Hypocrisy: alive and well on Sky news

This morning on Sky news we were presented with a distressing story about "indigenous" (I guess you don't say "aboriginal" these days, right?) people in northern Australia who are regularly abandoning their children to the streets while they drink themselves into oblivion. Once again there is talk of adopting these hapless little souls into nice, middle class white families.

But while the report did make mention of the earlier Australian practice of basically abducting black children from their families and re-locating them to nicer white families, no one was prepared to highlight the real reason for these terrible episodes in Australian history: the fact that when the British colonised that vast southern land, just as they did in America and elsewhere, they treated the people who were already living there as sub-human vermin to be exploited at best; exterminated at worst.

The terrible scenes depicted on Sky news this morning, with black men and women staggering around wasted while their children wandered the streets are the sure signs of a smashed culture. It's the same with the native American peoples, where the two commonest forms of death are alcoholism and violence. But what else is there to do when everything of value has been stolen from you?