates primarily to the inner-city and single mothers," said Michael Tanner of CATO Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington.

He noted that blacks also suffer disproportionately from poor education and lower quality jobs."

Here, more than anything is it's a people problem. The opportunity is there, but too many fail seize the opportunity. And when you have race baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson running convincing blacks they are victims of white people they will stay stagnant and unproductive.

>>15% is too high a number.<<

Yep, and so is 12.6% as your article cites.

>>Your minimum wage for example is something like $5 hour<<

Maybe, but that's mostly teenagers entering the workforce. Anybone that wants to succeed in this country can, but you have to quit sponging off of society and get off your welfare a** and do something.

Steve