I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest,…

I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest, though I’ll vote Yes because what harm can an advisory committee do. Here’s an excerpt from the national agreement on ‘Closing the Gap’. This is much more important. /1 https://t.co/gN04JsXFb3

The ‘gap’, no matter how many nice ways it’s contextualised in the agreement, is clearly conceived as Aboriginal Australians being ‘behind’ in some way. And of course by the ‘all Australians’ majoritarian metric (such a repulsive thing), they are. /2 https://t.co/rSGafyZUbj

‘All Australians’ is populist code for the Australia invented in 1788. The one in the Constitution. Why the No case uses the phrase so often, pretending that document was some sort of group hug warm embrace of everybody living on the continent. /3

We won’t understand this issue or even survive, until we flip the idea of the gap on its head. Until it’s not just a laundry list of European and US cultural norms like finishing school, going to university, having access to great health care, etc. Here’s the flip, again. /4

The continent is collapsing. Rivers drying up or already dust. Topsoil washed and blown into the sea. Massive species extinction. We call these ‘environmental’ problems (image is from the ‘State of the Environment’ report: https://t.co/x9wWQ50ckl) /5 https://t.co/embpHlne9N

‘Environment’ is another nothing word, like ‘economy’. Meaningless, but said so often that people come to believe it must refer to something. Always a giveaway is that it’s yet another thing we’re supposed to ‘balance’ against the economy and jobs. Balance always means ignore. /6

We’re biological creatures. Without our landscape, we’re dead. It’s that simple. No marvellous modern technologies can change that equation. None can fix the landscape either. The landscape is broken and collapsing because we *have no relationship with it*. THAT’s the ‘gap’. /7

We either use it as an extractive industry, either mining or farming mostly, or we lock it up in ‘pristine’ national parks. Both abominations. We’re about to enter another dangerous fire season, where huge parts of the inhabited parts of Australia might explode into fire. /8

Why? Because we don’t live in or manage that landscape. We huddle the coast and fly in and out on recreational travel. The few non-Aboriginal Australians who live inland are nearly all remnants of early extractive industry, again usually farming or mining. /9

Until we - and it won’t happen, I’m pretty sure - understand that the gap is the gap non-Aboriginals have in understanding the land under their own feet, the country will continue to decline. And our civilisation will decline with it. You can’t eat dirt. /end