BY MANDY BALDWIN

While sensible people have been proudly celebrating the formation, in tough conditions, by tough people, of the worlds 13th largest economy – the advanced, dynamic democracy that is Australia – the usual bunch of Renta-gimps have been bleating about it, and ‘demonstrating’. (Demonstrating by their book means getting together to pretend to support people who say they are deeply dejected about loss of their native culture and who – thanks to what they call ‘invasion’ – have the money, time, transport and internet connection to orchestrate protests.)

The whole thing reeks of the usual tedious hypocrisy.

With all due respect to the indigenous people of Australia – and I do empathise because, as an indigenous person of Britain, I occasionally feel keenly protective toward my own threatened culture – it doesn’t actually seem anyone is preventing them living as their forebears lived. Australia is a large, sparsely-populated country, and it’s hard to imagine anyone would object, or possibly even notice, were the protesters to swap their iPads for spears, their Levi’s for loin-cloths, ditch the car, and go walkabout.

As for the protesters who are descendants of ‘invaders’ or ‘invaders’ themselves, here’s the bitter truth: as usual they don’t actually give a fiddler’s wotsit about any part of the cause they are so loudly shrieking about.

There are several reasons for me saying this.

First, they are perfectly fine with large-scale immigration into Australia from the Far East and the Indian subcontinent. They want more and more immigration to Australia, diluting the ‘native’ population still further, this time with people who most often feel no sense of responsibility for them whatsoever.

Second, they claim to actively rejoice at diversity, which doesn’t mesh with the idea of an Australia returned to its ancient non-diverse population formed of immigrants from Melanesia (who probably displaced whoever was there before them.)

Third, they are parading what might appear to be a rabid self-hatred, but this is in fact just a passing hissy fit; a tantrum of the entitled, such as goes on among the affluent and vapid in every part of the First World now. A fad about as meaningful as streaking or bra-burning, which in years to come will be looked back on with mild irritation by historians and embarrassment by protesters should they one day grow up.

True self-hatred is awful – manifestations include suicide, drink and drug abuse, self-harming, deep depression, isolation. Most of these protesters suffer none of this. Far from hating themselves, they think they practically fart rose-petals.

So, they hate their ancestral past?

Ancestral self-hatred is cruelly destructive: think of the son of Nazi Martin Bormann, who became a priest and spent his life expiating for sins he had never committed.  But this kind of self-hatred at least offers a chance to make practical amends.

However, the chance to make practical amends is being conveniently passed-up in Australia. There are smug-looking white Australians posting pictures of themselves anxiously holding placards in their gardens, saying “I am on – whatever tribe’s lands. Always will be.”  And yet they don’t surrender ownership, and move off, or perhaps apply to renounce Australian citizenship and repatriate themselves to their European country of origin.

Why on Earth not?

Furthermore, such people claim to hold a global view when it comes to immigration from the Third World to the First – apparently, the only race is the human race, nobody owns land, or territory, and being there for thousands of years, forming a culture and national identity, doesn’t give, say, a European the right to resist mass immigration which drags their advanced society back centuries. Only when the complainant is non-white does the protesters’ passionate understanding of attachment to territory kick in.

What do they propose, practically? That Australia be returned to stone-age conditions and its millions of non-indigenous people repatriated, including themselves, so the indigenous peoples can live as their ancestors lived for around 60,000 years?

Hardly feasible.

Or do they suggest that people whose ancestors had never made any practical advances be given, lock, stock and barrel, all the achievements of the ‘invaders’?

Hardly fair.

Anyway, let’s get real. Fascinating though Aboriginal culture appears, it was astoundingly technologically backward in every possible way. They had art work? They have Dreamtime? All humans have innate spirituality: there is evidence of ritual burials and art among the earliest peoples in every part of the world.

If Europeans had never colonised it, Australia would in all likelihood, like other nations inhabited by undeveloped peoples, have currently been the recipient of major financial aid from the First World, with the aim of providing it with the technology and infrastructure which were in the event provided by the colonisers. Large numbers of the native people of Australia might be applying to emigrate to Europe – a fact the hypocritical protesters have no problem with at all.