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You can't 'identify' as indigenous. You either are or you're not. Andrew Bolt was a stupid provocateur. If getting political, the ALP has no objection to any

You can't 'identify' as indigenous. You either are or you're not. Andrew Bolt was a stupid provocateur. If getting political, the ALP has no objection to anyone so long as they support their view... same as the Liberal party.

freejazz 3y ago
I don't think you are getting the point, which is how it is analyzed whether someone "is or isn't" 'indigenous' and a necessary element of that was the requirement that they have indigenous blood. So I don't get where you are coming from when you say you can't "identify" as indigenous - in the law, you needed to do both.
- agentgumshoe 3y ago
  Ok I get what you're saying now. Still though, you can't exactly identify as such without the blood... But this is the whole ludicrous thing; what are they actually identifying as?. Traditional landowners? Cultural martyrs? 'Aussie?' 'Neglected outsiders? It gets really tricky if they start to actually really dig into the problem. It's like the argument is saying they're disadvantaged because they're not living their 'full modern Western life' while also supposing somehow 'we' will give back the old ways and apologise. Which is it? Hence I've been saying we need to work out what future 'Australian' is and all head towards that, as best we can. I don't even know what Australian culture is now, it's a mess of trying to be all cultures to everyone.
  - freejazz 3y ago
    I don't think anything you asked follows logically. They seem like your personal political grievances, and I don't see why they are necessary questions to ask at all
    - agentgumshoe 3y ago
      How so?
      - freejazz 3y ago
        It's literally just a list of politically pointed things that have nothing to do with whether or not someone is indigenous.
        skissane 3y ago
        I do see a potential problem: being accepted as Indigenous requires no minimum amount of ancestry; identifying as Indigenous is increasingly seen as a social benefit rather than detriment, and hence people with that ancestry (or even without it) will seek that identity out; some Indigenous community groups will try to limit access to an officially recognised Indigenous identity, but those who seek it will gravitate towards those community groups which are most generous in recognising it, and those groups will grow in power and influence as a result, producing a feedback loop which encourages lowering those barriers over time; intermarriage rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are high (over 50%) – isn't the likely result of this that, in the long-term, more and more of the population will be Indigenous? It is one thing to argue for "affirmative action" for a minority which is only 2-3% of the population - what happens as it grows to 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, etc? It also potentially results in two groups of Indigenous people – one group with majority Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in remote/regional/rural areas, who experience a great deal of social deprivation; another group with minority (in some cases even only slight) Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in urban/suburban areas, who experience far less social deprivation. With all this talk of "closing the gap", counting both groups as "Indigenous" makes "the gap" seem smaller than it actually is, and if the second group is growing, that growth can create a false sense of progress of the gap being closed, even as little or nothing improves for the first group.
        agentgumshoe 3y ago
        Meanwhile it creates stigma around Indigenous = disadvantaged which a) is a terrible way to label a group and b) ignores all the other disadvantaged people for the sake of signalling empathy the 'right' way.

freejazz 3y ago

I don't think you are getting the point, which is how it is analyzed whether someone "is or isn't" 'indigenous' and a necessary element of that was the requirement that they have indigenous blood. So I don't get where you are coming from when you say you can't "identify" as indigenous - in the law, you needed to do both.

agentgumshoe 3y ago
Ok I get what you're saying now. Still though, you can't exactly identify as such without the blood... But this is the whole ludicrous thing; what are they actually identifying as?. Traditional landowners? Cultural martyrs? 'Aussie?' 'Neglected outsiders? It gets really tricky if they start to actually really dig into the problem. It's like the argument is saying they're disadvantaged because they're not living their 'full modern Western life' while also supposing somehow 'we' will give back the old ways and apologise. Which is it? Hence I've been saying we need to work out what future 'Australian' is and all head towards that, as best we can. I don't even know what Australian culture is now, it's a mess of trying to be all cultures to everyone.
- freejazz 3y ago
  I don't think anything you asked follows logically. They seem like your personal political grievances, and I don't see why they are necessary questions to ask at all
  - agentgumshoe 3y ago
    How so?
    - freejazz 3y ago
      It's literally just a list of politically pointed things that have nothing to do with whether or not someone is indigenous.
      - skissane 3y ago
        I do see a potential problem: being accepted as Indigenous requires no minimum amount of ancestry; identifying as Indigenous is increasingly seen as a social benefit rather than detriment, and hence people with that ancestry (or even without it) will seek that identity out; some Indigenous community groups will try to limit access to an officially recognised Indigenous identity, but those who seek it will gravitate towards those community groups which are most generous in recognising it, and those groups will grow in power and influence as a result, producing a feedback loop which encourages lowering those barriers over time; intermarriage rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are high (over 50%) – isn't the likely result of this that, in the long-term, more and more of the population will be Indigenous? It is one thing to argue for "affirmative action" for a minority which is only 2-3% of the population - what happens as it grows to 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, etc? It also potentially results in two groups of Indigenous people – one group with majority Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in remote/regional/rural areas, who experience a great deal of social deprivation; another group with minority (in some cases even only slight) Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in urban/suburban areas, who experience far less social deprivation. With all this talk of "closing the gap", counting both groups as "Indigenous" makes "the gap" seem smaller than it actually is, and if the second group is growing, that growth can create a false sense of progress of the gap being closed, even as little or nothing improves for the first group.
        agentgumshoe 3y ago
        Meanwhile it creates stigma around Indigenous = disadvantaged which a) is a terrible way to label a group and b) ignores all the other disadvantaged people for the sake of signalling empathy the 'right' way.