The Victorian government’s ‘treaty’ with the one per cent of its citizens who purport to be Aboriginal is unjust and illogical.

Unjust because it is in no way representative even of the so-called ‘first nations’ community. Out of 66,000 people in Victoria who claim to be Aboriginal, only a small number (coyly unspecified by treaty enthusiasts) bothered to vote in the election of the ‘First People’s Assembly’. The vast majority must have been totally indifferent. If they thought about it at all they would presumably have realised there was nothing in it for them, neither power nor – the true goal of this treaty – money.

This assembly will have the right to interfere arbitrarily with the proper governance of the state. Its cabal of 33 ‘delegates’ can outsay the elected government on any ‘issues that directly affect First Peoples’. And since the assembly, or its behind-the-scenes professional Aborigines and their white ‘activist’ encouragers, will decide what these issues are, it can enforce its opinions on just about anything.

How’s that for fair treatment of the other 99 per cent of Victorians, though of course, being descendants of colonialist ‘invaders’ and continuing to occupy ‘unceded’ Aboriginal land, their role is to shut up and knuckle under? The new assembly is called Gellung Warl, alleged to be a term from the ‘Gunaikurnai language’ meaning ‘tip of the spear’, although once all the unctuous bonhomie on the treaty website is forgotten (‘This a chance for all Victorians to acknowledge our past, heal and move forward together’) and Gellung Warl gets its claws out demanding ‘reparations’, ‘tip of the iceberg’ might be a better rendering. Indeed, it is already happening.

The ink on the treaty is hardly dry and – wham! – the first land claim has come in. It is demanding, modestly, only the whole of greater Melbourne and hundreds of square kilometres around it. In Canada, from whose racial politics our local activists have copied this and other of their demands, such claims are extinguishing private ownership so that people’s houses will become ‘indigenous’ property. Honeyed voices from Gellung Warl and its apologists tell us that can’t happen here because native title can be granted only over Crown land, not private freehold. And as to Crown land , Gellung Warl explains with an air of hurt disappointment that anyone could be so mean-minded as to think treaty proponents power-hungry, all Gellung Warl wants to do is ‘cooperate’ in ‘managing’ what for them is still ‘Country’. Cooperate? Not only does the treaty give Gellung Warl the power to boss around the Crown lands administration but experience suggests that when native title is imposed the first thing the new owners do is shut everyone else out. Ayers Rock, Mt Warning in Queensland and now the Grampians in Victoria are places once much frequented by the general public and now at least in part off limits.

A perusal of the treaty website, replete with affected pseudo-Aboriginal terminology such as ‘yarn’ and ‘mob’, also induces a certain scepticism as to the degree which the assembly delegates, whose claims to millions of dollars of reparations is based on their being ‘descendants’ of the original native population, do actually ‘descend’ from those earlier indigenous tribes. Many of them might just as easily descend from the Anglo-Celts whose arrival upset the supposedly Arcadian existence of their putative ancestors. To judge from their photos, in different circumstances some delegates could equally be proclaiming their provenance from the Emerald Isle or the banks and braes of Bonnie Doon. Less than one per cent of the 944,000 Australians ‘identifying’ as Aboriginal are full-blood so the possibility that the delegates are is slim. It is illogical to give these people, many of whom are in part of the same ethnic stock as millions of other Australians, authority over the rest of us.

Colonisation, real or metaphorical, is one of the ways history works. Technologically advanced societies absorb less advanced ones –usually, over time, more to the benefit of both than not. It is how progress is universalised. Progress, obviously, has its casualties, but this is a harsh fact of nature and not rectifiable by reparations. Should owners of stagecoaches be reimbursed because they were put out of business by railways? Would Gellung Warl prefer that whitey had never come here at all? Even to bring penicillin and painless dentistry? That Captain Cook, putting into Botany Bay, had contented himself with anchoring long enough for Sir Joseph to go ashore and collect a few cuttings, then sailed away forever?

Schemes such as the treaty and the ‘Voice’, designed to impose ‘reconciliation’, are counter-productive. The audacious scale of their demands for ‘reparations’ creates resentment, quite an achievement in a land where real ‘racism’ has never been a serious social problem. And why should reparations be paid to anyone? Whom would they benefit? The tribes whose lands were supposedly stolen are all dead so reparations are no good to them. Their descendants (who, after generations of intermarriage, are themselves in many cases partly descended from the invaders so that they might as well pay reparations to themselves) are far better off as a consequence of white settlement than those earlier indigenous generations could ever have imagined being, so they don’t need them. Experience suggests little or none of the money would reach the deprived Outback townships. No, the real beneficiaries would be the cosy circle around Gellung Warl, for whom they’d be a bonanza, and contemporary leftists with their fixation on absolving themselves for the sins of ‘colonialism’. Reparations (not from their own pockets of course but financed by the taxpayer) are a means of buying off the guilt they have laid upon themselves.