Typically enough for a Labor Party and a pro-Aboriginal constituency ever susceptible to such things, the distraction is but a slogan, and one almost without meaning. It is compensation, particularly compensation to be paid to victims of the "stolen generation".

A South Australian victim recently won handsome compensation through the court system. The plaintiff-lawyer lobby is back spruiking the benefit of making claims, and it's now dominating the limited space for discussion.

The Government is trying to insist that individually focused compensation is not on, despite recommendations from the original stolen children report. But its own actions at the election, discussing another aspect of the same report saying sorry inevitably put it in the mix.

I have ambivalent views about compensation, and certainly not a jot of disapproval of the South Australian verdict. But my heart sinks at efforts to put compensation at the forefront of any Aboriginal agenda. It will suck energy, concentration and achievement from much more important issues of work, education, health and living conditions, and from the equally important issues of helping Aborigines liberate themselves from pauperism, despair and family dysfunction. This might suit some: after all the worse all these things remain and the more miserable Aboriginal people are, the better seems their moral case for compensation. But even then, compensation, and apologies, are not going to fill in the gap.

Labor, and Aborigines, have taken such wrong turns before, not least by converting all Aboriginal aspirations into a single slogan. In 1983, it was national land rights. Work and energy on everything else was suspended until it became obvious, thanks to the Western Australian Labor government, that this was not going to happen. There were more wasted years pursuing the silly belief that all would be well after a (consciously) imperfectly designed elected body could manage a (consciously) inadequate budget and make up for all past deficiencies.

Then, in the early years of the Howard government, matters which had not even been issues before the stolen children report, the sorry question, and the flow-on of the Aboriginal deaths in custody report filled almost the whole agenda. John Howard would say this was not his fault. He was, after all, dismissing the left's demands as meaningless symbolism and saying his focus was on "practical reconciliation". In fact, he did very little even about that.

Then, as an election year stunt, he seized on a report which seemed to put traditional Aborigines at a moral disadvantage (over child abuse) to announce an intervention in Aboriginal affairs, chiefly focused at top-down coercive management of all indigenous matters.

Labor was not (and is not) going to be wedged on the issue and, even now, changes to this doomed policy await a formal review at year's end. That Labor policy on Aboriginal affairs had not been the subject of much internal analysis or debate, and is replete with slogans, moral vanities, pious hopes, guilt and 1970s-style collectivism, has inhibited its capacity to have anything else much on the table.

Labor has not been part of the debate about welfarism which it sees as coming essentially from the radical right (if most articulately espoused by Noel Pearson), but also reflecting a change of thinking from the old left shown by people such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. They argue a welfare system can provide a safety net and even a ladder to those who are motivated to take responsibility for their lives and want nothing more than to be out of it. But it will not work in an underclass sunk in despair, with a cultivated sense of victimhood and entitlement, and even incentives to be dependent and irresponsible.

But if Pearson's critique contains much truth, and points in the directions of better policy, it cannot be said that Howard followed it. Demonising and penalising every Aboriginal family, and returning people to the status of wards, lunatics and children, is hardly calculated to engender a new culture of accepting personal responsibility.

Moreover, Pearson has been equally forthright, if less listened to, on another fundamental failure of access, particularly by rural Aborigines, to the ordinary services that all other Australians take for granted. Some think that because there are special programs, say in health, Aborigines get "more" than other citizens. The truth is, Aborigines consume, on average, less than half the public goods the average Australian does, but need them more.

This is true in health, in education and in basic municipal and community services. Whatever the failures of Aborigines' to get off their bums and make the best of their opportunities on offer, the failure to have access to services is not the fault of the victims.

It is primarily the fault of governments at every level and of bureaucracies. The problem is compounded by levels of federal administration and blame-shifting, as well as failures to coordinate the work of different agencies, by poor planning and, as often as not, poor consultation, or, under the last minister and the last bureaucracy, a complete impatience with any form of consultation at all.