From MercatorNet. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The circumstances of the half-million indigenous people of Australia are quite varied, from integration in capital cities to isolated outback townships where people barely speak English. But they are united in being disadvantaged. Life expectancy for Aboriginal men and women is about 10 years less than non-indigenous Australians. Other indices of social welfare – employment, education, housing, infant mortality – are appalling. It would paint a rosy picture to describe some Aboriginal settlements as Third World. They are Fourth World camps with unimaginable levels of squalor, domestic violence, child sex abuse, drunkenness, and drug abuse.

[…]…over the past 40 years, the conditions of indigenous people, relative to the rest of Australia, have hardly changed. Not that the government has been sitting on its hands. In fact, as a scathing review of the effectiveness of its programmes showed this week, it has been busy spending money hand over fist — A$3.5 billion a year for many years. And, says the report, these billions have “yielded dismally poor returns to date”.

“The history of Commonwealth policy for Indigenous Australians over the past 40 years is largely a story of good intentions, flawed policies, unrealistic assumptions, poor implementation, unintended consequences and dashed hopes. Strong policy commitments and large investments of government funding have too often produced outcomes which have been disappointing at best and appalling at worst.”

How to raise the standard of living of indigenous people is bitterly disputed. This vast and intractable morass has defeated generations of government bureaucrats, both white and indigenous. Unhappily, as the report acknowledges, “good intentions in Indigenous affairs do not translate easily into good policy, and … the risk of unintended consequences in this domain is often extremely high.”

There is one promising approach on the table – to abandon the welfare mentality to which so many Aborigines are addicted. Some Aboriginal leaders, like Noel Pearson and Galarrwuy Yunupingu are trying to convince their people and the Federal and state governments that less sit-down money is needed, not more. They argue forcefully that welfare is a poison which is killing their people.

[…]But both governments and these impressive leaders have failed to address a central issue– the state of the Aboriginal family. For decades, the government has tried to give its indigenous citizens everything they needed to access the benefits of a developed economy: education, housing, health care and so on. But it withholds the pincode, which is the traditional Western family.

All the indices for Aboriginal families are dire. About 70 percent of indigenous mothers have never been married. The vast majority of children are born out of wedlock. If Aboriginal families are dysfunctional, is it any wonder that literacy levels are in the basement and drug and alcohol abuse is sky-high?

For the bureaucrats, the figures for indigenous marriage are far less important than those for literacy or health. There are probably two reasons for this. For one, they are loath to criticise customary marriage — even though it includes polygamy and child brides – lest they appear paternalistic and patronising. But the main reason must surely be that marriage is not important for them either. The high rates of divorce, co-habitation, and single-motherhood in white Australia do not trouble them.

[…]If Aborigines had strong families, their child mortality rates and maternal mortality rates would not be the same as East Timor or the Solomon Islands.

What is happening, effectively, is we are shutting Aboriginals out of Australian society by refusing to promote the most powerful social technology of all: the traditional nuclear family. Families teach orderliness, self-restraint, industriousness, ambition, respect for others’ rights – all the virtues that children need to be healthy, to take advantage of their education and to succeed in working life.

The reason why left-wing bureaucrats are opposed to strengthening marriage is because they don’t like the differing gender roles that are inherent in marriage, they don’t like chastity and sexual restraint, and they don’t like people having the ability to make a living independent of the state. If there was no “crisis” to solve, then how could the compassionate left get elected? How could they feel good about themselves by redistributing other people’s wealth and imposing their enlightened values on the poor? They need to create the crisis – they don’t want to solve it. Subsidizing risky and reckless behavior just throws gasoline on the fire – which is exactly what the left wants. They don’t like religion. They don’t like morality. They don’t think that people should feel bad about being immoral. They don’t care about encouraging people to be careful about conceiving and raising children. They care about getting elected and being perceived as generous. And they will only be stopped when people see that redistributing wealth is not as good as helping the poor to make their own way in the world – to earn their own success, independent of the state’s social programs.

We need to realize that the secular left elites are not wise, and they are not good. They do not have a plan to do good, they do what makes them feel good. They are not helping the poor, they are helping themselves. Undermining religion and morality while favoring dependence on government does not help the poor.