Submission to Productivity Commission Inquiry into an Indigenous Evaluation Strategy

-

Neoliberal indigenous policy: settler colonialism and the 'post-welfare' state

This book examines recent changes to Indigenous policy in English-speaking settler states, and locates them within the broader shift from social to neo-liberal framings of citizen-state relations via a case study of Australian federal policy between 2000 and 2007

Contemporary Indigenous Affairs: Seeking the Radical Centre

Indigenous policy in Australia appears to be following a pattern. Decades-long bipartisan stability breaks apart in rapid, highly partisan and controversial shifts to an alternative paradigm. A new consensus forms, and as the dust settles, public and academic commentators seek to make sense of the changed landscape and their role in it. This happened in the 1970s move from assimilation policy to self-determination, and we have just lived through it once again. For thirty years, the self-determination era prioritised social reconciliation, political and cultural recognition, collective land rights and support for Aboriginal self-management via a growing Indigenous NGO sector. The Howard government dismantled this policy assemblage piece by piece, beginning with challenges to the reconciliation process around 2000, accelerating with the abolition of ATSIC and the bureaucratic “quiet revolution” in 2004, and dramatically concluding with the Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2007 (the “Intervention”). The federal government openly presented the Intervention as the start of a new policy phase of normalisation, in which rights politics and cultural recognition could no longer trump material disadvantage. Policy focus narrowed to remote Indigenous communities as sites of dysfunction and suffering, and to the task of bringing these communities into mainstream economic and social systems by whatever means necessary

Beyond colonial completion: Arendt, settler colonialism and the end of politics

As many have argued, the Western political theory tradition tends to justify settler colonialism and erase its ongoing effects. However, this chapter suggests that we can draw on resources from within that tradition to challenge problematic settler colonial dynamics, which can prevent us as settlers from engaging in genuine political dialogue with Indigenous peoples. As an example, I show how Arendt helps us rethink traditional settler visions of ‘decolonisation’, which are deeply entwined with the drive to colonial completion and the erasure of Indigenous political independence. While her overall body of work has a complex relationship to settler colonialism, she offers an important critique of political projects that paradoxically seek to end politics once and for all. Most importantly, she reinstates political action as a positive enduring condition, and offers an account of politics as the good life rather than as pathway to the good life. This allow us to move the political task facing Indigenous and settler relations from ‘fixing the problem’ Indigenous people pose for us and for the dominant state towards fostering a productive but uncomfortable political coexistence. However, she can only help us to see the need for deep encounter with Indigenous people and worlds. At this point a different and more deeply dialogic conversation must begin

Politics of indigenous development

Indigenous peoples constitute permanent and culturally unique minorities spread throughout the settler states of both North and South, characterized by prior claims to the territory they inhabit and an ongoing experience of colonization (UNDESA 2010a: 6). They do not have a formal political voice within the international state system, and must instead assert jurisdiction against powerful state institutions that have an interest in denying their political existence. This has meant that Indigenous marginalization and poverty have generally been classified as domestic social policy problems of settler states and neglected by the global community. However, over the past 40 years, Indigenous transnational activism has led to greater visibility of their claims. Recent milestones include the first meeting of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII, in 2002) and the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). This global recognition makes it more difficult for settler states to frame Indigenous poverty and political struggle as a strictly domestic issue. In this context, international organizations, state agencies and activists increas- ingly seek to incorporate Indigenous communities into the international development paradigm. These communities are framed as ‘left behind’ by global development to date, and as economically deficient in relation to dominant populations. In turn, they are thought to be in need of particularly intensive programmes to improve social conditions and economic participation. While Indigenous people have long been subject to developmental imperatives, and to concerted attempts to bring them into dominant societies (Buchan 2005), it is only in recent decades that the global apparatus of development, including international organizations, aid agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), environmental groups, consultants and technicians, have been mobilized in relation to Indigenous lives. This has been reinforced by more recent approaches that frame development in global rather than national terms (Edelman and Haugerud 2005: 17); while development was targeted at the nation-state, Indigenous struggles remained subsumed within the broader national projects. This reconceived development framework is generally understood as a more empowering, transnational and inclusive means of acting upon Indigenous disadvantage, which some argue addresses decades of neglect by settler states (see, for example, discussion of the Millennium Development Goals in relation to Indigenous people at UNDESA 2010a: 39). However, this chapter highlights the complex ways in which the development paradigm is implicated in ongoing colonial conflict

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy–rather than legal agreements–as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict