Bill Shorten hugs Senator Malarndirri McCarthy after Malcolm Turnbull delivered the Closing the Gap report at Parliament House. Credit:Andrew Meares Both Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten made noises about how disappointing these results were and that clearly action was needed, but let's be honest: nothing will happen. Why? Because indigenous issues don't win elections, thanks to a quarter century of governments making it OK for Australians to be openly stupid, cruel, and racist. I turned 18 in 1990 and was in my first year of university in Adelaide: a middle class white boy fresh out of private school. Indigenous affairs were not even remotely on my radar. My knowledge of Australian history, like my peers, went pretty much as follows: Captain Cook, convicts, goldrush, Gallipoli, ANZACs, Bradman, done. And then I heard Archie Roach's Took The Children Away. That was the first time the Stolen Generation came across my radar, and the more I learnt the more horrified I became.

Other councils are planning to also vote on Australia Day celebrations after the City of Yarra decision. Credit:Ben Plant Then came Yothu Yindi's Treaty, calling out the government's hypocrisy on land rights. It was also when I learnt that Canada had made treaties with their First Peoples, including land rights, proving that it was entirely possible – indeed reasonable – for a grown up country to do so. Just to send that message home the Kev Carmody/Paul Kelly song From Little Things Big Things Grow appeared a few months later, elegantly telling the story of Vincent Lingiari and the struggle for land rights in four chords. Change seemed in the air. In 1991 the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody concluded, exposing the nation to heartbreaking reality of state-sanctioned murder, making a suite of recommendations. And in December 1992 Paul Keating gave his "Redfern Speech", one of the defining moments of his prime ministership, in which he officially acknowledged the wrongs done to the First Australians.

How have things improved since? In 1998 Pauline Hanson entered Parliament for the first time with a speech that included the assertion that "Along with millions of Australians, I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government and paid for by the taxpayer under the assumption that Aboriginals are the most disadvantaged people in Australia." Evidently "dead a decade earlier than other Australians" was some sort of advantage in Hanson's eyes. And sure, Labor PM Kevin Rudd finally gave an official apology to the Stolen Generation in 2008, which should have been a moment of healing and another chance to kickstart the spluttering engine of reconciliation, but that didn't exactly happen – not least because it was explicitly made clear that there would be no suggestion of any actual compensation for those wronged. And let's never forget the pack of Liberal Party cretins that made a big deal of walking out on the apology: a team which included such beloved intellectual giants as erotic war novel author Dennis Jensen, Sophie "the only Liberal MP so unpopular that she still lost her seat in the 2013 Coalition landslide" Mirabella, and your Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton: a man inexplicably being touted as possible leadership material. These days you don't need to hunt too far for bloviating gasbags on talk radio or Sky News insisting that the Stolen Generation never even happened; and if it did happen, that it wasn't nearly as widespread as people say; and if it was that widespread, then it was purely in the best interests of the children; and if it was not in their best interests then it was ages ago anyway and people have to stop using past injustices as excuses for their current predicament.

There's no sign of a treaty – but our government is bickering over whether we should consider perhaps maybe at some point looking at the wording of how we might include some sort of indigenous recognition in the Constitution, possibly, in the fullness of time. So that's good. Land rights? Living on traditional lands (which, incidentally, is a pre-requisite for claiming any sort of rights) is a "lifestyle choice", according to Tony Abbott. So then in 2016 the WA government announced plans to cut funding to a number of remote communities which, by an amazing coincidence, all happened to be Aboriginal. What are the odds, eh? We've seen what happens to people in youth detention in NT - the territory which still has the paternalistic, victim-blaming, openly racist Intervention, which we now know was justified on spurious grounds and yet has remained policy under Labor and Coalition governments. Those royal commission deaths in custody recommendations? Almost entirely ignored. Abbott also celebrated his tenure as the self proclaimed "Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs" by cutting over half a billion dollars from indigenous programs and projects in his first budget. Let the healing begin! Twenty-five years ago we seemed ready to grow the hell up and reconcile with our complicated and often shameful history and look to a strong future as a united nation. But we decided instead to be cowards – or, more accurately, racists.