Following on from my previous article in On Target on the Aboriginal recognition agenda and the break-up of Australia, I will offer some remarks in review of Keith Windschuttle’s The Break-Up of Australia: The Real Agenda Behind Aboriginal Recognition, (Quadrant Books, Sydney, 2016). This is a long, scholarly book of 470 pages (including the index), so many readers are not going to have the time to read it. Nevertheless, there are people who should be given copies, such as One Nation members, and other independent members of parliament, for even if they do not read it themselves, they often have young, eager staff who can. I would therefore highly recommend people consider getting copies of this book to circulate ready for the coming battle of this century. Sooner, rather than later.
Windschuttle’s thesis is that the agenda behind Aboriginal recognition, is problematic from the start, because it is based on the false claim that the Australian Constitution was drafted to exclude Aboriginal people, where it was nothing of the sort. Windschuttle demolishes these arguments in the early part of his book, especially in the preface, which gives a concise “No” case. Aborigines voted to approve the delegates to the Constitutional Conventions and to approve the 1899 Constitution before being put to the people. They were not excluded and nor was there any desire to attempt in any way to give any history of Australia, because this enabling document is a charter for the creation of a federal government. Windschuttle points out that the “Yes” side confuse, perhaps deliberately, the history of a continent or land mass, with the history of a nation, one which only came into existence in 1788.