Truth-telling on treaties and constitutional recognition

Again it underlines how different Australia was from almost anywhere else. There was no council of Aboriginal chiefs capable of participating in such an arrangement in Australia and no structure to participate in a treaty or worry about being dominated by competing colonial interests. Don't blame the British.

But these aren't the constitutional recognitions that Burney wants you to think they are. They don't give aboriginal peoples the right to intervene in the whole of government like The Voice would. They're closer to land rights agreements than The Voice.

And they reflect the sophistication of native populations when Europeans arrived. You can't reverse engineer those arrangements because time has moved on.

Neither should Burney be trying to reinvent the past.

We are here, where we are now. We cannot fix the past because we can't change it. And what would fixing even mean as the past was a product of its time?

When Australia was settled the paradigm was that all the inhabitants of the land gained the protection of the crown. That's actually more inherently egalitarian than a system of treaties, and surely better for Indigenous and other Australians.