Pauline Hanson wants to know what Aboriginal people achieved in 60,000 years.

Perhaps the more interesting question is not whether Aboriginal civilisation was "primitive". It is what Hanson thinks civilisation is.

In a podcast recorded last year and recently unearthed, Hanson reportedly described Aboriginal Australians as the "most primitive race on earth", dismissed tens of thousands of years of culture as little more than "a few paintings on a rock wall", and asked what we had achieved.

The answer is written across the continent on which she serves as a senator.

First Peoples developed systems of law, kinship, diplomacy, trade, ecological management, navigation, astronomy and ceremony across radically different environments. At Budj Bim, Gunditjmara people engineered channels, weirs and dams to systematically harvest kooyang. At Madjedbebe, archaeological evidence points to human occupation around 65,000 years ago and extraordinarily early technologies of grinding and plant processing.

But there is something foundationally wrong with accepting Hanson's test in the first place.

Why should Aboriginal civilisation have to demonstrate its worth by producing the same things as Europe?

The absence of the wheel does not demonstrate the absence of intelligence. Technologies emerge because societies need them.

Measuring Aboriginal civilisation according to whether it reproduced European inventions is like judging European civilisation by its failure to develop the ecological knowledge of the Martuwarra, the navigational traditions of the Torres Strait, or the kinship systems of the Noongar.

More importantly, technological accumulation is a remarkably narrow definition of human progress.

We Noongar did not have a history of human sacrifice, nor of major warfare, territorial expansion, continental conquest, religious violence, the invention of nuclear warfare, nor the idea that an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth, all for the mad pursuit of utopia which summoned, instead, the crimson furnace of modernist hell.

How can we as any Aboriginal people be primitive if all we've done is cared for country and for one another for 60,000 years or more?

That is not an argument that Aboriginal societies were utopias. We fought. We disagreed. We punished. We were, and remain, human beings.

It is an argument about the absurdity of the measuring stick.

Europe produced extraordinary philosophy, science, art, medicine and democratic thought. It also produced imperialism, industrialised warfare, racial pseudoscience and weapons capable of ending human civilisation.

None of that makes Europeans inherently barbaric. But it should make us suspicious of a theory of history in which technological power automatically confers civilisational superiority.

And the word 'primitive' carries particular weight in Australia.

Colonisation required an intellectual justification. Aboriginal peoples could not simply be people already governing Country according to sophisticated systems of law and obligation. We had to become something less: wandering rather than governing, occupying rather than owning, possessing customs rather than laws.

The fiction of inferiority helped make the reality of dispossession possible.

That is why Hanson's language cannot be dismissed as another provocative contribution from a politician who has spent three decades courting controversy. She is drawing upon one of the oldest ideas in the colonial archive: that Aboriginal people occupy an earlier and inferior stage of humanity.

There are legitimate arguments about treaty, truth-telling, constitutional transformation, Indigenous expenditure, land rights, and more. Aboriginal people disagree fiercely about these questions. As we've a right to do.

But democratic disagreement requires a boundary: we debate policies without debating whether the people affected by them are fully human.

Australia crossed that boundary too many times before.

And perhaps there is an answer to Hanson's question that requires no archaeological excavation at all.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples survived.

Our languages are still spoken. Our ceremonies continue. Our law survives. Our children still learn Country. Our old people still pass knowledge forward.

Cultures do not endure for tens of thousands of years because they have achieved nothing.

They endure because they have mastered something modern societies; facing ecological crisis, democratic fracture and weapons capable of annihilation; might yet discover they desperately need to learn: how to continue.

Pauline Hanson wants to know what Aboriginal people achieved in 60,000 years.

We are still here. What greater achievement does she require?

Jesse J. Fleay is a Boorloo-born Noongar writer and academic living in Naarm. He lectures in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. Views are his own.