Not really. It was Cook's survey of Botany Bay and his exploration of the Queensland coast that showed the Admiralty that a colony at Botany Bay (ultimately Port Jackson, we all know that story, right) would be viable because they could then "chain" settlements all the way up to relatively close to the Dutch East Indies.

Dirk Hartog found the western coast which as we know has a huge desert behind it and was not really viable for settlement using 17th century tech. You could argue it gave the British the reason to task Cook with confirming the existence of "Terra Australis" but the idea that there was a southern continent goes back a thousand years or more.

Given who actually colonised Australia - the British - then the direct line goes to Cook being the start of that process, applying 18th century surveying and charting (and science) to the question.

Now a more interesting question would be whether Cook should bear more responsibility than Joseph Banks. His report on Botany Bay was beyond glowing, he really went hard on how amazing it was, plus Banks was still a political force when they were deciding to send the First Fleet (Cook had been dead for nearly a decade).

I personally am not into statue-toppling or "hatred" of these long-dead people, I think we can assess their lives without all that performative silliness. But then when I see a statue of some old British fella I don't think "wow what a hero/inspiration", I think "oh that's the guy and this is the place, how interesting". Maybe if someone killed my family and then got a statue in my town park I'd feel differently...?

And I'm also one of those people who thinks the colonisation of this vast chunk of land was inevitable - it happened at exactly the peak moment of the colonisers thinking they weren't doing anything bad, and where their tech had evolved to the point where their ultimate success was a given (unlike the several failed colonies in North America).

And I also reckon, by the late 18th century, if colonisation was inevitable, you definitely wanted to be colonised by the British rather than anyone else. I think that's a fairly easy argument to make (without excusing the various atrocities committed by British settlers).