The underlying value of the left-liberal policies of which Raimond Gaita speaks in the August Monthly Comment is equality, which leads to self-determination. Equality and equal opportunity are magnificent values, but they are easier to say than they are to do, and we have had to maintain policies of affirmative action to move towards equity.

Left-liberal Aboriginal policies have developed a strong and magnificent Aboriginal middle class. Aboriginal artists have been responsible for the largest art commission Australians have ever been offered: the Pompidou Centre in Paris. It is Aboriginal culture which has the largest footprint in international knowledge of this country. It is Aboriginal footballers who awe the crowds at the MCG.

Those Aborigines who have not are mainly those in their tribal homelands and who live in isolated communities dependent on welfare payments. These communities are dominated by alcoholism, a disease that will not respond to policies that try to treat it through social disadvantage. Trying to cure alcoholism by treating social disadvantage is like trying to treat cancer with aspirin. Self-determination is a sophisticated motor to give to a tribal people whose traditional decision-making may be at odds with best practice in a white society, particularly when affected by the impairment of the mind and spirit from alcoholism.

Self-determination abandons Aboriginal people to their fate. We cannot do this, so we must do something, and to do something is paternalistic and racist. This is the impasse that Gaita and Robert Manne find themselves confronting. The processes so often eulogised by the Left can lead to tragic outcomes. It becomes difficult to see who is doing evil and who is suffering evil, and as such we can't be helped by Gaita's Socratic guidelines, except to be clear that the situation must be changed.

Yet Gaita and Manne, for all their predictions about the motives of the Howard government and the endurance of Noel Pearson, cannot offer one positive suggestion as to how we can bring the traditional Aborigines back from this present despair and degradation. They believed that self-determination and land rights would allow tribal Aboriginal culture to flourish. Yet it was alcoholism and madness that flourished. Self-determination is moving these Aborigines away from equality and not toward it.