Brian Ross wrote on Feb 22^nd, 2026 at 12:00pm:



Here are some truths:

Historical reversion: British settlement commenced in 1788, but it did not extend to the outer reaches of the Northern Territory for almost a century. Large areas remained beyond sustained colonial administration until the late nineteenth century, and some until the twentieth. Wadeye itself did not exist until 1935, when the Port Keats Catholic Mission was established.

Prior to that period, the continent, including what is now the Northern Territory was characterised by persistent inter-group violence. Violence was often severe, but its scale was constrained by geography, mobility, population density, and logistics rather than by enforceable restraint.

The imposition of colonial law introduced authority at scale. Frontier violence, though real and frequently tragic, was progressively suppressed. Retaliation gave way to adjudication. Order replaced feud. Populations stabilised and, over time, grew.

Wadeye demonstrates what occurs when that process is reversed. Under self-determination and exclusive land control, approximately 2,000 people are now concentrated at densities unknown to pre-contact desert life, yet without effective internal enforcement or consistent external authority. The result is not cultural continuity but the re-emergence of violence at scale: hundreds mobilised in armed clan conflict, a phenomenon inconceivable under ancestral nomadism and, more importantly, inconceivable anywhere else in modern Australia.

This is not a failure of funding, remoteness, or neglect. It is the predictable outcome of a system that withholds enforceable authority in deference to an ideology no longer capable of governing human behaviour in a modern setting. The state that once imposed order now withdraws it for fear of political and racialised criticism. The mass violence that periodically erupts is only the most visible expression of a deeper collapse, alongside entrenched domestic violence, chronic child sexual abuse, and the breakdown of basic social restraint.

Any serious response must therefore abandon symbolism and restore what alone has ever worked: uniform law, enforceable authority, and protection applied without exemption.

No Australian electorate has ever consented to the permanent transformation of remote Aboriginal settlements into zones of racialised governance, economic dependency, and legal exception. Native title and self-determination in their present form were never put to the public as a system of indefinite segregation, perpetual funding and deteriorating outcomes. After fifty years of demonstrable failure, any other comparable system: corporate, governmental, or humanitarian, would have seen its architects dismissed, its assumptions abandoned, and its structure fundamentally redesigned. That this has not occurred here is not evidence of success or complexity. It is evidence of ideological entrenchment and systemic, long term government failure. The model persists not because it works, but because it has been placed beyond democratic and political correction. It will not be reformed. It will simply endure, notwithstanding the human cost.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/aborigines/welcome-to-wadeye/




Aborigines, when given 'self-determination', fail.

Why would anyone have a treaty with a bunch of self-serving ratbags who cannot control, let alone protect their own people and make them flourish.  Abos, get your own house in order.