Not exactly new

The attention recently given to the issue of violence in Aboriginal communities (see here for example) will shock many people. Though it is often referred to and people wonder about what to do and then shake their heads and walk away from it.
There is a variety of issues. The safety of children must be paramount, and blow all the stuff we might say about preservation of indigenous culture, we cannot use that sort of argument to avoid responsibility. The integrity of people is also at stake here. We cannot simply say we will come in and impose solutions without reference to individual freedom. (The stolen generation solution) The fear of this sort of paternalism is, I suspect, the key dynamic that grinds this issue to the inevitable standstill.
Frightened that we might be accused of all sorts of things from jingoism to nazism,perpetrating a new 'stolen generation', we have chosen to do nothing. Worse than this we close our eyes and refuse even to discuss it. For a few days we are being forced to discuss it again.
There is no easy solution.
All these serious social issues do raise the question about why governments choose to return their taxation windfall to the wealthy and not to resourcing solutions for the most pitiful in our society.
There are of course no votes in aboriginal people.
One would think that ear-marking, say, an additional one billion dollars towards aboriginal health, policing and education, the roll-out of Opal (non-sniffable) petrol in the NT must all surely go a long way towards alleviating some of the circumstances that drive these issues.