By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

If Australia's political class directed a tenth of the sensitivity reserved for Israel towards First Nations Peoples, then the Voice would have coasted home on strong backing from across parliament and media.

In fact, a raft of treaties would already be in train and our flag would long ago have lost its tactless colonial fealty.

Think about this in light of the puffed-up indignation over Laura Tingle's observation that this is a racist country. A chorus led, incidentally, by the same right-wing politicians and commentators who simultaneously claim there is a volcanic upwelling of anti-Semitism at present. So, it is a racist country, after all?

This is not some cheap debating point. Rather, it highlights the ability of many in public life to trumpet double standards, to haughtily exceptionalise their way into staggering behavioural inconsistencies to serve their worldview.

One cause has campaigned for decades in Canberra duchessing politicians, journalists, editors and academics, signing them up to Israel's plucky narrative of heroic besiegement.

The other, unexotic and downtrodden, has struggled to animate a murky disjointed tale which uncomfortably dismantles this country's egalitarian origin myth.

The asymmetry in political effectiveness is striking. Between God's chosen people, and the nation's "most unloved", one group begets deference, the other, indifference.

But it is worse than indifference.

Remember when "No" campaigners said the Uluru agenda amounted to apartheid? That it proposed a third chamber of parliament? And when we were told Indigenous people suffered no consequences of British settlement.

"A positive impact? Absolutely," bubbled the Nationals' senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, sparking giddy applause from the Nationals leadership. "I mean, now we've got running water, we've got readily available food. I mean everything my grandfather had when he was growing up, because he first saw whitefellas in his early adolescence, we now have."

Offered the chance to reconcile with a brutal history of Indigenous treatment last year, Australia refused. Picture Shutterstock

Case dismissed. No deleterious effects from massacres, land theft, dignity denied, the Stolen Generations. These comments were made by mainstream political leaders. Last year. Openly.

What about when one of the No campaign's leaders - a former federal Labor minister, no less - opined First Nations people should be required to take blood tests to receive government assistance?

Another leader claimed a respected Aboriginal journalist had deliberately darkened his complexion.

Still not racist?

Robust did not describe the tone of that debate. Callous, contemptuous and hateful would get you closer.

Mainstream discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict, though, has occurred within the narrowest of sensitivity parameters in which the feelings of Jewish supporters of Israel are paramount.

Here, according to an unspoken consensus, the Israeli state, executive policy, military actions, faith and race are rendered indistinguishable so that criticism of one is an attack on all. Or more particularly, an attack motivated by the latter, race.

This presents material dangers. Incomplete arguments masquerade as rigorous. The Jewish state's "right to defend itself" is asserted as a catch-all in which even the annihilation of thousands of children is an acceptable cost.

So acceptable that this ongoing carnage sits beyond detailed questioning whereas the question, and only the question, becomes "unspeakable". History will not judge kindly these moral contortions and political appeasements.

Another incomplete argument is that Hamas should stop using civilians as human shields.

Clearly this is true, but does Hamas's terrorist immorality give the IDF carte blanche to obliterate those unwitting "human shields"? In mainstream politico-media circles, the question is virtually a no-go area.

Is Israel's leadership guilty of genocidal acts? The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan thinks so, but the court itself is yet to issue such warrants, let alone hear a case.

Here, though, there is no such doubt. It is established fact that inhabitants of this land for 60-plus millennia were violently dispossessed, did not cede their land, and were not compensated.

That is, they were subject to cruel annihilationist practices that in both form and intent, would probably meet the test set out in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG).

Policies included the removal of peoples from country, deprivation of liberty, forced labour, starvation, corporal and capital punishment, rape, terrorisation and mass-murder.

Whatever honest labours and ingenuity characterised the early settlers, this country's original prosperity proceeded from the enabling lie of terra nullius and from what we would now very likely define as crimes at international law.

Our second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, celebrated liberal and key architect of federation, was hardly alone in arguing Aborigines were a dying race.

The university which still bears his name acknowledges this openly: "Deakin was one of the chief architects of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 - otherwise known as the White Australia Policy. The intent of this restrictive immigration policy was to create a 'White Australia' - a deeply racist concept that was argued strenuously for by Alfred Deakin throughout his career."

Noel Pearson predicted defeat of the Voice would leave the First Nations cause "perished in the mud".

"For those who wish to oppose our recognition it will be like shooting fish in a barrel. An inane thing to do - but easy. A heartless thing to do - but easy."

Wasn't it, though. Offered the chance to reconcile with these brutal truths last year, we refused. Actively, consciously refused.

But hell, don't you dare suggest there's racism here.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.