Overseas visitors flying for the first time into Sydney on Qantas will be told they are setting down on Gadigal land. When they go downtown, prestigious building lobbies and bus shelter posters will confirm this. Glance across Circular Quay to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and they will see at the top of the arch an Aboriginal flag flying alongside the Australian flag. Which flag is the national flag, they may wonder? (Rather than pride of place atop the bridge, the state flag has been relegated to NSW Parliament House.)

Should those visitors enter through Perth, bound for Adelaide, the destination will be displayed as Adelaide/Kaurna Country. Likewise a flight to Newman will be shown as Newman/Nyiyaparli Country.

It’s not only puzzling for strangers. Many Australians are also wondering whether non-Aboriginal place names are to be phased out.

What they do know is that hardly a day passes by when they don’t participate in rituals which pay respect to Aboriginal elders past and present. Corporate stationery, emails and shopping dockets acknowledge the same. With Aboriginal flags more ubiquitous than Australian flags and land rights already covering around 55 per cent of the country, many are asking: is Australia about to become one country two systems?

Lately, so pervasive and spirited has the messaging become, some are seeing it as a not-so-subtle softening-up campaign to win Yes votes in the upcoming Voice referendum. If the rising No vote in recent polling is a guide, it is proving counterproductive. Indeed, at least anecdotally, this observation confirms growing evidence at sporting events and elsewhere that Australians have tired of it and are turning off.

Settlers from non-Anglo backgrounds are especially sensitive to any minority having privileges enshrined in the constitution and will strongly oppose a divisive treaty and wealth transfer. After all, they know well, despite the pervasive guilt narrative, the issue of Aboriginal disadvantage is not the result of their neglect.

On the contrary. They were among the Australians who strongly supported a landmark act of ‘recognition and healing’ when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tendered an apology to the ‘stolen generations’. Rudd offered a new partnership on ‘closing the gap’ between the living standards of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. He set concrete targets promising, within a decade, to halve the widening gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes. Little more than a decade later, Prime Minister Scott Morrison introduced a more ambitious scheme with ten additional targets and a permanent seat at the table for Aboriginal leaders. Morrison informed the nation of his plan’s vital distinction. ‘We (previously) told Indigenous Australians what the gap was that we were going to close, and somehow thought they should be thankful for that… that wasn’t the way to do it.’

So, after fifteen years of direct informed input from respected indigenous leaders and, the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars from state and federal governments, with two exceptions, none of prime minister Rudd’s or Morrison’s eighteen targets have been met. Indeed, the greatest misery and squalor remains in the same areas – remote Aboriginal communities and town camps.

This is where the collective’s dead hand of victimhood, low expectations and learned helplessness are strongest. It’s where idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and where crime flourishes. It’s where separatist local languages are favoured over English; where blind eyes are turned to school truancy. It’s also where the Lancet observed ‘amongst the highest diagnosed rates of sexually transmissible infections in the world’.

Despite presumed best intentions, these communities are where child neglect and sexual abuse are reaching epidemic proportions. According to statistics, the rate at which indigenous children were removed from their families increased by 80 per cent between 2008 and 2017, (the years following the apology). Of the $4.1 billion spent on community support and welfare services for indigenous people, the largest proportion (29 per cent) was spent on child protection and out-of-home care services (compared with 6.5 percent for non-indigenous people). In years to come will those removed be characterised as a ‘stolen generation’?

Blaming this misery on British colonialism, or on endemic racism, may play well for the guilt industry but it has changed little. Condemnation should be reserved for the current structure and the sanctimonious advocates who administer it.

Noel Pearson, a respected and outspoken Aboriginal advocate for the Voice, should know this. He correctly argues,‘If the fight against discrimination was the most important development in the cause of human dignity in the second half of the twentieth century, then the soft bigotry of low expectations must be the most important in the first half of this.’ Yet, while well intended, he seems unable to grasp that once enshrined in the constitution, a permanent Voice, with accompanying privileges, will institutionalise the very bigotry he deplores. Indeed it has already begun.

Just the very prospect of a treaty and other targeted benefits has seen a jump in those identifying as indigenous, up from 649,173 in 2016 to 812,728 in 2021.

Mr Pearson may be emotionally wedded to a constitutionally empowered voice, but 25 Aboriginal members of parliament, multiple indigenous voices in peak bodies and hundreds of other agencies and summits, not to mention countless billions of state and federal dollars, show history is against him.

Indeed, there are no examples anywhere where prioritising indigenous minority cultures within large settler populations, closes gaps of disadvantage.

Not even in much-lauded New Zealand where Maoris have won treaties, dual language and, significant funding, has the inequality gap measurably narrowed. What’s more, Maoris are increasingly over-represented in prisons.

It is inarguable that the only enduring pathway to happy and healthy lives comes, not from constitutionally privileged voices and low expectations but from education, jobs, financial independence and integration. Until apologetic whites, black separatists and their green-left sympathisers acknowledge this, disadvantaged indigenous Australians can anticipate diminishing goodwill and perpetuating misery.

For the moment, there are none so blind as those who will not see.