Damn those selfish Aborigines; getting in the way of my lifestyle choices. It's a damned inconvenience having to pay anything at all towards keeping them in substandard housing out the back of beyond, but it's especially vexing when that money could be better spent keeping me even more luxuriously domiciled in the inner city.

It's a hellishly expensive business, you know, keeping most of us in the urbane style to which we've become accustomed; tens of billions of dollars a year on metropolitan infrastructure, hundreds of billions in services; dizzyingly expensive policies like negative gearing to keep a steady supply of delightful investment properties popping up around the better sort of water views; cozy tax rorts which allow our favourite multinational corporations to shift all of their profits out of the country, while writing off their losses onshore.

None of these things come cheap. The Prime Minister was right to point out that we can't endlessly subsidise other people's lifestyle choices, not when these inconsiderate natives need to learn that every dollar devoted towards them is a dollar that could have been devoted towards us. Why is that so hard to understand? Surely they can see the evidence right there in front of them even though they live so far away from the nearest eye doctor? Do they imagine, for instance, that the mining companies and giant agri-businesses which occupy their ancestral lands somehow just strolled out there to do business.

I hope not, because it's not nearly that simple. Even after our forebears shot and poisoned their forebears to seize control of the land, enormous amounts of money are still yearly delivered from the public treasury into the hands of those private businesses to ensure their continued holding and exploitation of that land. Sums which could be just a little bit bigger if only some of these self-serving indigenes would only come on board for the big win. For Team Australia.