Australia is a first-world country whose indigenous people live under third-world conditions, and nowhere is this so obvious as in the education sector.
For years, the parlous state of Aboriginal schooling has been recorded in study after study, government inquiry after inquiry. Yet it seems almost no progress has been made despite the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars.
In a scathing report released this week, conservative economist Helen Hughes condemned the Northern Territory government for its manifest failures to tackle the issue of Aboriginal education disadvantage in its remote communities. Professor Hughes said the government had known for more than 10 years that its indigenous students were finishing school with the numeracy and literacy skills of five-year-olds.
'Ten thousand illiterate, non-numerate teenagers and young men and women in their 20s are unemployable because of the educational failures of the last decade,' she said. 'Many Aboriginal schools do not have standard facilities, such as electricity, ablution blocks and teaching equipment.
'But the principal causes of the absence of literacy and numeracy are not physical shortcomings but separate Aboriginal curriculums and substandard teaching. Aboriginal children who live in the open Australian society and attend mainstream schools perform as well as their peers.'
Professor Hughes is a senior fellow with right-wing think-tank the Centre for Independent Studies. But she is no remote commentator on the situation facing black children; she has first-hand experience of just how badly educated they are.