I think there's a bit of miscommunication happening, David. Some of the things to which you seem to be objecting are not things I'm advocating for anyway. That's fine, you can express objections to whatever you want - presumably you've seen
somebody advocate for them. I'll simply clarify those which
I'm not advocating for.
1) The law explicitly disallows group punishments, and that is for a reason.
I'm not sure why you're bringing up group punishment. Is it because you think it's what I'm advocating for? If so: I'm not.
2) It is, I think, hard to know if anyone gained from colonisation other than the very wealthy. Sure people in the West got a few things - sugar for instance - that they wouldn't have had otherwise, but people were worked to the bone here, and sent out against their will to fight for the profits of the colonisers.
Almost everything that every non-indigenous person has here in Australia was gained from colonisation. Of course, it took a lot of hard work on top of that, but without the theft of the land and its resources in the first place - including
the effective slave labour of many of its indigenous people up until as late as 1970 - the colonisers, immigrants, and their descendants would have had nothing.
What I am objecting to, is a totally spurious concept of white guilt, because it is simply daft.
The reaction against guilt seems to be very defensive (where "I" stands for the generic member of an occupying group): "
I have done nothing wrong; the original crimes were committed by
dead people; why should
I be blamed for them and feel guilt for them?"
It looks different from another perspective: that of the people whose land has been stolen from them and is
still occupied by a foreign people. The injustice is ongoing; those of us non-indigenous people living on indigenous land are each complicit in its perpetuation to some extent. Since you (David) are living in your (presumably) native land, the degree to which you (David) are personally complicit in the occupation of colonised lands is of course minimal.
I'm not expecting or advocating for guilt - I think the support of restorative justice is more important than how one feels - but I do think it's an understandable and appropriate emotion to feel under the circumstances (at least, to the extent that guilt is
ever an appropriate emotion to feel - some people argue that it is totally unconstructive and never appropriate, but that's a whole other discussion).
One final question (in general, not necessarily based on any position you, David, take): if "pride in the achievements of one's culture" is a legitimate emotion to feel, then why would "shame for the injustices committed by one's culture" not be?
Peoples have been shifting across the planet since history began, the concept that a certain race is entitled to a particular piece of land because of history, is basically stupid - you would never exhaust claim and counter claim!
Some claims might be more tenuous than others, but many are clear-cut, including the case of Australia: there is no known occupying group on this land prior to the indigenous Australians (that's why we refer to them as "indigenous"), who have lived here for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. They continue to live here. The colonisers and immigrants have been here for a mere 230 years - that's roughly three lifetimes back-to-back.