$1,000,000 for All First Nations People

Reparations. It’s a word that’s being tossed about in Australia recently regarding Australia’s Indigenous community to pay for historical injustices. “Reparation: The action of making amends for a wrong one has done, by providing payment or other assistance to those who have been wronged.” So in this video, I’ll present a hypothetical. Let’s say the Australian Government make a deal with Indigenous leaders to pay each person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander heritage $1,000,000. Let’s assume that the vast majority of Indigenous people agree with this, and in exchange, the whole colonisation debate is finished. There will be no more talk of past injustices. There will be no more special funding for Indigenous Australians. Everything will be settled. Okay, so what do you think would realistically happen?

First of all, how many Indigenous people are there in Australia? According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, as of 2021, approximately 984,000 individuals identify as First Nations people, although I suspect this number would go up dramatically if a million dollars is on the line. But let’s just say in our hypothetical that a system is worked out, which everybody agrees on, that only people that are truly considered Indigenous receive the money. Okay, fine. So 984,000 people multiplied by a million dollars each equals $984 billion. To put that in perspective, the entire health system in Australia cost around $105 billion in 2023, representing 16.8% of the Australian Government’s total expenditure. So these one-off reparations to each and every Indigenous person will cost more than nine times that. Fine, it’s a one-off payment and it will never need to be paid again.

To be clear, every Indigenous man, woman, and child will receive the $1 million, with children’s money obviously being placed into a trust, or whatever, and not accessible till they turn 18, or 21, or whatever number everyone agrees on. So what would happen?

Well, most people who receive this $1 million will waste it. Now I’m not criticising Indigenous people here. I think most non-Indigenous people would waste it as well. Just look at Lotto winners and the like. They almost always spend their entire fortune in just a few short years. $1 million isn’t exactly a massive fortune anymore, so it could be spent relatively quickly by those who aren’t financially savvy, which is most people as I said.

There would be a smaller number of Indigenous folk who might invest the $1 million, but I’d suggest they’re already fairly well-off and financially savvy if they’re knowledgeable of investments and the like.

And the third class of people, the elite Indigenous activists. People like Marcia Langton. Noel Pearson, and Stan Grant who have done well for themselves. I’m not taking anything away from them. They’ve obviously worked hard at what they do, no matter what we think of their individual opinions. But what do you think they would do with this money? Well, just for fun, and for the sake of illustration, I’m going to pretend to be Stan Grant writing for the Guardian, or the ABC, or whoever else, with regards to the recent cash windfall. And I suspect that this would be similar to what the real Stan Grant would write.

The title of the article would be: “A million dollars? Is that all my suffering is worth to you? By Stan Grant.”

In other words, reparations will not result in this ending. Reparations will simply embolden the activists.

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Allégro by Emmit Fenn