Submission to Productivity Commission Inquiry into an Indigenous Evaluation Strategy

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Colonising white innocence : Complicity and critical encounters

This paper argues that white settler researchers seeking to engage with Indigenous sovereignty or contribute to antiracist and decolonising struggles should approach these critical encounters with and through awareness of our complicity in ongoing racism and colonialism, which involves appreciating our locations and limits. A discourse of colonizing white innocence circulates in policy, academic and other spaces to reinforce and obscure progressive white investments in maintaining power relationships generated by ongoing colonising racist violence through presenting particular individuals, groups and institutions as non-problematic, and so not complicit in historical and contemporary violence. This foundational assumption allows white settlers to assume that our contributions are benevolent or in the interests of Indigenous people and that we ourselves transcend our own locations within racist and colonising systems of rule, in so doing emphasising our legitimacy and authority in relation to Indigenous people. Complicity establishes both a political responsibility and an intellectual imperative to understand and contest systems of domination in which we are enmeshed through deliberate respectful engagements with those who have experiences, knowledges and forms of authority that we do not and cannot possess

Aboriginality and the Northern Territory intervention

This paper examines constructions of Aboriginality circulating in discourse surrounding the 2007 introduction of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (the intervention). It provides a preliminary analysis of several constructions of Aboriginality that are deployed to justify the intervention, and identifies subject positions, values, logics and power relations that these constructions create, reflect, sustain and foreclose. I argue that discussions of abuse of Aboriginal children in intervention debates operate as a site for contestations about the nature, value and future of Aboriginality, generating, reinforcing and restricting the political legitimacy of a range of subjectivities and speaking positions. Aboriginality is constructed in dominant discourse as primitive, in need of erasure, modification or development in the face of the inevitable and inescapable demands of modernity; it is also understood as inherently savage or threatening, and hence in need of control or discipline. These ideas culminate in understandings of Aboriginal communities as threats to the settler order that must be managed or contained, which are deployed to reinforce the settler state‟s assertions of sovereignty and moral authority

The violence of analogy:abstraction, neoliberalism and settler colonial possession

This article explores the value of theorising about colonialism that is specific rather than universal, informed by our locations in colonial struggles and driven by engagement with our continuing material colonial relationships with land, place and people. We do this by examining recent scholarly engagements with our contemporary precarious global economic and environmental conditions, particularly within settler colonial theory. We argue that using analogy to think our way out of material colonial and racial relations can obscure the authority of Indigenous peoples and reproduce colonial epistemologies. This attempt to create solidarity through political equivalence risks reifying imperial relationships and resecuring white possession. Rather than seeking to evade our positions as colonisers embedded in violent political systems, we argue it is possible for colonisers to act in solidarity from a position of complicity. Working towards justice from our own locations involves building solidarity across differences, without first needing to reduce these differences to sameness

Patrick Wolfe and the settler-colonial intervention

In some ways it is heartbreakingly appropriate to reflect on historian Patrick Wolfe's last book and intellectual legacy on the tenth birthday of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER, the Intervention). A decade ago, the Intervention left many of us struggling to understand what seemed like a radically changing political landscape in Indigenous policy. Into this confusion, for us and many others, came the powerful and illuminating analysis of Patrick Wolfe

Responsible citizens, political consumers and the state

Civil society organisations’ activist campaigns contain calls to action that draw discursive boundaries around the allocation of responsibility to citizens, governments and other agents for addressing major social issues. To address the problem of modern slavery, civil society groups are increasingly calling upon citizens to engage in acts of political consumerism to catalyse corporate social responsibility. This article assesses the ways in which responsibility for modern slavery is configured between different actors, particularly citizens and the state, through a qualitative content analysis of ‘calls to action’ embedded in campaign materials collected from anti-slavery awareness campaigns and initiatives from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America over the last decade. We chart the configuration of responsibility across a broad spectrum of anti-slavery activist approaches, highlighting the ways in which more traditional activism centres the state as powerful actor, while political consumerism campaigns frame the state as either enabler of activism or entirely absent. These activist framings resonate with current policy frameworks, in assigning an increasingly limited burden of responsibility on the state for addressing the problem of modern slavery

The vanishing endpoint of settler colonialism

In this paper, we interrogate the way that narratives about the unfolding of settler colonialism through time are encoded in recent Australian Indigenous policy frameworks. We argue that the postcolonial image of a single transformative moment of radical political break is embedded in Australian policy frameworks, but is deployed in ways that fuse this idea with the moment of colonial completion and in so doing assist the colonial project. By merging the moment of decolonisation and the moment of colonial completion, temporal narratives mobilise conservative and progressive settler voices towards colonial goals. We identify three recent policy approaches: reconciliation, neoliberal contractualism and intervention, and interrogate the narratives of the present and future that they reflect and deploy. We argue these unacknowledged stories of the colonial future must be contested, so that debates about how settler and Indigenous people might live together differently across time are not foreclosed

The ethical demands of settler colonial theory

This article explores the strengths and limitations of settler colonial theory (SCT) as a tool for non-Indigenous scholars seeking to disturb rather than re-enact colonial privilege. Based on an examination of recent Australian academic debates on settler colonialism and the Northern Territory intervention, we argue that SCT is useful in dehistoricizing colonialism, usually presented as an unfortunate but already transcended national past, and in revealing the intimate connections between settler emotions, knowledges, institutions and policies. Most importantly, it makes settler investments visible to settlers, in terms we understand and find hard to escape. However, as others have noted, SCT seems unable to transcend itself, in the sense that it posits a structural inevitability to the settler colonial relationship. We suggest that this structuralism can be mobilized by settler scholars in ways that delegitimize Indigenous resistance and reinforce violent colonial relationships. But while settlers come to stay and to erase Indigenous political existence, this does not mean that these intentions will be realized or must remain fixed. Non-Indigenous scholars should challenge the politically convenient conflation of settler desires and reality, and of the political present and the future. This article highlights these issues in order to begin to unlock the transformative potential of SCT, engaging settler scholars as political actors and arguing that this approach has the potential to facilitate conversations and alliances with Indigenous people. It is precisely by using the strengths of SCT that we can challenge its limitations; the theory itself places ethical demands on us as settlers, including the demand that we actively refuse its potential to re-empower our own academic voices and to marginalize Indigenous resistance

Australian political studies and the production of disciplinary innocence

While Australian political studies often appears to have neglected engagements with Indigenous peoples and politics, we argue this is not a simple question of omission. In fact, the discipline is deeply implicated in imperial knowledge production and the authorisation of racialised colonial governance. As non-Indigenous scholars working within Australian political studies, in this paper we reflect on our own discipline in light of several decades of critical scholarship, identifying the production of disciplinary innocence through a theoretical and institutional analysis of Australian political studies knowledge practices. We explore this production via canonical knowledges, institutional processes that contain Indigenous people and knowledge to subjects of policy, and the operation of disciplinary divisions which neutralise scholarship on policy and political institutions

Partnership for Justice in Health: Scoping Paper on Race, Racism and the Australian Health System

This discussion paper was first prepared as a scoping paper designed to assist the Partnership for Justice in Health (P4JH) consider what is offered by existing scholarship about race and racism in the health system, and in particular, to identify a research approach to support the Australian Government’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan’s (NATSIHP) vision of ‘a health system free of racism’ (2013)