Colonial risk management

Australian Journal of Political Science, 2018

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.

Risk, Responsibility and the Welfare State. Eds. G. …, 2010

In June 2007 the Australian federal government initiated a policy program that aimed to transform Aboriginal communities in Australia's Northern Territory (NT). In the months following the NT Intervention, several commentators and scholars remarked on the similarity of the policy to the coercive and assimilatory politics of Australia's colonial past. These authors argued that the Intervention represented a 'lack of capacity to abandon past thinking about colonialism'. This article contributes to a settler-colonial analysis of the Intervention by providing the first substantive comparison of the political discourses employed by the Liberal National (Coalition) government and the Labor government on the subject of the NT Intervention. By drawing on the emergent field of settler-colonial studies, I am able to identify the settler-colonial mentality that is shared by the Coalition and Labor governments.

2013

Between Indigenous and Settler Governance addresses the history, current development and future of Indigenous self-governance in four settler-colonial nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Bringing together emerging scholars and leaders in the field of indigenous law and legal history, this collection offers a long-term view of the legal, political and administrative relationships between Indigenous collectivities and nation-states. Placing historical contingency and complexity at the center of analysis, the papers collected here examine in detail the process by which settler states both dissolved indigenous jurisdictions and left spaces – often unwittingly – for indigenous survival and corporate recovery. They emphasise the promise and the limits of modern opportunities for indigenous self-governance; whilst showing how all the players in modern settler colonialism build on a shared and multifaceted past. Indigenous tradition is not the only source of the principles and practices of indigenous self-determination; the essays in this book explore some ways that the legal, philosophical and economic structures of settler colonial liberalism have shaped opportunities for indigenous autonomy. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance will interest all those concerned with Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations.

2010

Introduction In this chapter we take the Northern Territory Intervention as a prism through which to explore a distinctive cultural shift that is currently underway in the governing of remote-living Aboriginal Australians. At the heart of this process, we argue, lies a shift from a focus on community to individuation that entails a profound contradiction. From one perspective the state can be interpreted as acting responsibly and decisively to reduce the risk posed by a section of its citizenry who represent a refusal to conform to mainstream social values. This refusal is viewed as constituting risk not just for the Australian nation, but also for Aboriginal communities and persons themselves. Yet such mainstreaming action will be shown to have opposite effects. Rather than working to re-establish the kinds of social forms through which ontological security might be fostered within this distinctive section of Australian society, government policy is increasingly geared towards prod...

Understandings of resilience which primarily focus on the individual are of limited applicability unless we recognise the historical, economic and political factors in which social life occurs. To explore the social foundations of resilience is to chart the ongoing influence of these factors.

Anthropologica, 2010

The success of Aboriginal people in reconstituting kin and locality-oriented socialities which could engage with Australian nation-building is underestimated in the naturalizing of"the local community" by anthropologists and politicians alike. But these socialities have not been able to withstand their radical re-shaping under "self-management" programs. These have produced a violent struggle between kin and civic sociality, and between personal autonomy and social r esponsibility. The consequent loss of cultural and economic autonomy, the stress placed on the realization of persons, and the rendering of authority as ineffectual have produced a pervasive social sickness throughout Aboriginal Australia. Resume: Les populations aborigenes ont connu du succes dans leur entreprise pour reconstituer des unites sociales basees sur la parente et la proximite et susceptibles de contribuer a la reconstruction de la nation australienne. Toutefois, les anthro-Anthropologica 52 (2010) Colonizing Processes, the Reach of the State and Ontological Violence I 51 A nthmpologica 52 (2010) Colonizing Processes, the Reach of the State and Ontological Violence I 61

Australian Journal of Human Rights, 2008

Page, A., & Petray, T. (2012). The Dualism of Agency and the Australian Settler-State in the Twenty First Century: The Palm Island Riot of 2004 and the Aftermath. Proceedings of The Australian Sociological Association Conference, November, 2012.

The relationship between Indigenous Australians and the Settler-State continues to be that of a stark power inequity. Despite a continued push by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for self-determination there continues to be very little recognition of Indigenous perspectives, authority, or political autonomy by the structures of the Australian state. We analyse the Palm Island Riot of 2004 and its immediate aftermath through the interactions of individual agency and the state. Following the 2004 death in custody on Palm Island, North Queensland, community members challenged state response through a community meeting followed by a protest-turned-riot. We argue that the Palm Island Riot of 2004 was a calculated expression of agency - albeit one of anger and frustration - in reaction to the perceived subversion of justice by the Queensland Government and Police Service. Both the Government and the Police Service, as representatives of the Australian Settler-State, responded to this vivid display of calculated resistance with the overt violence and coercion that is routinely associated with the Settler-State in relation to Indigenous peoples. This response can be understood as the continuation of its attempted dominance over both the residents of Palm Island and the broader Indigenous Australian population in the twenty first century. Key Words: Indigenous, Agency, Settler-State, Australia, Riot, Police. The Australian Sociological Association Conference Paper 2012