Does being the first to reach a piece of land give you special rights? And are those rights collective and inherited? That is the question Australians are gearing up to answer in a referendum.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left government, elected last year, wants a constitutional amendment to recognize a special place for autochthonous Australians, giving them a formal representative body, alongside Australia’s existing democratic structures, called the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.In a country that is rich and getting richer, 30% of Aboriginal Australians are in poverty — vastly higher than any other ethnic group.
It is worth noting that this is not an internationally transferable principle. The people who strongly support giving extra rights to indigenous peoples in Australia, the United States, and Canada would, by and large, be horrified at the concept of giving additional rights to indigenous Germans over descendants of postwar guest workers, or indigenous Scots over more recent Commonwealth arrivals. And they would be right to be horrified.
We apply the same principle to several areas of public life. States vie to show that one of their citizens reached a disputed territory before anyone else. When it comes to plants and animals, we can be nativist to the point of genocide, seeking to eradicate invasive species for no reason other than that they are competing with a native one. The native species is not defended on the grounds that it is stronger or prettier or more useful to man, but simply because it is native.
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