Talking of preserving a White Australia literally whited-out indigenous Australia. The solution to cultural distance and collapse is cultural adaptation and renewal. Now, run through in your mind the items in the contemporary public agenda of 'indigenous issues'. In fact, much of that agenda is harmful. The vicious policing of public debate on indigenous issues in order to preserve the intelligentsia's moral assets makes even discussing problems and difficulties within indigenous cultures either extremely difficult or simply forbidden.
Debate is made difficult even for people with impeccable Aboriginal credentials.
It makes it difficult for welfare agencies to carry out their proper roles. Extreme examples maybe, but of a type that is all too common. Even native title is a deeply flawed process since the form of property rights given, by statute and by High Court decision, is spectacularly and needlessly ill-designed for effective participation in a modern commercial economy. That indigenous policy has been denied honest analysis of the needs of indigenous Australians is surely one reason that it has been such an unhappy failure, with many indicators of indigenous well-being remaining static or even regressing over the past 30 years. Michael Duffy writes 'in 50 years' time, people will look back in horror and wonder how intelligent and powerful white people could have let such things happen while professing so strenuously their concern for black welfare and their superiority to previous generations'.