There are no noble savages, only savages

The high moral ground is coveted territory in politics, and elusive.
We can distinguish two ways of attaining it. One is to make pragmatic, and often unpopular decisions about difficult issues, such as concerns the welfare of those who can not or will not take such responsibility for themselves. The other method involves declaring by fiat that you inhabit the pointy summit of the high moral ground and that this can be best demonstrated by manufacturing as much collective guilt as possible and then liberally spreading it around (or in this case, spreading it around the Liberals. More of that shortly.)

Today our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, will apologise in Parliament to Australian Aboriginals for decades of supposed mistreatment at the hands of successive Governments, missionaries and social welfare agencies.

Well, I’m writing to say, “Kevin, count me out.”

I’m not sorry. Not in the slightest, and you’ve debased the dignity of our nation by dishonestly saying something on behalf of millions of other Australians that isn’t true and isn’t felt by us.
If you’re sorry, that’s your right. If the Union thugs now running every government in Australia get teary and feel the need to send flowers, good on them, but don’t presume to speak for me.

I take the view that the so called “Stolen Generations” weren’t stolen, they were rescued. Often in a flawed, under-resourced way, but always with high minded and beneficent intent on the part of dedicated social and mission workers who felt they were giving impoverished Aboriginal children a chance of a better and more civilised life away from the abusive, primitive shanties they were coming from. Keith Windschuttle, armed merely with facts, does his usual good job of demolishing the myth of the Stolen Generations in this piece in The Australian. This view is not racist. There's a white drug dealing single mother in our own street whose poor children run feral through the neighbourhood. Someone should give them a better chance too, and that would probably involve forced separation as well.

The only person in Australia yet to be declared as having legal standing as a “stolen” child came from a situation where, as the case notes of the time say, he was a "neglected child without parents" at 13 months old, "suffering from malnutrition and infective diarrhoea". They add: "The other two children are neglected. Mother has cleared out and father is boozing." This man was given half a million dollars by a South Australian court for being taken from that environment as an infant, with scant acknowledgement that the intentions of those orchestrating the move were far from sinister.

I would regard such a situation as common to the many supposed incidences of government sanctioned separation. There are no noble savages, only savages.

Our new Labor Federal Government, swept away in a trendy stupor of social conscience is naïve to the point of recklessness if they think that an apology will not be followed by a flood of punitive legal claims, as the usual drones in the corrupt Aboriginal industry want to claim (repeatedly trying, as in this example to insert the words “attempted genocide” into the apology- a disgraceful slur on the Christian dedication of those who ran the missions and schools of outback Australia in the last century)

I don’t accept that the “oldest and enduring cultures in human history”, as Rudd’s wording will say, is anything to be particularly proud of when that history involves forty thousand years of living in abject superstition, and totally failing to create anything approaching systemised agriculture, a written language, architecture, philosophy or the wheel. Nor have I never subscribed to the politically correct doctrine that there is never any place to evaluate the merits of differing societies for fear of causing offence.

The broad march of history is inexorably one of increasing civilisation and technology, all the way back to the pre-history of Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Aboriginal culture, living in far-away Australia were a stagnant gyre in this upward struggle, but no one should make the mistake of thinking that it wasn't going to arrive sooner or later, and would represent a massive "outside context problem" for them when the West arrived. Western society may have caused and suffered a great deal of misery over the centuries, but they certainly don’t have a monopoly on it. The misery endured by thousands of generations of Aborigines as a result of starvation, tribal warfare and superstitious fear genuinely deserves comparison with the benefits of Western medicine, representative democracy and impartial justice. We may have brought alcohol, smallpox and the gun, but Aboriginals should count their blessings that Australia was settled by the British instead of the Spanish, French or Portuguese. It would have been worse.

It's rich for people to criticise white Europeans for decimating their culture while they do so wearing fabrics invented by western chemistry, standing in front of temples of legislation and litigation invented and refined by the West over a period of two thousand years, speaking into cameras the technology of which would have been regarded as black magic by those people an uncomfortably short time ago, historically speaking, and availing themselves of Western antibiotics when they are sick.

An apology (and I predict that our KRudd will turn on the water works today- Labor tradition demands it) will do nothing to reconcile Aboriginal Australians to the rest of civilisation in either the short or the long terms. As my good friend Michael Sutcliffe points out in his own blog, what is curiously missing is any reciprocal intention to make a universal declaration of “forgiveness” as a counterpart to this national apology. Such absence reveals the ruse, because what this is really all about is continuing the debilitating culture of victimhood Aboriginals have genuinely suffered under for as long as there have been trendy lefties to champion their cause and promise them a bucket of money to palliate their greivances.

This logic, ably articulated by former government minister Tony Abbott, stands in stark contrast to the soft indecisiveness that has overtaken the Liberal/National opposition. Those parliamentarians, to a man, should absent themselves or turn their backs on tomorrow’s gesture. I am disappointed that they have too-quickly abandoned the closely reasoned and eminently justifiable policy of the former government which was upheld for over a decade. Aboriginal Australians, like all Australians deserve nothing from life except equality of opportunity, which they've had since Phillip landed.

Usually the “greatest good for the greatest number” in national governance comes not from symbolic gestures but from pragmatic decisions made with a full and frank acknowledgement that some people can’t govern themselves. In such cases, paternalism isn’t a dirty word, it’s a high virtue.

My name is Nathan Zamprogno and this is my view. And by the way, your right to disagree with me without being lynched was invented by white men, too.