Responsible leadership needed

There is a surge again in news about regional aboriginal lawlessness (particularly amongst youth).  The ABC notes:

• In short: Widespread unrest broke out in Alice Springs on Tuesday, including an attack on a pub by people throwing bricks at doors and windows.
• The incidents occured after a ceremony and funeral for a teenager who died when an allegedly stolen car crashed two weeks ago.
• What's next? The Alice Springs mayor is calling for the federal government to step in to address social problems in the town.

And on 7.30 the other night, they did a story on aimless youth getting into trouble in Moree.

The problem here has been a long time brewing:   the relatively moderate aboriginal leadership figures are ageing and seemingly lost influence.  They placed all their eggs for future change into the one mechanism - The Voice - which may have been well intentioned, but failed due to appearing to moderates as pretty much a mere re-run of a bureaucratic approach that had failed before, and to the young radical activists as insultingly inadequate as a power sharing arrangement. 

And of course, when the Voice failed, it meant that there was virtually uniform criticism within aboriginal advocacy of "the system" - apart from the handful (if that!) of Right wing aboriginal figures (Mundine, Price).

Given that Mundine and Price seem to be too "political" in a self interested way, and don't seem to have much of a following within aboriginal communities broadly, the end result is a real vacuum where there needs to be responsible, moderate aboriginal leadership that should be sending the right messages to aboriginal youth - that their best future lies in getting ahead in the modern world they find themselves in, regardless of historical wrongs, and this means being part of the modern economy, and all that goes with it - get a reasonable education, respect property rights, and other people of all races.  

Instead, the radical aboriginal advocacy which is currently in the ascendancy is emphasising grievance and cultural pride, which is not the messaging needed to stop crime and anti-social behaviour.  

It's unfortunate that its a Labor Party federally that is caught with this problem.   

It's also unfortunate that, as the messaging I am suggesting is easily painted as "right wing", the Right in politics just has a tainted reputation at the moment for sounding reasonable on nearly anything.   

So I think it is from the mainstream Left that there needs to be some bravery here - to try to get aboriginal leadership to break the emphasis on grievance (and cultural re-writing, such as the dubious attempt of academia to try to re-write pre-Colonial aboriginal society as something with equivalence to other technologically advanced societies), and more emphasis on the "join us" messaging.   

Of course, it is also easy to point to Labor Left apologies for past wrongs - going back to Paul Keating - as having encouraged the "pro-grievance, 24/7" style of radical aboriginal advocacy to take hold.   But this is why I say the course correction has to come from the Left too - at least they can argue in good faith that they did acknowledge past wrongs, but now is the time to move past the emphasis on that.  The Right - in figures such as Dutton and other - are easily dismissed due to never having joined the attempt to acknowledge past wrongs.