The Uluru Statement from the Heart is one of those documents, like the ‘Bringing them Home’ report that everybody has heard about, but very few have actually read. Both documents take a one-sided view of the issues they claim to address, but while the latter document has over 500 pages, the Statement from the Heart has only one.

The Uluru Statement has been widely praised and frequently described as ‘powerful’. It is nothing of the sort. Possibly the authors have chosen certain forms of expression and archaic words in an attempt to give the document gravitas. Unfortunately they have failed and instead produced a page of pretentious and tendentious text which has about it the same vague air of fakery we see in the increasingly common use of smoking ceremonies.

The Statement starts off with; ‘We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart’. Which is OK as long as we accept that only Australia is connected to the ‘southern sky’ and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere has a different sky.  The tone is faintly reminiscent of the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, (‘We hold these truths to be self evident, etc.…’) and this is probably intentional. The Declaration is one of the most important political documents ever written but its solemnity and dignity are translated in the Uluru Statement into grandiose pomposity.

The Statement gets into trouble in the third paragraph where, for reasons that are not clear, it starts to italicise some of the text. The process of transferring from plain text to italics continues throughout the document and, while I’m sure the authors had their reasons, it simply makes the document look strange. The third paragraph is also where we see the use of archaic forms of expression as in, the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. Why thither?

The next two paras make the not unreasonable claim that the people who lived here for 60,000 years never ceded sovereignty albeit in the characteristically pompous language.

Then in paragraph six we make a transition from a general statement about ‘ancient sovereignty’ to an oft-repeated set of claims that; ‘Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future’. ‘Aliened’? Surely there are better words. Why not ‘estranged’?

Whether this is still true now that Comrade Xi has millions of his Uighur subjects in detention is unclear but what is very clear is that we have shifted from general statements about historical injustice to a specific claim about the current situation which is, at best, tendentious. It should go without saying that Aborigines are not ‘innately criminal’. No human being is. It is equally undeniable and deeply regrettable that their ‘youth languish in detention in obscene numbers’. But the tragic and massive disproportion in the numbers of Aboriginal kids in detention as compared with the rest of the population is due to a complex set of cultural and historical circumstances and not, as the Left would have us believe, because of discrimination in the criminal justice system. In choosing to focus on this issue in what is meant to be a fundamentally unifying document, the authors have nailed their colours to a very shaky and divisive mast.

The Statement then continues, ‘These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem’, which is reasonable enough. The problem of criminality among the youth of many Aboriginal communities is indeed ‘structural’ and may well contribute to what is referred to, again in italics, as the torment of our powerlessness.

The document’s authors ‘seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish’.

One might quibble about the phrase ‘to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country’. Shouldn’t it read ‘to take’ rather than ‘and take’? But of much greater importance is the question of exactly how constitutional reform will stop Aboriginal kids getting killed when crashing stolen cars in which they are joyriding? Invariably, when tragedies such as this occur the first question our media asks is ‘were they being pursued by the police?’ and not ‘what were the parents doing?’. The authors may be satisfied that when they ‘have power over their own destiny our children will flourish’, but where is the evidence?

We are in the midst of a fascinating power struggle in which an army of people – who make a career out of their Aboriginality, real or imagined – aided and abetted by an increasing portion of the fourth estate, the political Left and the wokerati, are pitted against a sceptical minority.

The balance of that power, if the opinion polls are to be believed, is steadily shifting in favour of those who support this idea which has been labelled Atsic 2.0. Readers who can remember the stench of corruption that emanated from that failed model may wonder how it will be avoided this time around. This is not a problem for the Left who forget why Atsic was closed down by John Howard in the first place. There is not enough room in this column to go into all the many charges of fraud that have arisen with connections to that sorry institution but we are expected to believe either that Atsic wasn’t closed down because of internal corruption, or that this time, things will be better.

The legal profession strongly supports the referendum on this issue. The NSW Law Society has put out a statement saying, ‘Implementation of the Uluru Statement is crucial for empowering First Nations People to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination’. Only a complete cynic would say that lawyers support this idea because of the business that it will bring them.

Read the Statement then ask yourself how it is that such pretentious waffle can pass as a profound document. The only profundity here is the depth of intellectual decay demonstrated by the Statement and its supporters.