On the ABC Lateline program that launched the latest round of racist hysteria, Nanette Rogers, the Crown prosecutor in Alice Springs, openly blamed Aborigines for the terrible problems confronting their communities: "Violence is entrenched in a lot of aspects of Aboriginal society [and] Aboriginal people choose not to take responsibility for their own actions."

She did not say a word about the endemic unemployment, the lack of even basic facilities, the day to day racism of police and white authorities.

Rogers, who has a PhD from Sydney University, is a classic example of the middle class paternalistic do-gooder who starts out wanting to "help" oppressed people but ends up despising them.

Middle-class liberals condemn socialists because we argue for mass struggle to win a better life for Indigenous people, and for linking up the fights of Aborigines with those of white workers and students in a united struggle against capitalism. Instead, liberals champion individual "solutions".

Rogers first went to Alice Springs to work for the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service. But the Aborigines did not live up to her middle-class standards: "I ended up getting sick of acting for violent Aboriginal men and putting up the same old excuses when I was appearing for them."

So she took a job as a Crown Prosecutor and went from trying to keep Aborigines out of jail to advocating locking up as many of them as possible. Evidently she is not sick of acting for the violent Australian state with its racist mandatory sentencing laws and its proud record of murdering Aborigines like Eddie Murray in the police cells of Wee Waa or on the streets of Redfern and Palm Island.

Rogers prefers instead to blame the victims of this appalling racist violence, and for this she receives a very handsome salary. Save us from middle-class do-gooders!