“To suggest that the government has been ‘guided and inspired by the customs and cultures of the First Nations people’ is a barefaced lie. Where, for example, was any awareness of the custodianship of country,” asks The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.

Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers’ budget speech was a damned disgrace.

His opening words set the tone: “On this Ngunnawal land we acknowledge all the First Nations people of this country and the custodians, customs and cultures which guide and inspire us.”

Oh really? He not only deliberately abandoned the traditional “respect to Elders past and present”, the sentence itself makes no sense at all. Canberra might be “Ngunnawal land”, but in no way does the “custodians, customs and cultures guide and inspire” the current government any more than it did previous whitefella administrators.  

The proof was in the speech itself. The Aboriginal people barely rated a mention. Since the previous budget, we have had the tragic rejection of a totally mismanaged referendum. Yet in the half-hour that followed the mangled syntax of the opening, the referendum was ignored and our First Nations were dismissed in three spare sentences.

In case you missed them, here they are in full: “We will also make new investments in health, housing, education and jobs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. As well as more remote housing, we’re creating the new Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program. With 3000 new jobs in remote Australia to build new skills and new confidence within communities.”

That’s 3000 jobs (at best) among our 983,700 Aboriginal and Torres Straits people, a large percentage of whom live in remote Australia. 

How could he?

And to suggest that the government has been “guided and inspired by the customs and cultures of the First Nations people” is a barefaced lie. Where, for example, was any awareness of the custodianship of country? 

Of the obscene fish kills in the once heathy river systems; of the Great Barrier Reef bleached yet again by the heated waters of climate change; of the raging flood waters that killed our native flora and fauna; of the steadily rising temperatures across the northern lands; the fearsome cyclones that batter the communities as never before; and the sacred sites defaced and vandalised by the mining companies?

Three vague sentences and not a single specific figure of proposed expenditure. 

Not a single figure of new money for education, for decent housing, for the revival of languages trembling on the brink of extinction. No mention of a figure for health facilities; a mere 3000 jobs where 30,000 would barely scratch the surface of need. 

Could it be that as a Queenslander, Dr Chalmers has turned a blind eye like so many of his fellow State “No” voters who see the referendum defeat as the end of the story? 

One had only to glance at Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney to see disappointment writ large throughout the speech. She was almost as glum as Bill Shorten who could barely bring himself to look across to the Despatch Box.

And what of his leader, the man who so proudly boasted on his night of victory, that, “on behalf of the Australian Labor Party, I commit to the Uluru Statement from the heart in full”. 

That was when it was a little more fashionable to see our continental forebears as a valued element of the community, the genuine custodians of the magnificent island that we are all now privileged to occupy.

Now, it seems, they are back where they used to be – down the back of town near the cemetery and the rubbish dump, in the junk and galvanised iron camp we call (with unconscious irony), “Closing the Gap”.

Shame, Dr Chalmers, shame!

robert@robertmacklin.com