Arrivalism is a new woke ideology being developed in Western countries. Currently, it is found in Australia with the campaign to vote in a national referendum to change the Constitution by adding a ‘Voice to Parliament’ group of unelected Aboriginal people to advise the federal government, and cannot be removed by Parliament.
Arrivalism is used in reference to the so-called First Nations peoples, but basically it is the Woke ideology of conferring on an Indigenous race a privilege based on who arrived in the country first. The English word ‘indigenous’ means born in the country, a native to that land.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary the word ‘indigenous ‘ has two meanings:
- Produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment.
- Indigenous or less commonly indigenous: of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonised by a now-dominant group.
In this case, definition b is the claimed meaning in this debate.
There are various claims of Aboriginal people arriving on the continent 60,000 years ago and some claim even 80,000 years ago. Thus the argument is that Aboriginals lived in the country before colonisation and therefore they have a prior claim to the land and sea. Their arrival preceded white Western colonisers and hence they have a prior legal right to the land.
Aboriginal ‘Yes’ Voice activist Noel Pearson on ABC Q&A claimed the ‘Voice to Parliament’ is not racist but about who arrived before colonisation. He seemed to imply that those who arrived first could have had any type of genetic haplotype features. A haplotype (haploid genotype) is a group of alleles (genetic information) in an organism that is inherited together from a single parent. If that parent had the same haplotype as the current full-blood Australian Aboriginal people then it must constitute a specific race, the Australian Aboriginal race, certainly in the common usage of the word.
And recently we have seen the extreme in claims of Aboriginality when one media personality claimed their great-great-grandmother had the right haplotype genes that would qualify them as Indigenous. That could involve a genetic dilution factor by as much as 64 times or even more. I am being generous; genetic inheritance is a bit of a roll of the dice. At most, they would be 1.5 per cent Indigenous or 98.5 per cent non-Indigenous. It is splitting hairs over a few genetic molecules. Is that what defines Indigenous now?
Pearson said that being Indigenous is not about a race and a ‘Voice’ would still be required even if there was no Aboriginal disadvantage. But quite clearly it is predicated on race because those initial arrivals were of a monolithic race and remained that way trapped on the island continent. Generally those who arrived later were of a different race or races. Certainly, that is how all history has been. Xenophobia always seems to apply to later arrivals. It is what has always kept one group fighting another group. Is that what Australia has come to? Woke Arrivalism divides the country. Vote ‘No’ to the Voice!
