Some misinformation here corrected.
All Australians are entitled to free health care.
All school kids are entitled to free dental care. After that, dental care is means tested. (If you want free health care as an adult (its means tested), then lobby your govt. fight for it: just don’t say ‘it’s not fair, they get all the benefits I do not’ , someone fought for any benefits Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders get and believe me, they aren’t enough. We pay high taxes, insist your govt stop throwing money away on companies like ‘ Price Waterhouse consultancy’ and reinvest in your public service.
If you are a non Aboriginal Australian with school age kids you can access dental care for them. Some parents know that, many are unaware. Usually the parents who know this have had Dept of Health mobile dental services come to their kids’ schools. Many schools don’t have the mobile dental services come around, but you can access the free service.
Ring the Department of Health Dental services (it may have a different name now, as it’s been a while since I accessed it for my kids a few times when I was broke. And I only found out about them because a parent from another school told me about the free dental. WHAT? I said’ FREE DENTAL - WHAAAT? When I had had some money again, I found it easier, more convenient, to access my local dentist that I paid for). The mobile dental van with its free dental services is coming to my grandchild’s school next month so free dental is still available for children. Insist on it.
Demand better of your govt. & be better informed. Always ask about your rights. It’s something Australians generally tend not to do as we aren’t encouraged to. (Australia wash colonised as a penal colony and that thinking then, that a convict had few rights, has filtered down somewhat inter- generationally Be aware, every single govt representative of yours, both federal and state, knows their rights.
First Nations people do get preference for Educational Systems.. How does it work? One example: In my understanding: eg Two students get 50% in their final exams. Both barely scrapped by, and there’s University One place left. One is an Aboriginal teenager, another is not. The University will take the Aboriginal teenager and not the non Aboriginal teenager. Why so? Because there’s recognition that it’s more likely it’s taken a lot more effort for an Aboriginal Teenager to get that far. They face so many roadblocks. (eg a court is much more likely to sentence an Aboriginal child to a custodial sentence than a white child - for exactly the same crime). But, its not to say the non Aboriginal teenager in the example did not face roadblocks, but that generally, in our society, an Aboriginal teenager is likely to face more roadblocks than a Non Aboriginal teenager. It’s not a perfect solution. It’s up to you to demand better from your govts. Voting every 3 or 4 years helps, but becoming activists in your own lives helps that much more. If nothing else, if something unfair pisses you off,!write an email and send it to your MP and every relevant MP. One of the shiftiest shock jocks ever - Alan Jones - used to do that because, it works. Enough letters on the same topic and the MPs stop ignoring you and others. Don’t be put off by those pithy non answer emails they send back in reply. Write again and Organise people to write. Ring their offices, let them know. Find out when your representatives are in their offices and make an appointment to see them. They work for you.
A Pp poster is right - The book is called ‘Dark Emu’ and not ‘emu rising’ but I always mistakenly call it that. Might be the ‘rising’ bit and a connection to the phrase ‘phoenix rising’ some Aboriginal people do question his Aboriginality, some do not. At any rate his research is good.
There is a documentary on Netflix - it was on our ABC but I think it may have moved to Netflix - called ‘in my blood it runs’ about a 10 year old Aboriginal child growing up in Alice Springs. He’s a great kid but goes perilously close to running off the tracks despite a loving, but impoverished, family. He triumphs but over the course of a couple of years the documentary is filmed over, you start to see all the roadblocks faced by Aboriginal children and their parents.
Not to say many white people people don’t face roadblocks. But for Black , and many Brown and Asian people too, the very colour of their skin is a roadblock in our society. Preconceptions abound. Preconceptions abound for poor people, single parent families, disabled people, abused women and their kids, and so on.
Recognise though, that that Original People, the First Australians, are the ones whose lands were colonised. We to come here or most of our ancestors wanted to come here. First Nations People - they are owed a chance to improve their lives. They are owed a debt. (Despite the popular bullshit, theybaren’t asking for handouts.). On average, First Nations people are still living at levels of Great Depression Era Poverty. And they are amongst the most roadblocked people in the world. We should not get to take nearly everything of theirs and then say ‘okay, now we are all equal.’