I have heard several prime ministers during the past decade and a half assert that tens of billions of dollars leave Canberra each year to improve the circumstances of this continent's First Peoples, particularly the one in two living below the Henderson Poverty Line or in proximal value to this line.

The Productivity Commission's 2014 Indigenous Expenditure Report was released to the media amid statements the spending addressed "Indigenous Disadvantage". By then, the annual spend was asserted at $30 billion.

Prime Ministers bought the crock of these spends as addressing disadvantage. They perpetuated the myth.

In 2011 and 2012, I wrote articles disaggregating the expenditure.

In 2012, I wrote, less than one billion dollars annually effectively reaches First Peoples. The then Federal Government analysed my assertions and replied that I was correct. There were no tens of billions of dollars spent on First Nations disadvantage. So, if there weren't, why do these myths persist?

The 2014 Indigenous Expenditure Report totalled $30.3 billion spending on "Indigenous disadvantage" – accounting for 6.1 percent of total direct government expenditure.

Then Chair of the Productivity Commission and Chair of COAG Steering Committee, Peter Harris said the report "of total government expenditure and the information on outcomes in the 'Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage' report are two critical building blocks. Governments, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and researchers have the opportunity, to use these reports to consider the effectiveness and efficacy and efficiency of government expenditure. In that way this report will contribute to better policy making and improving outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians".

Though the expenditure report is no longer aligned with "disadvantage spending", it has been used by Prime Ministers and Ministers and most Australians believe it is the case. Consequently, they are lulled into believing "little is working" and "stop wasting billions". If only tens of billions had been spent each year since the turn of the century. If this had been the case, there'd be considerably less First Peoples living below the poverty line, less children removed, less in jail, less suicidality.

The report suggested, "expenditure in real terms increased by $5 billion, or 20 percent, from 2008-9 to 2012-13". We were being sold the myth that each year more was being "thrown at" First Nations disadvantage.

The first time I disaggregated the Productivity Commission's annual Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Report, twelve years ago, the attributed total spend was $25.4 billion. Then Prime Minister Julia Gillard publicly stated "$25 billion" a year was spent on addressing the disadvantages of the First Peoples.

The spend was sold as "86 initiatives". To this day, the hogwash is seeped through public consciousness.

You'd be shocked at what was considered as spending on overcoming "Indigenous Disadvantage": Australia's Corrective Services budgets!

First Peoples are incarcerated at the world's highest jail rate. How can any corrective services budget be included in an overcoming disadvantage budget? How can the spend on locking up the marginalised and vulnerable in prisons be a line item spend in an overcoming disadvantage report?

If only the attributed $44,000 per First Nations spend actually 'hit the ground' where needed, instead of corrective services, law-and-order (police) and child protection department budgets misused to attribute 'spending' on improving the lives of First Peoples.

The $25.4 billion spending included $3.2 billion on 'public order, safety and corrective services.' This leaves $22.2 billion.

Spending on remote and regional homelands infrastructure just does not occur with an equivalency to non-First Nations Australian towns, remote and regional.

Australia is the world's 12th largest economy, one of the world's wealthiest nations per capita, but 22 percent of the descendants of the First Peoples have no clean water, no electricity, and no comparable sewerage. Thirty-five thousand remote and semi-remote children go without a secondary education because there are no high schools. It's a human rights abuse.

The total direct spending attribution includes the normal spending for any Australian. $20,900 is the accepted cost of every Australian. That component is not an affirmative action or additional spend to overcome disadvantage, so let's subtract the $20,900 from the ostensible $43,449 spend on a First Nations person. The $25.4 billion already cut to $22.2 billion is reduced by at least $14 billion to $8.2 billion.

There was an education spend included - $3 billion. For too long, what schools there are in homeland communities have been grossly neglected. One should not argue the right to go to school as a line item to overcoming disadvantage – it is a basic human right. No Australian community should be denied schooling. This leaves $5.2 billion.

In the $25.4 billion, $4 billion in social security payments to First Peoples were included. These payments are, again, the basic right to all eligible Australians. We're left with $1.2 billion.

Expenditure on 'job creation programs' specifically for disadvantaged First Peoples is fair enough. It was five times the rate spent on 'job creation programs' for non-First Nations Australians. However, half this expenditure was absorbed by bureaucracy. Not good.

I continued through the 86 categories of expenditure, and found that less than one billion dollars a year reached First Peoples in terms of restoratively overcoming disadvantage. The spending has marginally increased in the ten years since, but it is underwhelming.

There is an entrenchment of poverty – relative and abject – affecting one in two of Australia's now nearly one million descendants of the First Peoples.

Australians need to understand there is no spend in the tens of billions each year. A number has been done on the First Peoples for too long.

Governments should apologise. Governments should spend the tens of billions each year on the one in two First Peoples crushed by generational poverty. This is the least owed to the First Peoples, for the sins of a nation of invaders who corralled into human misery and with brutal savagery dispossessed the First Peoples of their birthrights, dignity, and humanity for two centuries.

We need to do the spend, not pretend we do.

According to the United Nations Development Programme, the Human Development Index, Australia ranks second in the world for public and social health, but when I disaggregated to the First Peoples – standalone – they ranked 132nd.

No lie should be so grand that it makes people invisible – especially the most marginalised and disadvantaged people.

The Constitution should recognise the First Peoples, that's a truth-telling no-brainer.

The Voice should be much more than is asked, but what little is being asked should not be denied – it is the right thing to do.

If our governments want to continue betraying the wronged, the disadvantaged, then do that while hearing their words and looking into their eyes, wearied eyes that have seen children as young as nine suicide.

First Nations children are 80 percent of Australia's suicides of children aged nine to 12; one in 16 First Nations deaths is a suicide; half of Australia's child prisoners are First Nations; one third of the Australian prison population is of the First Peoples; half of Australia's children removed from their families are Indigenous; ten times the rate of deaths in custody… I could go on – but you understand. Surely, you must.

Gerry Georgatos is a longtime restorative justice advocate, researcher and journalist.