The great irony is that the 'treaty process' the Victorian government has initiated and Indigenous activists have embraced owes nothing to Aboriginal culture. What it promises to deliver is different laws for different races, which is the very definition of the racism its advocates profess to find so repugnant

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It is generally known that those Welcome to Country ceremonies which these days precede almost every public event are made of whole cloth. Yet the fiction, as the celebrated anthropologist A. P. Elkin might have noted, is far more palatable than the actual means by which rival tribes sorted their disagreements and promoted amity

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Constitutional recognition would create different rules for different races, which would benefit a well-placed few while denying many Aborigines access to their full potential. It is a tragic irony that the paternalism of the past, which today's elites decry, would be imposed by template on the least fortunate, least educated and most isolated

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Beer-sodden Western Australia's police shooting up secret sites, Kangaroo Island ferry passengers deriding Aborigines and the island's residents according the, ahem, proud indigenous visitor a 'bitter' reception -- is there no end to the Melbourne University professor's gift for getting himself oppressed?

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For too long now, laws have eroded free speech in Australia, and the indigenous Voice would see that liberty further constrained. Of the numerous objections that can and should be raised, the prospect of a nation divided into those who can air claims and those who will find it in their best interest to remain mute is perhaps the most insidious consequence

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Most young Australians have been spoon-fed the ‘invasion = colonisation’ and ‘frontier wars/genocide’ mantras from primary school through to university. Education is a powerful thing, and whoever controls it controls the future. Is it any wonder, amid a declining appreciation of what it means to be Australian, the likes of Bruce Pascoe make out like bandits? 

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As sovereign individuals we have agency, but with agency comes responsibility, which is why the Uluru Statement is first of all an exercise in the authors' self-deception. Rather than acknowledge incarceration rates, violence and community dysfunction as ills that can only be remedied from within, they are packaged as scars of external oppression visited upon the blameless

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The Uluru Statement falsely portrays people of Aboriginal and British descent as long-standing enemies, and it misrepresents British, Australian and international law. When the Aboriginal political class demands 'a more inclusive and nuanced narrative' no one should be in any doubt that, far from producing a more unified nation, it will achieve the precise opposite

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It's such a nebulous term I can never hear it without Paul Simon’s words coming to mind – ‘the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip sliding away’. If we are never told what this 'reconciliation' is, how will we know when we get there? Looking to the likes of Marcia Langton and Tom Calma for guidance doesn't promise much in the way of enlightenment

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For a whitefella to make a comment or have an opinion about Indigenous issues is considered ‘cultural imperialism’ and therefore inappropriate, even ‘racist’, by the city-dwelling, university-educated, grant-fed elite. Meanwhile, as abused children take their own lives in remote Aboriginal communities, their only response is to blame white privilege

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