18/09/2026
💜🙏💜
I have been thinking about Pauline Hanson describing Aboriginal people as primitive and the more I think about it, the less interested I am in being offended by the word and the more interested I become in the measure she is using. To call another group of people primitive, you must first have decided what advanced looks like. You need a measuring stick and for a very long time Aboriginal people have been measured using a European one.
When Europeans arrived here they didn't see cities, roads, factories, fences, written language or the accumulation of individual wealth they associated with civilisation. They looked at Aboriginal people through their own understanding of progress and decided that because our lives didn't look like theirs, we must somehow be behind them. But maybe the problem wasn't what they were looking at. Maybe the problem was the measuring stick they brought with them.
What happens if we change the measure? What if advancement isn't simply measured by what we build, what we own or how much wealth we accumulate. What if it is measured by how well we understand the place that keeps us alive, by our knowledge of seasons, plants, animals, water and fire. If we measure our relationships with one another and our responsibilities to family, community and country. What if progress was measured not by how much we could take from the earth, but by how much we could leave for those who came after us. Suddenly the story looks very different.
Aboriginal cultures were built around relationships, responsibilities and obligations to others. That doesn't mean life was perfect or that every Aboriginal society was the same, they weren't. However, the accumulation of enormous individual wealth while other people around you had nothing was not the measure of success unlike our modern economic system. Resources were connected to relationships and obligations, your place in the world came with responsibilities beyond yourself.
Compare that with the world we have created today. We live in a system that constantly dangles a carrot in front of us. Work harder, earn more, buy more and own more and maybe one day you will be wealthy too. We are sold the dream that enormous wealth is available to anyone who wants it badly enough and so millions of ordinary people spend their lives running towards it. Meanwhile wealth can concentrate at the top and the people who already have the most are in the strongest position to accumulate even more. We call that progress.
We can have billionaires with more wealth than they could reasonably spend in a lifetime while other human beings sleep on streets. We can walk past homelessness on the way into shops filled with things we don't need and somehow accept both as normal parts of an advanced society. We can have people working full time who still struggle to afford housing, food and electricity while being told that if they just work a little harder, perhaps they too can eventually reach the carrot hanging in front of them. Maybe we should be careful about who we call primitive.
We have also become incredibly good at taking from the earth. Forests have been cleared, rivers changed, wetlands damaged, habitats destroyed and animals pushed towards extinction. We dig enormous holes into the ground, remove what has taken millions of years to form, turn it into wealth and call the numbers on a balance sheet growth. We produce more, consume more, throw away more and then use that consumption as evidence of how successful we have become.
None of this is an argument against technology or modern life. Human beings have achieved extraordinary things. Medicine saves lives that once would have been lost. Technology connects people across the planet. Science allows us to understand things previous generations could never have imagined, however surely being advanced must mean more than simply being clever enough to invent something. Perhaps it should also mean being wise enough to understand the consequences of what we do with it.
That is why I find Pauline Hanson's use of the word primitive so interesting because perhaps there is something primitive in the thinking behind it. The idea that one culture can stand above another, apply its own values as the universal measure of human advancement and declare everybody who lived differently to be beneath them feels like a remarkably outdated way of understanding the world.
Perhaps primitive isn't living without skyscrapers, factories or enormous personal wealth. Perhaps there is something primitive about believing our worth should be measured by how much we own. Perhaps there is something primitive about accepting that some people can accumulate unimaginable wealth while others cannot afford somewhere safe to sleep. Perhaps there is something primitive about destroying the environment that keeps us alive and calling it progress simply because somebody made money doing it.
For tens of thousands of years Aboriginal people lived on this continent adapting to enormous environmental changes and developing knowledge that allowed generations to continue. They weren't waiting for Europeans to arrive and show them how to become civilised. They had cultures, laws, knowledge systems, relationships and responsibilities developed for the world in which they lived. Then another culture arrived holding up its own measuring stick.
History has usually allowed the people with the most power to decide what gets measured. They decide what knowledge counts, what wealth looks like, what progress means and what civilisation should be. Perhaps unsurprisingly they create a measure that places themselves somewhere near the top.
Maybe Pauline Hanson's comments give us an opportunity to ask a much bigger question than whether Aboriginal people were primitive. Maybe the question should be, how de we measure primitive and whose measuring stick do we use?
If advancement is measured by technology, individual wealth, production and consumption then one story emerges. However if we measure ourselves by how we treat the person who has the least, whether we leave people behind, how we care for the earth that sustains us, what we leave for generations who haven't been born yet and whether we understand that having more is not the same as being more, another story begins to emerge.
Before people hold that measuring stick against Aboriginal people, perhaps they should have the courage to turn it around.
They might not like what it tells them about themselves.
