The Indigenous people of this land are used to white lies.

History, if you don’t re-interpret it, as many have, to render the colonial experience of this continent benignly, tells us that.

After 65,000-plus years of Indigenous habitation the white men came bearing gifts and orders (ignored) to show amity and respect sovereignty. Instead, mouthing friendship, they gifted strychnine-laced loaves, massacred the custodians and took their land and children, compelled by their fallacious racially superior self-belief to empire-build.

They gave scarcely a thought to treaties of the type that had defined negotiated relations between colonisers and other First Nations people. So terra nullius (another laughable fallacy that endured for two centuries) it was.

The 1901 white Australian federation was built on that colonial land theft and mass murder. The constitution, founding document of that settler state, written by “founding fathers”, some stained with Aboriginal blood, was adopted without deference to Indigenous sentiment or referral.

The first business of the new federal parliament, with its racially discriminatory constitution, was the equally racist white Australia policy, its last vestiges extant until barely 50 years ago.

The WAP is gone. Racism against Indigenous people still underscores their relations with our federal, state and territory political institutions (from the parliaments and executives to the bureaucracies and judiciaries). Meanwhile, the federation’s exclusionary symbols and interpretations of supposedly nation-defining historical moments, from the flag and Anzac and Australia Day to the anthem – For we are young and free! – pervade politics and culture in defiance of Indigenous sentiment and sensibility.

A new parliament last week was supposed to bring new hope. Hope that the politicians would rally to allow the constitution to afford Indigenous people recognition – not just some token words acknowledging countless millennia of Aboriginal custodianship but an entrenched representative “voice” to the legislature as expressed by the 2017 Uluru meeting.

Here were the powerful white men on both sides of politics, seeming to agree that it was time to meaningfully change the constitution consistent with the request to the Australian people (never its politicians, mind) in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Time, that is, to let Indigenous people into it in a meaningful way with an enshrined “voice” – a body that would parse legislation affecting Indigenous people, as per the Uluru statement that what was needed was a voice, treaty and truth telling.

Enter Ken Wyatt, the new minister for Indigenous Australians and an Aboriginal man in a party that has done little, since the days of John Howard but play the most cynical politics on the “recognition” issue. Ahead of his Naidoc Week speech in Canberra last week, the brief went out he’d be announcing a referendum on recognition. Would he go further and recommend the referendum consider enshrining the voice in the constitution? – the favoured, meaningful option of black and white supporters of constitutional change.

Wyatt’s address was many things: dignified, composed, personal. It was also artfully politically ambiguous and underscored by a realpolitik that meant he veered clear of mentioning in his speech any prospect of constitutionally entrenching the voice. His message in the speech and in answers to questions that followed was: there would be a referendum on recognition, if possible, but that the voice might be legislated only.

And he wanted time – although so much time has already elapsed with so little advancement.

Wyatt seemed to leave the question of treaties to the states and truth-telling (about the poisoned loaves, the cordite and cold steel, the massacres, the stolen children and the legacy of it all) not to a formal national process, but to communities who’ve already been doing that for many decades.

Despite this the prime minister, Scott Morrison, still felt the need to signal furiously that any understanding that a constitutionally-embedded voice might be put to a referendum was wrong. Can the feral, noxious Right of the Coalition parties that also stripped Malcolm Turnbull of credibility on Indigenous issues hear the PM? those “sources close to” him (read press secretaries under strict instruction), might’ve said.

What seems to be on offer, though it’s now kind of impossible to tell, is the idea of a legislated advisory body – not like what Uluru told Australia it needed.

The voice is a hostage – perhaps now already a victim – of Coalition internal politics. It is, perhaps foremost, a casualty of an acute absence of human empathy from a governing class that views and records Indigenous needs and aspiration through a cage-fight of (mostly non-Aboriginal) political short-term-ism, with its addiction to media- and ideological-management.

And didn’t all this flush the liars out in force again last week! Senior Liberals and Nationals have been lying their tonsils out since Uluru with the false claim that the “voice” is a third parliamentary chamber.

Barnaby Joyce, that great sage of Australian sentiment, did it within 24 hours of the Uluru Statement. Turnbull (weak as weak on recognition) and Morrison have both deliberately miscast the voice as another chamber. Peter Dutton replayed the lie last week. As did many others, including Joyce and Craig Kelly, a predictably reliable echo of the basest reactionary rhetoric.

Kelly, among others, feared recognition could be racially divisive – “a reverse form of what South Africa was a few years ago”. It was breathtaking, craven, race-baiting – political discourse at its most nauseating. Which is quite something. But for many Indigenous Australians and the more ardent supporters of their rights it was even more egregious still – and part of a historical continuum of white lies.

In 2018 the historian Mark McKenna wrote a Quarterly Essay, Moment of Truth – History and Australia’s future, about the imperative of altering our racist constitution and of the need for Australia to redefine itself, consistent with the offer from Uluru, to reflect Indigenous continental antiquity.

I’ll choose the considered historical-, over the hot political-, take on this one. McKenna watched carefully last week. The government’s behaviour was, he says, “historically consistent with the approach taken by so many federal governments in the past – great promises but little return”.

McKenna says: “The conservatives’ arguments – we don’t want race placed in the constitution, we’re all equal, no special treatment etcetera – is blind to the historical reality that we have an exclusionary and racist constitution which was drawn up without even once consulting Indigenous Australians. And they go on with their holier than thou equality rhetoric. They just can’t see, or they refuse to accept the perspective of those whose land was taken from them without treaty, compensation or consent. They refuse to understand what it’s like when you’re on the outside looking in.”

There it is again – the empathy gap and the denial of historical truths.

So, now we head towards 2020 and the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s landing, to be marked with many millions of dollars of public commemorative spending, including the circumnavigation of a replica HMS Endeavour and a new $50m monument to Cook in Morrison’s electorate.

Meanwhile, the lazy acceptance of a trope of Australian nationhood forged through Anzac, is further entrenched as a re-elected government pushes ahead with plans for a $500m Australian War Memorial expansion.

These days the war memorial, with giant banners on the roads leading to its entrances, advertises itself with the anthemic line: For We Are Young And Free.

Another lie.

How do those from the oldest continuous civilisation on earth feel about that?

Those in power don’t really need to ask. For they know the answer. They just choose to ignore the voice.