Other than empty cliches and angry slogans, what a pact between white and black Australia might achieve is never explained by its loudest and most insistent advocates. Before proceeding down this path, what about addressing alcoholism, abuse and dysfunction?

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Papers rescued from a landfill, painstakingly unearthed archival material, long-forgotten records, diary entries and correspondence put pay to the myth that racist policies saw many Aboriginal children removed from their parents. The reasons were good and the numbers tiny

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The SBS series was valuable, but might have achieved much more had it eschewed the easy and obligatory voicing of several participants' 'white guilt'. First, that sentiment is unwarranted. Second, self-laceration doesn't do a thing to get the rubbish cleaned up

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No activist of the sort the ABC keeps on speed dial will admit as much, but their refusal to address the dreadful circumstances of so many women and kids in so many dysfunctional communities says it all. Why talk of grog and violence when there is a cartoonist to crucify?

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The absurd complaint against Bill Leak and his infamous cartoon has ended with Gillian Triggs' & Co throwing in the towel and "closing the books". That children suffer while feather-nested thought police suppress discussion of their wasted lives is the real obscenity

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If Aborigines are to be written into the Constitution, what is that must be added? More than that, will a few sentences of feel-good boilerplate make the slightest difference in remedying the dysfunction and abuse that marks so many Indigenous communities?

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First, know that accusing someone of racism is enough, as a mob of keyboard warriors will soon take up and amplify the cry. Second, don't spare the emotive language. And finally, close tight your eyes to demonstrable fact and inconvenient evidence

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Bill Leak's cartoon set the twittering class to displays of by-the-numbers outrage. Rather than hashtag sermons they might have addressed the actual causes and problems afflicting so many Aborigines. Yes, they might have done that but, sadly, they never will

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Apart from calls for yet another royal commission, what sense can we draw from the appalling number of Aborigines who die by their hands? Again, we hear that a renewed celebration of heritage will make all the difference, yet suicide in remote communities is far more common

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Words can be troublesome things, as their accepted meanings might derail an advocate's invoking of emotion in lieu of the more relevant examination of unpalatable fact. No wonder so many discussions of Indigenous betterment come couched in the vocabulary of vacuity

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