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rmg1859 05/08/08 5:00PM

Irfan,

Quite an interesting commentary ! Your quotes from hayek, especially:

‘The first of the two ways is an arrangement under which "commands are passed from top down and individual agents obey, in other words, a made or organised order".

‘The second arrangement is "a spontaneous or grown order in which independent people with diverse individual goals interact on the basis of some shared rules (institutions) and discover and test new knowledge in the feedback of signals they send each other".

‘And Hayek’s conclusion? That in modern complex societies, organised order just doesn’t work. Rather, what governments need to do is provide institutional rules like private property rights, the rule of law, contractual freedom etc. And that the most enduring and desirable social orders and institutions are the ones that emerge spontaneously from civil society.’

Sounds good to me too. This is very much like Karl Popper’s ‘Open Society’ vs its enemy ideologies, and Isaiah Berlin’s negative vs positive freedom. As someone brought up as a socialist, I have been trying to square my socialism with these liberal-democratic and freedom-oriented principles for the last twelve years or so, not an easy task, but one that I think all socialists must undertake.

While we are on the subject of the open society, a society in which individuals are free to pursue their own interests as long as they don’t interfere with those of anyone else, free to come together in common cause as they wish, free to opt out if they wish - I’m sure that NM readers would be overjoyed to hear that, according to the latest DEEWR stats,

* Indigenous university student numbers were at a record in 2007, at 9,370 students, overwhelmingly in degree-level courses and post-graduate courses, studying internally, in mainstream courses;

* Indigenous women now have a better participation rate in tertiary education than NON-Indigenous men;

* Indigenous women commencing study had a participation rate of 97 % that of non-Indigenous women.

So it might be quite a job to justify pushing Indigenous people, especially women, back into remote Australia, under the guise of a Special Place in the Constitution for our Beloved First Inhabitants.

Since you ask about graduate numbers: the latest stats for Indigenous university graduates, those for 2006, show that 1360 indigenous people graduated in 2006.

On top of the 19,246 counted in the 2006 Census (i.e. as at the end of 2005), if we add these as well, then the graduates for 2007, probably about the same or more as in 2006, then we get a total of about 22,000 graduates. And 23,400 by the end of this year.

If we take into consideration a 13 % under-count of Indigenous people, then the total number of Indigenous graduates by the end of this year could be more than 26,000, with about 32,000 degrees and other awards between them.

Im’ sure that decent NM readers will be gob-smacked - positively - by this good news, which proves what the yhave believed all along, that Indigenous people are not all a bunch of drop-kicks, thugs, stand-over merchants, thieves and drunks. Not all Indigenous people are content to be dependent on welfare all their lives. Those 26,000 represent families totalling up to eighty or ninety thousand Indigenous people, on their feet, self-reliant, ready, willing and able to contribute to an Australian open society, a vibrant Australian civil society.

Another bit of very good news is that, because of a huge increase in the birth-rate from the early eighties, the number of Indigenous people enrolling at universities is about to rise dramatically - it is certainly possible that there could be twenty thousand at university at any one time, by 2020, and fifty thousand graduates by 2020. Wonderful ! Imagine - twenty thousand Indigenous students at uni, probably one sitting next to your daughter or granddaughter, falling in love, marrying, and giving you Aboriginal grandkids and great-grandkids. That’s the Australia of the future !

Joe

rmg1859 05/08/08 11:00PM

It’s always interesting, and often very telling, what sort of response one gets to one’s blogs. Keep those responses coming ……

Joe

rmg1859 06/08/08 3:55PM

Ah, the eloquence of silence ………..

BPobjie 07/08/08 11:28AM

Your analysis is incisive Joe, especially the bit about Isaiah Berlin. My favourite Isaiah Berlin song is Puttin’ On The Ritz. What’s yours?

rmg1859 07/08/08 12:46PM

‘The Crooked Timber of Humanity’: it’s from a ditty that Manny Kant threw off one day somewhere in East Prussia that went something like (in gavotte time);

‘Out of timber so crooked
As that from which man is made,
Nothing entirely straight
Can be built.’

Pretty catchy eh ?

Actually, I thought Putin’ on the Ritz was written either by Stokely Carmichael, or one of those Russian Mafia bands.

Another bit of news which came out yesterday: there were 285,000 births in Australia in 2007, and 3.9 % of them were Indigenous (and probably 20 % of them were born to recent migrants and refugees). Thanks to inter-marriage, the Indigenous component of Auastralia is doubling about every thirty years, so by ninety years’ time, about 33 % of all babies born will have Indigenous ancestry, and will probably have yours as well :) And of course, by 2100, most of our g-g-g-grandkids will have Sudanese, Vietnamese and Afghan ancestry as well, a beautiful mixture ! It sure beats all those pasty-skin white kids.

Joe

David Horton 07/08/08 7:22PM

Well, I’ve always thought she was just a particularly nasty vicious neoconservative, but I guess if she "openly advocates the closing of faith-based independent schools and imprisoning those teaching intelligent design" she can’t be all bad. Wonder if she likes dogs?

rmg1859 07/08/08 9:45PM

Hi David,

What do you mean, that Rebecca Weisser or Hirsi Ali was a particularly nasty vicious neoconservative ? I don’t know Rebecca Weisser, but I would have thought that Hirsi Ali has pretty good reasons to be, as you call it, neoconservative, if you mean by that that she is opposed to genital mutilation and dictatorship by churches, mosques and, in the final analysis, men ? Universal human rights applie to women, you know. If the opposite of neoconservatism is to be socialism, then it surely has to recognise the universality and equality of human rights, women’s as well as men’s, no matter where they may be or in what culture (HBIN) they may be entrapped.

To get away from labels, which are extremely useful in stopping us from having to think, what might be wrong with closing all faith-based schools ? All of them ? The responsibility for education should be the state’s, not some wayback superstitions’, even if currently such schools seem to offer a more rigorous and comprehensive form of schooling.

I wouldn’t imprison supporters of intelligent design, but if I were king, I would certainly have them all checked out and perhaps confined to instritutions for the hopelessly insane, as they used to be called, in those more frank times.

So on those grounds, I’m absolutely confident that Hirsi Ali loves dogs. Dogs are such socialist animals, don’t you think ?

Joe

feral sparrowhawk 07/08/08 10:37PM

rmg, I would indeed be delighted if the statistics you quoted were true. However, I don’t see how they all could be.

Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders make up up about 2.5% of the population. So if there are 9370 at University then they would match the national average if there were around 370,000 students at university (not counting overseas students). In fact, there’s about double that.

So Indigenous representation at university is about half that of non-Indigenous Australians. Unless there are virtually no Indigenous men at university I don’t think your claims can be right. If one adjusts for age then the situation would presumably get worse, since more Indigenous people are in the age brackets likely to be at university.

Can you provide a link for either the figure of 9370 or the claim that Indigenous women have a higher participation rate than non-Indigenous men?

David Horton 08/08/08 9:12AM

Thanks Joe (I take it you are agreeing with me?).

rmg1859 08/08/08 12:57PM

Hi Feral Sparrowhawk,

I’ve just been looking again at tertiary enrolments for 2007 actually: yes, enrolments for Australian citizens totalled 720,185, and Indigenous enrolments totalled 9370, or 1.30105 %.

281,625 ‘domestic students’ commenced study in 2007, but this includes New Zealanders and Pacific Islanders as well, but even so, the 4036 Indigenous commencing students make up 1.43311 % of all ‘domestic’ commencing students. Not bad for a population which makes up 1.66 % of all Australian ‘domestic’ adults, i.e. Indigenous commencing students make up about 90 % of their proportion of the Australian population, and total Indigenous enrolments make up about 78 % of all Australian ‘domestic’ adults.

No, it’s quite wrong to say ‘more Indigenous people are in the age brackets likely to be at university’. Unless children go to university ? The massive birth-rate boom of the eighties is just now starting to hit university-age, so a disproportionate share of the Indigenous populations is not yet at university age; correspondingly, a disproportionately small component are at university age. That’s how it goes with a recent birth-rate boom.

A link ? No problem: DEWR’s website. Their URL is
http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/15AEC1A7-CE5B-4B4D-97E6-5F4B8F432B35…

If you have the courage, look it up. Please get back to us if I have misrepresented the data. Your silence will be most eloquent.

Would you like the annual data for TOTAL ENROLMENTS OF Indigenous men and women ? How far back do you want to go ? It’s all there. Just to save you some trouble, here are the last seven years of data:

YEAR MALES FEMALES TOTAL
2001 3,132 5,529 8,661
2002 3,292 5,579 8,871
2003 3,294 5,694 8,988
2004 3,191 5,704 8,895
2005 2,901 5,469 8,370
2006 3,028 5,825 8,854
2007 3,170 6,200 9,370

Anything else ? Would you like a summary of graduations, and how there can be more than twenty thouasand Indigenous university graduates at the moment ? And maybe fifty thousand by 2020 ?

Anything to oblige.

Cheers,

Joe

rmg1859 08/08/08 1:43PM

Feral Sparrowhawk,

Forgive me, I meant to provide some demographic data as well. Here are the number of Indigenous births nationally through the eighties (with later five-yearly totals as comparisons), according to the 2006 Census: you can see when the birth-rate started and how university numbers are set to rise dramatically in the next five and ten years.

1980 6364
1981 6669
1982 7280
1983 7559
1984 7820
1985 8181
1986 8220
1987 8762
1988 9680
1989 10611
1990 11236
1995 11588
2000 11854
2005 11078

As you can see, the increase in enrolments has only just started. Most of that birth-rate boom are still in Primary and Secondary school. But you can see that tertiary enrolments are very likely to increase rapidly from now onwards, as those larger age-groups reach tertiary age. Currently we cannot really expect students (the average age at which Indigenous students tend to complete Year 12 is 18) born after 1988 to be involved in tertiary education just yet. But they are coming.

As well, the median age of Indigenous students tends to be a little greater than for non-Indigenous students: 29 years old vs 24 years old.

But as you can see, the number of commmencing students is roughly half of the 20-year-old age-group, and the total number of enrolments is more than that of the 20-yr-old age-group. Indigenous tertiary participation is on a par with Europe’s, actually, and the graduation rate would be on a par with Italy’s or Spain’s. Obviously, Indigenous education performance here is vastly better - Indigenous people are participating at far greater rates - than any Third World country.

Oh, and each year, the equivalent of around 18 % of the Indigenous 24-yr-old age-group are graduating each year, about 24 % of women, and 12 % of men, in that age-group. If men lifted their game, by 2020, a quarter of all Indigenous people could expect to graduate from uni sooner or later.

So, sorry folks, it won’t be ‘back to the bush’ any time soon !

Joe

rmg1859 08/08/08 7:51PM

Hi Feral Sparrowhawk,

I guess you are busy looking up that website. But the Census every five years provides another source of valuable information. According to the last four Censuses (Census is more correct), the number of (self-identifying) graduates was as follows (from memory):

1991 Census: about 3,660 graduates
1996 Census: 8,830 graduates
2001 Census: 13,399 graduates
2006 Census: 19,246 graduates

Add for 2006 and 2007 (at about 1100 graduates each year), and at a minimum, you have 21,446 graduates at theend of last year. Add another 1100 for this year, and there should be at least 22,546 graduates by the end of this year. Add back a factor of 1.2 (which DEEWR under-counts graduate numbers relative to the Census count) for the last three years and you get a minimum of 23,200 graduates. Add back the Census under-count which has been made so much of, a factor of about 1.13, and you get a possible 26,200 graduates by the end of this year.

And, of course, that birth-rate boom will massively boost the annual number of Indigenous graduates. Fifty thousand by 2020 is quite feasible. Of course, the Indigenous elite won’t like it: no longer the favoured Few, the Glorious Exceptions, the Treasured Unique Ones. Hard to be elite when there are tens of thousands of you.

So what, I hear you ask ? Well, so what if you or your kid graduates from uni ? So what ? So that they can get better jobs and take the load off you and make a life for themselves, for one thing. So that they can contribute to the betterment of society, for another. So that they can pull down the unemployment/welfare/non-working population and reduce taxes for the working stiff, for another. So that they can be role-models, for another. So that they can get better jobs, safer, cleaner, more pleasant, better-paying, than factory work, or picking fruit, or washing dishes, and have less reason to hit the piss every Friday night, for another.

Feel free, feral sparrowhawk, to stick your oar in anytime.

Now off to watch the Olympics: bigger than Nuremberg ! And in colour too, not like those 1936 black-and-white celebrations, how dull that must have been. Hitler, eat your heart out ! Of course, if the smog doesn’t lift, or it doesn’t rain when and where the emperors want it to, then it’s off to the labour camps with the met crews, all 50,000 of them. If any of them are Uighur or Tibetan, boy, are they in trouble.

I’m cheering for the US flag-bearer.

Cheers,

Joe

revilo 10/08/08 7:36PM

I wonder why the Chinese cheered Putin and booed Bush at the opening ceremony.
Probably because Putin’s pectorals are prettier. He can lift heavier weights?
Any way.
What the world needs is a great big melting pot, big enough big enough to take the world and all it’s got (I’m sure the Chinese can build one, helped by Volva Putin)…and keep it stirring for a hundred yrears ore more…and turn out coffee-coloured people by the score.(as long as they relinquish their former American and dare I say, Georgian identities)
I did’nt say it was an original idea, just a good one.
Ha Ha,
Oli

rmg1859 11/08/08 11:50AM

Hi Oliver,

Yes, that’s happening: California is about to go minority-majority, roughly 25 % Hispanic, 20 % African-American, 5% Asian-American, not to mention Samoan-Americans, Canadians, even Australians. Migration and refugee policies favour, almost by definition, young people who marry and have kids, so a high proportion of the 270,000 births in Australia last year were either Indigenous, non-Anglo Australian or ‘new’ Australian births. So it is highly likely that a huge proportion of Australia’s young population by 2020 will be non-Anglo, a bit like they were 220 years ago. Check out most school classrooms even now, particularly in more working-class areas, and you will see Vietnamese and Sudanese and Afghan kids, and probably doing better than the Anglo kids, even in English language.

The vast majority of young Indigenous people are marrying non-Indigenous partners: 3.8 % of births in 2007 were to couples with at least one Indigenous partner. In a generation, that will be up to 6%, not necessarily with Anglo partners, but still with Indigenous parentage. Of course, by then, Australia will be so ‘coffee-coloured’ that it will be quite common for young people to describe themselves in multiples - ‘yes, I’m an Aboriginal-Greek-Afghan Auastralian,’ or ‘I’m a Scottish-Islander-Vietnamese-Sudanese Australian.’ Fantastic !

When I was born, Australia was monochrome, bland, Menzies-boring, with a handful of Italians and Greeks and Maltese people who Anglos looked on with suspicion for their funny food and their subversive plot not to speak proper English. I was lucky enough to go to school in Darwin, which was already multicultural, the most wonderful town to grow up in, where the all-white football team never won a game (at least in those years) and the Chinese baseball team DCRC always won the premiership. ‘Full-blood’ Aboriginal people were still kept out of the town, allowed to the movies only one night a week from the Reserve, through a side door.

Thank God those days are over ……. Thank God those Apartheid barriers have been ripped down by the winning of equal rights by all Australians, where anybody can go anywhere, at least on public land, without permits or soldiers checking them out continually. And where Aboriginal people can get their lands back - that puts Australia ahead of some other countries who deny eve nthe right of access for people to their ancestral lands, let alone give it back to them.

Joe

denise 11/08/08 12:05PM

Enjoyable article Irfan and thought provoking as well.
I’d not seen it before, but the way the forces of politics works is both in cooperation, (to ensure the mainstream Parties make it as difficult as possible for an Independent, truly representative member of an electorate to enter Parliament) in order to retain one group or ideological set of ideas in power.
And then in the feigning of conflicts to ‘appear’ to be different to the public, when in reality Conservatism is all we ever really get.
Because to be a Radical (the opposite of Conservative) is to object to any form of totalitarianism, even if it is against what they themselves believe to be anti-logical, draconian education being indoctrinated to the nation’s children.
Hirsi is wrong in her attitude simply because she is totalitarian in her approach, but perhaps this is an understandable reaction to feel so strongly a political swing against her religious enemies who are so violently totalitarian.

rmg1859 12/08/08 11:08AM

Hi Denise,

Don’t confuse ‘radical’ with ‘progressive’: it may be a rather artificial distinction, but it seems to me that ‘radical’ refers to actions and beliefs of people who promote the interests of their group, who are willingto go to jail for it, to die for it, who are preoccupied only by the progress of their own group - but couldn’t give a toss about anyone else. Examples are everywhere: the workers who supported the Vietnam War to get more overtime; the women who will never vote for a Black man in the US; the Blacks here who dismiss everybody else as ‘c**ts’; the battling farmers who couldn’t care less about the environment or land rights, etc. So you can certainly have Conservative Radicals, that’s almost part of the definition.

‘Progressive’ (of course, this is just my take on the difference) refers to actions or people who have compassion for the struggles of people other than their own: whites who go into bat for Aboriginal rights, or males who march for women’s liberation, Black women who stick up for refugee rights. There are plenty of ‘Radicals’, in fact most of us are ‘Radical’ in the sense that we will fight for our own rights and privileges, but ‘Progressives’ are a bit more few and far between, if only because they often have to stand against the perceived interests of their ‘own’ group. Radicals are parochial, progressives are universalist. Radicals think of the impact of an issue on their own group first, progressives think of the rightness or wrongness of the principle behind an issue. In that sense, Radicals are opportunist, while Progressives are principled.

So, to be anti-Radical does not necessarily mean that someone is anti-Progressive: an anti-Radical may be objecting to the narrow-minded parochialism of a ‘Radical’ approach to a particular issue. For example, to oppose or condemn sections of the union movement in the sixties for its support of US aggression in Vietnam, would put ‘Progressives’ at odds with ‘Radicals’, and we could all think of examples if we tried. Can a Radical have principles ? Can someone battle for the rights of ‘their own group’ without putting the rights of others down ? I’m sure they can :)

IMHO

Joe

rmg1859 12/08/08 11:28AM

To get back to what I wanted to contribute, just another note on Indigenous success at tertiary education: what fields have Indigenous people graduated in ?

In the twelve years 1995-2006, graduate numbers, according to the Commonwealth department of education, totalled 13,208. If we take under-count into consideration, total graduations in those twelve years might have been nearly 16,000. In just those twelve years,

* 3129 Indigenous people graduated in Education, mostly Primary and ECE;

* 2313 graduates in Health, i.e. Nursing, Health Administration, Radiology, Occupational Therapy, Laboratory Science, Podiatry, Pharmacy, Health Science, Dietetics, etc;

* about 600 in Law and Legal Studies;

* about 240 in Conservation Management, Environmental Science, Agriculture and Bioscience;

* 117 in Architecture and Building, including Surveying and the Built Environment;

* 1300 in Business, Commerce and Administration;

* about 20 in Veterinary Science (mostly from Murdoch);

* 664 in Sciences;

* 4,447 in Arts, Social Sciences, etc.

and of course many others in a vast range of fields, all just in twelve years.

So if we add back all the graduates for the years up to 1994, and the graduates for 2007 and this year, by the end of this year, there could be close to six thousand teachers, four thousand Health professionals, eight hundred Law graduates (most of whom would have gone on to do the study or get the experience to be admitted to the Bar), seven hundred in Sciences, three hundred in Conservation and the Environment, fifteen hundred in Business and Commerce. And so on.

Graduates are fairly evenly spread across Australia, according to the different populations in each state and Territory. A high proportion of graduates in the NT have done their studies in SA, WA, NSW, Queensland and Victoria - even at the Tasmanian Maritime College.

Two thirds are women. The vast majority come from, have graduated, and are now working in urban areas. About 17 % hold post-graduate qualifications, especially teachers.

I hope this information can enthuse and inspire NM readers.

Joe

athena 29/08/08 5:14PM

I don’t agree with revilo’s interpretation of a ‘radical’. What he is describing are extremists and fanatics. Radical means advocating the transformation of society (abolishing capitalism, say, in favour of democratic socialism). Radical comes from the Latin word radix, meaning root. Radicals are those who challenge the fundamentals of the existing system of politics and governance. Therefore making it the opposite of conservatism, which wishes to preserve the status Quo. For this reason we usually associate radical with the Left and say Far Right for those who are extremely opposed to progressive change and would resort to repression to make sure the status Quo of the wealthy few having exclusive control of everything remains in place. It’s in the best interest, of course, of those in power to denigrate radical lefties as the ‘looney left’ or ‘far left’—as if they were on a par with Moonies and the Ku Klux Klan! But they are no more lunatics than those of us who oppose China’s suppression of Tibetans and protesters are ‘anti-Chinese’ (as if what we oppose are pandas and the Great wall of China!).

rmg1859 30/08/08 12:18AM

Beautiful Athena,

As an ex-fanatic, I respectfully offer the suggestion that your concept of ‘radical’ is a bit broad: it concurs with my lesser concept of ‘progressive’. ‘Radical’, to me, suggests something more specific: that people may be radical in their own interests, even willing to die for the interests of their particular group, but are indifferent to the interests and demands and pleas of other groups, and may even fight against those other interests.

Many social groups are, in their specific ways, radical: workers, women, Indigenous, gays, those bestially-inclined, left-handers, and it is no great achievement for such people to be obsessed and totally focussed on the interests, the fortunes, the difficulties and achievements, of their group alone; and stuff any other groups. Isn’t that so, beautiful Athena ? How common is it that a group can be very radical in their own interests, but not just indifferent, but quite hostile, even conservative, to the interests of other groups ?

To me, the term ‘progressive’, although less exciting, may convey the notion of ‘working in the interests of a group other than one’s own’. This may be quite arbitrary, but it seems useful to differentiate political movements and people who are

(a) focussed exclusively on their own obvious and narrow interests, from those who are

(b) prepared to risk their security, peace of mind, and even reputations, even their lives, for the sake of people and groups other than their own.

What do you think ? Is this a useful distinction ?

Joe

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