To much leftist adulation, the eagerly awaited findings of Victoria’s Yoorrook Commission into ‘historic and ongoing systemic injustices’ against Aborigines have at last been published after four years of the commissioners sitting around at taxpayers’ expense gathering ‘evidence’. Yoorrook, which translates loosely as ‘money tree’, is described as ‘Australia’s first formal truth-telling commission’ – note the self-contradiction, inherent in all leftist propositions (Akehurst’s Second Law) between ‘truth-telling’, and the usual insistence by leftists, when confronted by facts they don’t like, that there is no such thing as truth, there being only ‘truths’, yours, mine and everybody else’s. What kind of truth the inquiry has come up with is not specified.

To nobody’s surprise, the commission has concluded that, as the ABC breathlessly put it, ‘colonisation in Victoria involved widespread massacres, cultural destruction, forced child removals and economic exclusion’ – plus, naturally, ‘genocide’.

Reaction to the findings has been mixed. Rural and commercial interests have expressed ‘disbelief’ at the scale of the ‘reparations’ demanded in property and cash (as though reparations could do anything for the dead, while inflating the bank balances of the living). On the other hand, the Institute of Professional Aborigines, the peak body for indigenous nations’ ‘diplomacy and negotiations’, is ‘delighted’. ‘A new era of fairness and justice for Australia’s 65,000-year-old original citizens (sic) is dawning,’ said the institute’s media spokes-auntie.

The Victorian government says it is ‘considering’ the commission’s ‘recommendations’. While it does so, a second commission, which I have dubbed ‘Yoorrook II’, has been quietly preparing a revised and ‘more equitable’ assessment of ‘colonial settler oppression’. In its forthcoming interim report, leaked exclusively to this column in The Spectator Australia, the commission calls for even heavier reparations to be extracted from white Australians. ‘We’re only taking back what is ours by right,’ declares Yoorrook II chair Thomas Heinz-Mayo, who brings British and Polish ancestry to ‘enrich’ the supposedly all-Aboriginal composition of the commission. ‘Only by whitey paying through the nose can we have full and genuine reconciliation.’

This second round of reparations would include all ‘built structures’ in what Heinz-Mayo describes as ‘so-called Australia’s white supremacist conurbations, established by invaders on first people’s blood and soil.’ Asked by a ‘far-right interloper’ mistakenly admitted to the commission’s public gallery, if it wouldn’t be ‘only fair’ if white Australians could keep some part of all they had built since 1788, the commission ruled that if invasion had not happened ‘First Peoples’ would have built it anyway. Indeed, a renowned and eminent professor of First Nations’ Cultural Antiquity Appreciation Studies at a leading university  had ‘proved beyond all doubt that many of these buildings actually had been put up by Aboriginal people and “forcibly requisitioned” by settlers.’

A submission from co-opted commission member Ms Tarneen Onus-Williams repeating her past ‘Invasion Day’ recommendation that ‘what is now named Australia should be burnt to the ground’, while accepted as ‘eminently reasonable under the circumstances’, was dismissed ‘with regret’ on the grounds that, as Heinz-Mayo put it, ‘If we burn it down there’ll be nothing to hand over in reparations.’

It is understood that Yoorrook II will demand that the ‘encouraging process whereby colonialist place names are being “wiped off the map” in favour of “First Nations” designations’ – ‘the national broadcaster has been particularly helpful in this field,’ says Heinz-Mayo – be intensified. The white names, he said, had been ‘imposed on country’ as part of an ‘orchestrated campaign of linguicide’ (a relatively new crime against humanity invented by the United Nations). The renaming of capital cities should be prioritised with ‘distinctly indigenous names on the model of Meanjin (the name of a well-known leftist magazine as well as the new name for Brisbane)’. Suggestions include ‘Overland’, ‘Quarterly Essay’, ‘House & Garden’, ‘Vogue’, ‘Gourmet Traveller’, ‘Queer News’ and ‘Green Left Weekly’ for Canberra.

Yoorrook II’s analysis of ‘genocide’ against ‘First Nations’ notes that in the ‘Frontier Wars’, unarmed indigenous people ‘tending to their flocks, dreaming age-old dreams and in general minding their own business’ were attacked by ‘squatters’ with cannon, mortars and siege engines. Settlers had formed themselves into ‘hit squads’ to ‘raid our townships and expel the inhabitants’, seizing their stately stone and brick residences as ‘homesteads’ for sheep stations. The result had been ‘total annihilation of whole populations’ – in a word, genocide.

A far-right interloper, before being removed from the commission chamber, managed to ask, first, how you could talk about ‘economic exclusion’ when the Aboriginal community over the years had received billions of dollars of public money, and second, why, to paraphrase the British historian David Starkey, if Aborigines were the victims of genocide how is it that there are more people in Victoria claiming to be Aboriginal now (61,685 at the last census) than there were when the colony was established (around 30,000). Outraged commissioners, some pointing bones at the questioner, others shouting, ‘Knock his teeth out,’ protested that the figures were a ‘racist fabrication’ and that, anyway, ‘First Nations’ peoples today are descendants of a ‘remnant’ of ‘inland nations’ who had survived only because they had been ‘enslaved by invaders as cooks and blacktrackers’. Their enslavement lasted until the ‘wise government’ of Gough Whitlam set them free.

The leaked report shows that the commission intends to make itself a ‘mandatory adviser’ to the Victorian government with powers of veto ‘on all legislation enacted on-country’. The new advisory body would avoid the ‘tactical mistake’ of calling itself the Voice, as that name was now ‘tainted by racial vilification’. Instead it would be called the First Nations Loud Hailer to Parliament. Parliament itself would be ‘dispossessed just as it had dispossessed Aboriginal people’ and ‘relocated’ to less ‘ostentatiously imperialist premises’, while the Loud Hailer occupied the legislative chambers as its ‘yarning gunyahs’.

The Victorian premier has ‘welcomed’ both commissions’ reports, and described Yoorrook II in particular as ‘moderate and impartial’ and ‘shaping up to be a road map for righting a festering historical injustice’.