Apparently it’s going to happen in October. The Referendum, I mean, to determine whether the Australian constitution should be amended to provide something called ‘a Voice’ for the 800,000 or so Australians who are, or claim to be, of aboriginal descent. I’m firmly on the No side. The Yes case seems to me to imply that anyone with aboriginal blood in their veins must be so innately inadequate that they need a form of assistance permanently enshrined in our constitution – an implication that I reject.

The point of this post, however, is not to wrangle the case for the Voice, but to ask a question that, it seems to me, has never been seriously put to the activists of the aboriginal grievance industry.

We are constantly told that Australia was stolen from its ‘first nation’ people. This is indisputably true. We are also told that the loss Australian aborigines suffered in the first decades of colonisation was uncompensated. From this premise flow all sorts of claims which are either loosely articulated in emotive, but notably unforensic language, or simply taken to be self-evident consequences of the original dispossession.

The first of these, and surely essential to any claim to contemporary aboriginal victimhood, is that the injustice suffered by the aborigines whom the settlers displaced remains uncompensated.

Secondly, it is implied that the descendants of those dispossessed, including a majority whose descent is mixed with other races, have inherited their ancestors’ unjust loss whole, and unmitigated either by the passage of time, or by any benefits that may have been conferred by the culture of the invaders. Today’s aborigines, it is implied, suffer undiminished the loss experienced by their ancestors, and have gained nothing in return.

Thirdly, activists insist that this inherited injustice can and should be rectified by concessions to the benefit of ‘modern’ aborigines by Australians of whom only a tiny minority can claim – or be accused of – descent from those who invaded Australia in the decades following 1788.

An overriding presumption seems to be that before the arrival of Europeans, Aborigines lived a life of prelapsarian bliss, in perfect harmony with one another, and with their environment.

These are all questionable assumptions, but rather than question them in detail, I would pose the question I promised at the beginning of this post I would ask of the aboriginal grievance-mongers: if you could have all you wishes granted, what would your world look like? If the rest of the world had simply left Australia alone, would that have produced a society preferable to the one you inhabit today?

Let’s remind ourselves of what those first invaders found when they arrived in 1788. The accounts left by the likes of Watkin Tench are illuminating here. These were soldiers and sailors who had survived not only armed combat but the rigours of a wind-powered sea journey of some 17.000 miles. They were no strangers to interpersonal violence. These were tough men, and not the sort to cry at the movies. Yet they were shocked and amazed, in the natives they encountered, by the casual brutality of their lives. They were particularly shocked by the treatment of their womenfolk. Far from living harmoniously with one another, the Eora clans seem to have lived in a state of more or less continual conflict.

To the eyes of the British, and even allowing for the baleful effects of the smallpox they brought with them, these people’s lives were nasty, brutish and short. Having not invented money, they had no means of accumulating wealth, and as a consequence, recompense for injury or tort took the form of ritually inflicted retributive violence. It is supremely ironic to see the concept of universal human rights, which originated in the European Enlightenment, and would have baffled the Eora of 1788, invoked in aid of the claims of today’s aboriginal activists.

Now it is perfectly possible to argue that to an Australian of 1788, her brief life of precarious sustenance and frequent violence was not a cause of suffering, since she had no reason to suppose that any other way of life was possible. However, that can not be said of Australians today, so my question is a pertinent one. With the possible exception of a tiny minority of tribal aborigines in remote areas, today’s aboriginal Australians choose to live lives that owe considerably more to the European culture they implicitly disparage than they do to their ancestral culture. Even those with the poorest health outcomes fare far better than their 1788 ancestors, and they do so because they have available to them the pharmacological fruits of centuries of European science, delivered to them by clinicians who have imbibed the accumulated knowledge of the same centuries, and who arrive by means of aeroplanes and four-wheel drives, each of them a veritable temple to European culture. Talk about cultural appropriation!

So I repeat the question – if todays aboriginal activists could have all their wishes granted, what would their world look like? Because if it involves insulin, or Toyota Land-Cruisers, or Beechcraft King Airs, or any form of monetary payment, then I’m calling humbug.

The great majority of Australians who claim Aboriginal descent have every reason to view the benefits that have accrued to them as ample recompense for the loss inflicted upon their ancestors by the British people who invaded their lands in 1788. A substantial minority live in conditions of squalor and deprivation which disgrace our society, but their circumstances arguably owe much to misguided efforts by activists, abetted by hand-wringing liberals, to improve their outcomes while preserving what passes for a ‘traditional’ way of life, while maintaining a cult of grievance against their non-aboriginal compatriots, who are overwhelmingly well-disposed towards them. These efforts have been conducted, at vast expense, for as long as anyone can remember, yet remain stubbornly unrewarded. The call for a Voice is just the latest of these superficially attractive but meretricious ideas, and will do nothing to help those aboriginal Australians who really do need help. It deserves to fail.