Elizabeth Strakosch

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.

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.

Counter-monuments and nation-building in Australia

Counter-monuments aim to challenge and invert the nation-building agenda of traditional state memorials. Instead of presenting a simple story of triumph or martyrdom, they confront the nation-state with its own crimes and exclusions. In contrast to traditional pedagogical monuments, they use abstract rather than literal forms to accommodate ambivalence, multiplicity, and change. Scholars such as James E. Young have celebrated this new generation of monuments as capable of acknowledging the absences and uncertainties of historical events, and as able to build more inclusive, post-national political identities. They appear to allow the stories of victims and perpetrators to share a single representational space without either dominating, and are able to genuinely contribute to peaceful post-conflict coexistence.

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.

Redefining the ‘Aboriginal Problem’

Social liberal logics informed the official Australian policy of ‘selfdetermination’. From the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s, federal governments acted to establish progressive systems of self-management and legislative recognition (Jull 2004; Stokes and Jull 2000; Murphy 2000; Gibson 1999). The centrepiece of this policy regime was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). ATSIC operated through an elected regional council structure and was thus positioned as an authentic Indigenous political voice (Murphy 2000). The selfdetermination approach overlapped with and supported a social ‘reconciliation’ agenda, whereby the state aimed to reform mainstream attitudes and address past injustices (Gunstone 2007; Gooder and Jacobs 2002). Within the self-determination/reconciliation framework, Indigenous peoples were positioned as disadvantaged through collective historical exclusion but deserving of full inclusion in the Australian nation-state. It was the responsibility of mainstream governments to enact this inclusion through legislation, social welfare and support for limited forms of autonomy (Gibson 1999).

Policy: Assuming Sovereignty

As Alfred points out, If sovereignty has been neither legitimized nor justified, it has nevertheless limited the ways we are able to think, suggesting always a conceptual and definitional problem centred on the accommodation of indigenous peoples within a ‘legitimate’ framework of settler state governance. When we step outside this discourse, we confront a different problematic, that of the state’s ‘sovereignty’ itself. (Alfred 2005: 34–35)

Australian Indigenous Policy 2000–2007

The first part of this book considered the theoretical dimensions of neoliberal Indigenous policy, and argued that such policy involves a rearticulation of the crucial facilitative relationship between liberalism and settler colonialism. This part of the book explores and grounds this claim through an analysis of the neoliberalisation of Australian federal Indigenous policy between 2000 and 2007. Following this introductory empirical chapter, it analyses the intersection of neoliberalism and settler colonialism via textual analysis of three key policy moments. This analysis suggests that neoliberal settler colonialism is more rather than less likely to take place in the policy register, and through decentralised economic and social processes. In its distrust of state juridical procedures, in its suspicion of rights claims, in its deconstruction of the collective into atomistic individuals, in its valorisation of ‘organic’ market processes, in its focus on the ‘defective’ subjectivities of the disadvantaged, neoliberalism pushes Indigenous-settler relations out of the visible spaces of sovereign encounter. This is not to say, as I argue in previous chapters, that neoliberal Indigenous policy does not have significant sovereign implications and effects. It just means that more of this work takes place in the diffuse language of policy rather than in the centralised language of rights and recognition. Where neoliberal settler sovereignty does again become visible via unilateral authoritarian action on Indigenous lives, this takes a different form from the more complex entanglements of the social liberal era. It is more directly articulated in the policy terms of Indigenous socio-economic need and community dysfunction rather than political encounter.

Analysing Neoliberalism and Settler Colonialism

Neoliberalism and settler colonialism are sometimes framed as manifestations of a single Western structure of domination. For example, Walter Mignolo argues that they are both forms of modernist coloniality and rely on the same possessive capitalist logic (2011). As emerges throughout this chapter, both neoliberalism and settler colonialism reflect drives to possession of property, and work through racialised hierarchies. They emerge from the same global imperial histories and both work to structure encounters between Western Europeans and the rest of the world. However, this book does not reduce the categories to one another. While they are intertwined as part of the longer interaction of liberalism and colonialism, I explore how they articulate together in a particular context, without necessarily presupposing their fundamental sameness or even commensurability. It is true that in neoliberal Indigenous policy they tend to facilitate one another, but neoliberalism also poses problems for the settler project that this project struggles to address.