John Chesterman

The State of Citizenship

Books reviewed in this article: Luc, Rouban (ed.) Citizens and the New Governance: Beyond New Public Management Wayne, Hudson and John, Kane (eds) Rethinking Australian Citizenship Birte, Siim Gender and Citizenship: Politics and Agency in France, Britain and Denmark

'Their Ultimate Absorption': Assimilation in 1930s Australia

This is a post-print of an article published in Journal of Australian Studies 2004 published by API Network and Curtin University of Technology. This version is reproduced with permission from API Network. http://www.api-network.com/scgi-bin/jas/jas.cgi

Defending Australia's reputation: How indigenous Australians won civil rights, part two

This is the second of two articles concerned with the acquisition by Indigenous Australians of civil rights. The first article considered the background to the legislative changes that saw Indigenous people acquire two important civil rights at the Common‐ wealth level: the vote and access to social security. Here the analysis extends to consider the three other important civil rights ‘moments’ for Indigenous people at the Commonwealth level: the 1966 equal wage decision, the 1967 referendum and the passage of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975. Consistent with the argument developed in the first article, two factors are crucial in understanding why these three civil rights developments occurred when they did: the pressure applied to governments by activists within Australia, and the ongoing international embarrassment caused to Australia by its continued breach of international human rights instruments.

Australia’s Citizenship Void

According to W. K. Hancock, writing in 1930, Australians distinguished themselves from Indians and other such people of the British Empire because they were ‘citizen subjects’ rather than ‘subject citizens’.1 Many Australians from earlier and later generations were proud to be citizen subjects, which according to Hancock meant being ‘independent Australian Britons’, a people ‘nourished by a glorious literature and haunted by old memories’: in effect, a people ‘in love with two soils’, the Australian and the British.2 As recently as the late 1960s this positive view was championed by Sir Robert Menzies, for whom the attributes of British subject were perhaps the better part of Australian citizenship.

Creating a Legal Identity: Aboriginal People and the Assimilation Census

Abstract The Commonwealth government of Australia introduced the policy of ‘assimilation’ in the early 1950s. This policy aimed to merge Aboriginal people with other Australians. In 1953 the government drafted legislation that would cease to discriminate against Aboriginal people on the basis of their race, but would instead discriminate against Aboriginal people whose social status rendered them ‘wards’. This reclassification process ultimately affected almost every Aboriginal person in the Northern Territory. However, the assimilation policy could not be implemented until a census had been undertaken of all Aboriginal people in the jurisdiction to determine which people would be listed as wards. The full implementation of the assimilation policy was delayed as the census took over four years to complete. The government employed patrol officers whose role included locating, naming and registering all Northern Territory Aboriginal people. Many obstacles confronted the patrol officers and the administrators in the completion of the census. This article tells the story of the census.

Law on Australia's Northern Frontier: The Fall and Rise of Race

This article compares the two most significant paradigm shifts in the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Australia’s Northern Territory. The Welfare Ordinance 1953 (NT) constituted a then-unique attempt to reclassify the diminished legal status of most indigenous Territorians as justified not by their racial heritage but by their level of social need, while the 2007 legislation behind the “Northern Territory intervention” has jettisoned formal racial neutrality through a campaign to curb the breakdown of “community standards and parenting behaviours” in many remote indigenous communities. The authors argue that while both initiatives had similar fundamental aims—encouraging remote Aboriginal people to adopt social habits generally evident in non-indigenous society—the decision to jettison racial neutrality has ushered in a new era of race relations in Australia, in which race has openly and formally been reestablished as a marker of legal inferiority. Cet article compare les deux changements de paradigme les plus importants survenus dans l’administration des Affaires autochtones du Territoire du Nord de l’Australie. En premier lieu, l’Ordonnance de Protection de 1953 représentait, à l’époque, une tentative unique, quoique fondamentalement maladroite, de réinterpréter le statut juridi-que inférieur des statuts légaux des aborigènes du Territoire du Nord comme étant causé non seulement par leur héritage racial mais aussi par l’ampleur de leurs besoins sociaux. En second lieu, la législature de 2007 dans « l’intervention du Territoire du Nord » cessait de prétendre qu’une neutralité raciale existait dans l’effort du gouvernement de contrer l’affaiblissement des standards communautaires et des comportements parentaux dans plusieurs communautés indigènes lointaines. Tandis que ces deux initiatives avaient des buts fondamentalement similaires, soit d’encourager des peuples autochtones éloignés à adopter des comportements sociaux généralement acceptés dans une société non-indigène, la décision de réfuter la neutralité raciale marquait le début d’une nouvelle ère de relations raciales en Australie, où la race est ouvertement et formellement rétablie comme un indicateur d’infériorité.

The Politics of Rights Protection in Western Democracies

This article examines two contentious rights debates – prisoner voting and gay marriage – in five Western democracies in order to assess the impact of different methods of rights protection. The five countries share similar political and legal histories, but two of them (the United States and Canada) have constitutional bills of rights, two (New Zealand and the United Kingdom) have legislative bills of rights, and one (Australia) has no national bill of rights. The article examines whether the existence of bills of rights has affected the outcome of debates on prisoner voting and gay marriage in the countries in question. The article concludes that, although, in general, the existence of a bill of rights has tended to correlate to the improved position of marginalised groups in these particular debates, that has not uniformly been the case. Moreover, even when bills of rights appear to have been relevant, their connection to the outcomes has not always been a linear one.

Modernising Adult Protection in an Age of Choice

This article examines the effect that two important legal and social policy developments are having on adult protection laws and practices in Australia. The first concerns the increasing reach of human rights norms, which encourage minimal reliance to be placed on substitute decision-making arrangements, such as adult guardianship, in favour of providing greater support for people to make and implement their own decisions. The second concerns the consumer choice focus of current aged care and disability reforms in Australia. While both these developments will lead to improvements in the lives of many people, they also present regulatory challenges when it comes to protecting the well-being of at-risk adults, especially adults with significant cognitive impairments or with significant mental ill health. The article draws on work undertaken as part of a Churchill Fellowship and contains reform suggestions that seek to improve our protection of at-risk adults in an era increasingly characterised by freedom of choice.