The soul of a nation. Where does one find it? It’s 60 years since Donald Horne acerbically noted in The Lucky Country that:

“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”

Horne noted that Australia’s economic prosperity was largely derived from its rich natural resources and immigration, observing that Australia “showed less enterprise than almost any other prosperous industrial society”.

Well, it could have been worse. Robbie Burns wrote of the Great and the Good among his countrymen: “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation.”

Things can’t be as bad here as they were in 1964, surely. I mean, we’ve all (?) rejoiced in Mabo and the subsequent improvement in race relations in this country.

We have annual reports tabled in the Commonwealth Parliament on Closing the Gap, i.e. measuring the discrepancies between Aboriginal and mainstream Australian life styles in health, education and longevity.

The gap never closes to any significant degree, but we, mainstream Australia, prove our good faith by quantifying the disparities between the two groups, year in year out, always hoping that somehow (if we throw enough money at the problem) equality of outcomes will occur.

And equality is our mantra, never recognition by the mainstream of Aboriginal culture, beyond being glad that American collectors pay big money for indigenous art.

The lip service paid to Mabo is writ large when the approach of our courts to claims for Aboriginal fishing are compared with that of the New Zealand court system in taking account of indigenous culture. The Kiwis do not focus on simplistic assertions of “equality of treatment proves we’re being even handed”. See the NZ Supreme Court decision in Smith v Fonterra Co-operative [2024] NZSC 5 for a successful appeal allowing a claim to be struck back in that Maori culture had to be taken into account against Fonterra for tortious damage arising as a result of climate change, consequent on the company’s fossil fuel activities.

The case can now go to trial, the Supreme Court (Helen Winckelmann CJ, Susan Glazebook, Ellen France, Joe Williams and Stephen Kos JJ – Williams J being a Maori) having been anxious to note that it was not pre-empting the result, merely allowing the claim to proceed by reference to Maori culture and tikanga (traditional Maori values).