It's time to face up to the real difference between living a traditional Indigenous life and simply having Indigenous heritage. It's never easy drawing lines in policymaking, but it has to be done.

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Noel Pearson's remarks at the Garma festival highlighted the very real divide between the structural realities of remote communities and life everywhere else.

In remote areas, Indigenous Australians live much, much closer to their traditional culture and language than people with Indigenous heritage in our cities and towns. We should recognise that remote-living Indigenous Australians represent one of the oldest living cultures on earth. That's pretty special, and we should treat it as such. Grouping them in with city folks who might have an Indigenous grandparent but have never lived on country does a disservice to both.

We should be protecting and honouring this culture, not letting it be watered down or turned into a political football.

There's a big difference between living within a culture day-in, day-out, and simply having some heritage from it.

No doubt you've got friends who, like so many of us, are an ethnic melting pot. Imagine a mate who has a Greek granny in the mix. You don't introduce her to your mates as "the Greek one" just because of her granny, and she probably doesn't define her whole life around it either.

But weirdly, public policy and corporate metrics now encourage people with distant heritage to identify primarily through that single line of descent. Why do we treat Indigenous heritage differently from every other part of our Australian story? If your life is rooted in the city, putting on a symbolic performance for public occasions doesn't change that. It doesn't mean you're living a traditional culture - it ends up looking more like dressing for identity politics.

Among the great melting pot of our population, there's every mix imaginable. New migrants from places like China or India, or........

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