By ERWIN CHLANDA
Unequal treatment on the basis of race is something the Americans lose a great deal of sleep over, while here in the Northern Territory its government, without blinking, excluded whites from three initiatives for blacks just last week.
Is there a case for reverse discrimination in the NT? As it happened the events here coincided with a piece about affirmative action in the New York Review of Books, called Justifying Diversity.
Writer Noah Feldman examines the issues on his side of the Pacific in the light of the Trump Administration and its appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
It would be fair to ask whether a parallel story in the Territory would need to be headlined “Justifying Discrimination” as three government ministers bestowed millions of dollars of public money upon people whose race was a key condition for the allocations.
By contrast, reverse discrimination (as we sometimes call it) is regarded to be proper if it is just one consideration, judging by Mr Feldman’s article about the American university admission system.
In one of the three initiatives last week in the NT Education Minister Selena Uibo provided substantial scholarships “to encourage more Aboriginal Territorians to become teachers and educators”.
Non-Aborigines need not apply for that money, of course.
American universities use “diversity” as a yardstick in their student admission policies and how that can be achieved is a complicated argument.
An unsuccessful white applicant for admission has claimed that affirmative action, if it plays a role in the admission process, violates equality under the civil rights laws as well as the Constitution’s 14th Amendment: That says no state must “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”.
Conservative judges, who with Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment are now the majority in the US Supreme Court, have used this in their attacks on affirmative action.
They have “struck down various types of affirmative action as violating the equal protection rights of whites,” writes Mr Feldman.
“These decisions undermined the rationale for affirmative action, which was, its advocates generally maintained, to make up for slavery and segregation by ensuring that AfricanAmericans (and sometimes Latinos) would be able to obtain professional opportunities that had historically been denied them.
“The conservative justices repeatedly cast doubt on this argument by saying that a sufficiently close connection between past harms and current remedies had not been demonstrated.”
So over here the question could well be asked: What progress have our Aboriginal peoples, and the government policies in interaction with them, made in areas of economic independence, employment, underemployment and the charade of work for the dole; health, life expectancy, education and crime since – say – the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in 1976, their consequent acquisition of freehold ownership of half the Northern Territory landmass, and the concurrent receipt of many billions of dollars from the taxpayer?
Writes Mr Feldman: “Justice Antonin Scalia, the most aggressive of those conservatives, went further, insisting that any classification by race for any reason whatever violated a principle of constitutional colourblindness that he ascribed to the equal protection clause.”
Before the arrival of Justice Kavanaugh the university admission issue was deadlocked and that “left the balance of power with Lewis Powell Jr, the swing justice.
“Powell offered a compromise position: affirmative action in admissions would be unconstitutional if it assigned explicit weight to race,” writes Mr Feldman.
“It would be permissible, however, to take account of race as part of a policy that considered ‘diversity’ as ‘only one element in a range of factors a university properly may consider in attaining the goal of a heterogeneous student body’.”
No such mucking around like that in the Territory.
Ministers Dale Wakefield ($5.4m), Ken Vowles ($10m) and Selena Uibo (up to $60,000 per applicant, no number of applicants given) allocated public money to people on the condition of being Aboriginal.
No worries, mate.
Photo: Protesters at a demonstration against Harvard University’s admissions process, Copley Square, Boston, October 2018, Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg/Getty Images.
No worries – because no one is able to take them to court as our legal system cost too much.
Some people do need help but from what I have seen its the privileged ones that take the opportunities up while the ones that really need the help don’t get any help.
It is also amusing that a white person who may have spent time in a community for various reasons can be given a skin name by the community elder and they are then considered Indigenous from that point on.
All it takes is a declaration by the elder to say they are part of their community and they can cash in on all sorts of benefits.
Re James T Smerk Posted November 26, 2018 at 1:30 pm
Agree with James’s view that “no one is able to take them to court as our legal system cost too much”.
The Commonwealth maintains its claim of legal authority to order racial segregation of Australians.
Commonwealth refusal of legal assistance long obstructed our serious challenge to Commonwealth’s claim that it is lawful to order segregation of Australians from their families using racial identification as it measure.
While Commonwealth maintains its Northern Territory in a state of apartheid, our family continues search for legal representation to enable High Court receive, consider, then determine, our constitutional challenge.
“Reverse discrimination” under Australian anti-discrimination legislation is officially known as “special measures”.
“Special measures” provisions were first included in s.9 and s.10 of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.
The human rights policy is that minority groups need special assistance and allowances to access the anti-discrimination tribunal / court process.
This thinking does not set any goalposts and has taken hold in the far left wing Human Rights Commission.
Complainants from the wider community have great difficulty pursuing justice under the RDA.
The Commonwealth promotes and practices racial apartheid.
There is a lack of correlation between “special measures” and claimed past injustices.
On occasion it is rational, simpler, perhaps cheaper, to make a decision to provide entire groups a single compensation for past injustices many of them shared.
Such compensation(s) for equity are best divided and shared to ensure each individual deemed suffering the “past injustices” may use their share in manners decided by them.
Changing how we live is a decision each individual makes, with or without consideration of consequences.
Each needs accept responsibility for their own stupid decisions.